Lift The Bar

Doubting yourself and feeling much less than confident in your abilities is a common place that trainers can find themselves stuck in. Whether this is a temporary thing or a more chronic situation it is important to know that you are not alone and that we have all been there at least once. 

The good news is that there are things you can do to change this; something I talk about in the webinar Addressing Self Doubt and Building Confidence in Your Abilities which you can find on the member site if you want more detail of the areas covered below.   

Here are my top tips for building your confidence in your abilities: 

1) Recognise and avoid all or nothing thinking 

It’s really easy to take individual events, such as a client not getting a result or leaving us, or a session we don’t feel went well, and build them into a narrative about how rubbish we are.  It’s never easy when something doesn’t go the way we want it to go but, in the same way as we advise a client who has eaten half a packet of biscuits not to take it as a sign of absolute failure, we need to take our own advice and recognise that no one is perfect.  There is always a mix of good and bad and whilst there may be things we can improve, we actually have some pretty good skills and traits too. 

Task: Create a resource you can turn to when you’re doubting your abilities.  Collect together all those positive bits of feedback you receive from clients, the little comments as well as the big stuff, write up those moments when you have that “yes I did a good job” feeling, where a cue you use makes a penny drop or when you finish a session buzzing because you knew it went well.  Use whatever format you like, pictures, videos, voice notes or text and add to it whenever you can.  Then refer to it when you aren’t feeling so positive about things. 

2) Allow time to learn and improve (celebrate the journey) 

A lot of personal trainers seem to expect themselves to know everything from day one and see gaps of knowledge as evidence they aren’t any good.  Instead of using these gaps as sticks to beat yourself with, treat them as opportunities.  I guarantee that every single person you look up to in the industry has weaknesses.  Despite our tendency as human beings to elevate the people we admire and assume they are perfect at everything, they are human beings and will have areas of strength, and areas they are looking to develop or rely on others to assist in. 

Also, if you are comparing yourself as a personal trainer to yourself in a previous career make sure you are comparing like for like.  Often people compare themselves at the start of the journey as a trainer with themselves at the end of their journey in a different field.  You took time to become the expert before, allow yourself that time to become the expert now. 

Task: Identify any areas that you feel are holding you back, prioritise them and then start work on improving that area of knowledge.  Be aware of what you need to know vs what you think you should know and watch out for areas where you start hunting for some elusive magic beans and discarding the knowledge you have because there must be some ever better answer that you just don’t know yet.  Common areas for this are nutrition, programming and marketing. Generally if you find yourself repeatedly looking for more on the same generic area you probably don’t need it, you just need to apply what you already know!  When it comes to prioritisation start with the area that will make the biggest difference to your client(s). 

3) Identify / change your success markers and use your own judgement 

A lot of trainers never take the time to think about what success means to them.  They hold themselves up to an imaginary ideal of what they think, other people think, they should be aiming for.  This means it shouldn’t come as a surprise when they continuously find themselves lacking. It’s important to realise there is no such thing as a perfect personal trainer for everybody.  Different clients want different things and that means they will want to work with different personal trainers.   

Alongside this is the ever present existence of other people’s highlight reels on social media to compare yourself to if you are looking for reasons to talk yourself down. This isn’t a fault of social media, it’s a tool and where people use it for business it should be used to portray the image they want to portray to their audience.  This does however mean that it’s a rubbish place to look if you are seeking somebody else’s achievements to compare yourself to. Unless you are very close to someone it is unlikely that you know the whole story of their situation. 

Task: Think about what success means to YOU.  What is important to you as a person? What does your career need to provide? Is it to maximise income or free time, to make a difference to an individual or a particular group or demographic, to be able to build a team or to be able to focus on yourself?  What do you need to be able to do to offer the service you want to the people you want to provide it to?  Identify your goals and then break down the steps required to get there.  Focus on the process and the improvements not on what you haven’t done yet or what others think is important to them. 

4) Change what you can, accept or reframe your thoughts on what you can’t, let go of what you don’t want to change 

Most of your clients don’t need you to be able to describe the energy systems, quote the origins and insertions of every muscle or name every enzyme used in the digestive processes.  There is a certain level of base knowledge required but over and above that level it is a choice.  You don’t need to be expert level at everything, you do need to know enough to be able to help the people you want to help.  This means that some areas are going to be more important to your clients than others.  Focus on those and let go of the rest, even if it’s just for now. 

Task: Identify the things you are beating yourself up for not being any good at.  Consider whether you really need to improve them or not and then make a decision on whether you want to or not. Allow yourself to decide that right now you are going to leave things as they are in a certain area, you can always come back to it in the future if you want to but right now, what are you happy to stick with? 

5) If you’re going to create a narrative, make it a good one 

A lot of the time we make up a story to support how rubbish we are.  A client cancels and we decide it has to be something we have or haven’t done, a session goes badly and it must be our fault.  We get pretty creative sometimes in coming up with reasons why an event is the result of us lacking in something or being rubbish in some way.  Your new challenge is to change those stories.  You don’t know what happened, even when we are given information, we mostly get what the other person thinks is acceptable to share, so you have free reign to make it crazy.  The more bizarre the better because then you’ll laugh, break the negative thought process and be able to evaluate things more rationally. 

There will always be evidence that you are inferior if you look for it, conversely there is evidence that you are good at what you do if you look for that.  Focus on the good, change the genuine negative into opportunities and allow yourself to accept you are the best personal trainer you can be right now and that is brilliant. 

For more on this topic check out these webinars "So you're a personal trainer who wants to feel more confident" and "Addressing self doubt and building confidence" or the "Support your mental wellbeing course. 

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