If there’s one skill to master that allows you to make more money doing what you love, it’s understanding your Unique Ability. As health and fitness professionals we are all unique - from our experiences, our knowledge and skills, our passions, values, goals, and the things that energise and motivate us to get out of bed and work with our clients. Unfortunately, many of us downplay our uniqueness because we’ve never acknowledged or appreciated our talents.
Often, the things we are best at are so ingrained in us; we don’t recognise them as being special or unique. If your ambition is to take charge and build the business and lifestyle that you want, finding your unique ability is a sure-fire route to getting there.
I believe the health and fitness industry has lost its way. The fast, fun and easy approach to fitness is failing to flatten the curve of chronic illness and obesity. The industry promoted health but fails to support it. Most gyms, coaches and personal trainers are being forced to focus on quantity over quality, and we are falling into the trap of competing with everyone else in the industry. It's time to stop being the generalist and start focusing on your unique strengths and talents, so you can make the biggest impact possible while creating financial abundance.
Personal trainers, coaches and gym owners are drawing on the current craze of "general fitness” as a method that works for everyone. Should a 30yr women with and active job and is training for a marathon follow the same training program as a 36yr overweight, sedentary male with type 2 diabetes? Should a 24yr male football player who is currently studying at university be following the same training program as a 29yr old mother of two who has a bad back? Hell no! As qualified trainers, we know better...
Should a personal trainer be open to taking on all of these different clients with different goals? Most would argue that they could train all of these clients, but they would be doing these clients a disservice. Being a generalist is going to limit the success of your fitness business and it's going to cause you a lot of stress and frustration in the process. When you aren’t living in your Unique Ability, life is hard. When you’re mentally doing something that’s incongruent with what you like and out of alignment with what you do and who you are, it drains the life out of you. The same is true when you try to adopt someone else’s methodology or system. If it’s not something that aligns with you, it can put you into a negative place.
When you’re living in your unique ability, you become more generous and more confident, and you’re much happier. You create value for others and yourself. When you live from that place, you’ll not only make a lot more money doing what you love; you’ll have a sense of satisfaction about every part of your work and life. This is why I encourage health and fitness professionals to discover their unique ability; it will shed light on the things that motivate and fulfill you as a coach. Your unique ability is a combination of the things you’re good at and have a superior passion for. Unique Ability is a concept developed by Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach.
Put simply; your Unique Ability is the set of natural talents you’re already amazing at, that gives you energy, and that you love doing. When you spend more and more time working in your Unique Ability, you’ll start to see that’s where growth and money lie. Our success in the health and fitness industry depends on our energy, mood, and motivation. It makes sense to set ourselves up with a sustainable business model that supports our health and happiness.
Of course, once I learned about unique abilities, and went through the process to discover mine, it became clear why some workdays ended with me feeling great while others ended with me feeling unsatisfied. It turns out, the “feeling great” days were spent mostly within my unique abilities, using my superpowers. And the “unsatisfied days” were spent outside of them, with kryptonite strapped to my chest.
What’s more, when I started analysing my work to figure out how much time I spent in my unique abilities, and how much time I spent outside of them, I realised I was out of balance. While I knew it was unreasonable to expect to spend 100% of my time within my unique abilities, it became clear I was spending far more time outside of them than within. And this was hurting me, my relationships, and even the success of my business. So I took steps to shift the balance. I’m still taking the step to move me close towards that 100%.
By identifying your unique ability, you can start to understand why you enjoy working with a particular type of client and why other clients are a pain in the butt. Are you training the wrong clients? Once you understand what drive you and motivates you to be at your best, you can start to build a successful business that gives you energy, job satisfaction and financial security.
If you want to have any hope of building a career that you love, you need to figure out WHO you are as a coach. I find a lot of health and fitness professionals have no idea of their unique ability, and they are finding it hard to build a successful business without selling their soul to the devil.
If you are a gym owner, you will employ staff to help you run the business. Ideally, you will hire staff that have different unique abilities. Team diversity is critical to the success of your business; you want to hire staff that can bring different skill sets and knowledge to the company. Understanding the unique ability of your team can save you money, make you money, and it saves you a lot of time. Being able to delegate work to the right staff member can build trust, increase loyalty, and allow you, the business owner, to spend more of your time working on other essential business tasks. As business owners, we should not be micro-managing everything, we can become the roadblock that stops the business from growing when we try to do it all.
When you're new to building a business, or if you only have a few clients, discovering your unique ability and working with specific clients can feel like you are turning clients away. I understand; I felt exactly the same way when I started coaching and even when I opened my first gym or started to build an online business.
But here’s the thing to remember – you can’t help everyone and no client worth training will ever come to you for general health advice. You need to understand your strength, values, skills and talents before you start to worry about your ideal clients (niche). Choosing a niche that does not align with your strengths is not going to offer you career fulfillment. There is a 40% annual turnover rate among health and fitness professionals — meaning that by this time next year, four in ten will have left a field they were once deeply passionate about. If you don’t want to become another statistic, you would be wise to invest in self-discovery to figure out your career path to success.
Let’s say you are a trainer who has high levels of empathy, you are very patient, you love learning about anatomy, and you’ve done a lot of research on injury rehabilitation due to your injuries in the past. You notice that you enjoy working with clients who are recovering from injury. You have trusted connections with a Physio and a chiropractor. Your unique ability is empathy, patience, attention to detail, building trusted partnerships and working with injuries. You would wise to build a career based on your strengths and work with clients that need injury rehabilitation. If you can help these client recover, they will trust you to take care of them, and they will often stay on as long term clients.
Think of it this way. If you were struggling with lower back pain and you had the choice of picking one of these three trainers...
Trainer one: “I help people with injuries get relief through sustainable training and lifestyle practices.”
Trainer two: “I help you take your health to the next level.”
Trainer three: “I help you to become the best version of yourself."
Which one would you go for? See what I mean? Understanding your unique ability can help you determine who you are as a coach and the type of clients you enjoy working with. This will not only make your marketing easier, but it will help you get more ideal clients faster.
The benefits don’t stop there. If you are working with a specific type of client, you can spend more of your time research and building content that supports your audience. You can attend courses and workshops that offer knowledge and skills that apply to your unique ability. You can ignore the courses and seminars that are not related to your audience, making it easier to choose what you invest your time and money towards.
Going back to the example of the empathetic and patient coach who enjoys fixing broken people, this coach could:
Build training templates for specific injuries - this saves you writing a new programme for every client.
Build nutrition handouts on foods that can speed up recovery - this allows you to spend more time researching specific nutrition requirements for injury rehabilitation.
Create recovery tips that can speed up recovery - again, useful information for your specific audience
Establish partnerships with doctors, physics, chiropractors, etc that you can refer a client to and hopefully get referrals from - helps you become a subject matter expert and a trusted professional in the industry
Write social media marketing that targets clients with injuries - all the content you create is targeted at your unique ability and the specific clients you want to work with. This helps you to stand out in a saturated industry. Stop competing and start to stand out in the crowd.
Build content that talks about your client's success, injury prevention, injury rehabilitation, injury and sport, and anything else on topic - as above. Your content can become your social media content, blog, podcast, YouTube channel, etc.. knowing your audience saves you time producing general content that dose’t get noticed by anyone.
Gather testimonials from clients who have worked with you to fix their injury or limit the ongoing impacts of their injury - every single testimonial is linked to your more unique ability and helps you attract the clients you want to work with
etc...
Your whole business is built on the idea of supporting your unique ability which gives you energy, helps you stay motivated, makes you more productive and less busy. It also promotes you as the subject matter expert. People will know who you are and what you do. If they have a friend, family member or colleagues that have an injury, they will recommend your coaching service because they instantly know what you specialise in.
“As a health and fitness professional, can you afford not to know your unique ability?”
Success won’t happen overnight, it will take time for you to discover your unique ability, and it will take more time for you to get the message out. The sooner you do, the sooner you will start to reap the rewards. It will never feel like hard work and will open you up to how and where you can make your most significant impact.
Whether you work as a personal trainer, gym owner, or coach, the Protect The Asset Level 1 course has been designed to help you discover the right direction to take to build the career of your dreams.
Begin your journey to finding purpose in your career and getting closer to the heart of what drives you.
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