Do you workout with a trainer in your local gym? Do you see trainers working out with other members and think, hey that’s the life, they get paid to boss their clients around and count to 8 or is it 10 or sometimes 12? How hard can it be to get paid to workout all day while getting free massages from their attractive and fit colleagues? And how many of you look at these trainers and think, they must have been jocks in high school or maybe college and yes they know how to lift weights and live an active lifestyle, but they can’t possibly be any more vapid or one dimensional? On the one hand I can’t argue with any of these statements, after all, I was a full-time trainer and I did it for over ten years back in the 80’s and 90’s in Los Angeles, and I did count to ten and boss my clients around and worked out multiple times each day. And yes, I even got free back massages from attractive and fit colleagues while getting paid to do so.
On the other hand, I always felt just a little bit embarrassed back then because we didn’t have “real” jobs, had a bad taste in my mouth when people would roll their eyes at me or my friends when we’d tell them what we did for a living. “Gigolo Job” was what it was most commonly referred to as. And hey maybe it was, but in that little community of trainers, greatness emerged. And I feel proud to have been part of a group of the smartest, dedicated and most determined group of human beings I’ve ever worked with. It was here at Sports Club/LA that I learned that we were not in the service business, we were in the experience business. It was also here at Sports Club/LA that I learned about transformation and how transformation is not defined in terms of effort or desire but in terms of measurable results, or benefits that are sustainable over time.
For the past fourteen years, I’ve worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles and New York and during that time, I constantly worked to pass those simple messages on, sometimes with success but more often than not it was quite the struggle. Many of the folks I worked with saw my background in exercise science as less valid than those with degrees in accounting, engineering or business. At best it was met with a sense of amusement. Their lack of ability to grasp the concepts of creating experiences that delight and measuring their performance by the performance of their clients isn’t because the people there aren’t as smart or dedicated, to the contrary, PricewaterhouseCoopers professionals are razor sharp, some even brilliant. The issue is that the system rarely supports thinking in those terms; the dominant drivers of chargeability and billability run directly in the face of creating an end result that truly delights and is sustainable.
I love that social networking and customer experience and business transformation are all now “hot topics” in business today. We were doing all of those things thirty years ago and it didn’t require an initiative or a center of excellence or an investment request to do so. It’s just what we did. I love that there are businesses like The Human Performance Institute that has an incredibly successful business helping executives realize that performance is not created through finding more time to work but rather by putting more energy into the time that you have, by achieving a dynamic and holistic balance in all areas of your life, by getting the most out of your physical, mental, spiritual and emotional energy. Duh, that’s private training 101.
What amuses me is that all of these tenets were so clear and obvious to us back in that gym in Los Angeles and while business schools and multi-nationals companies search for and pay six figure salaries to executives who can help them to achieve even a modicum of success in these areas, all they had to do was look down the street to the gym on the corner. Because every day, dedicated trainers across the country and throughout the world are delivering on all of those promises, many without even knowing these are issues out in the “real” world. In that gym on the corner, clients are walking out the door transformed, they have received experiences that delight, they are a part of a vibrant and positively contagious community and they refer their friends to that business establishment and trainer every chance they get. And how many businesses wouldn’t love to achieve those metrics? Over the next few posts, I’m going to do what I’ve wanted to do for years but never did, profile some of the trainers I had the honor and pleasure to work with, those that just might change the way you think about private trainers from now on.
But don’t be too in awe just yet, I’ll let you in on another secret; we never actually did keep count when you were lifting, we just always relied on the fact that you didn’t. Three more. Or is it four?
