Five weeks into a twenty-four-week programme for a hundred kilometre trail ultra I've signed up for, four thousand metres of gain.
Easily the toughest physical challenge I've ever contemplated.
Seventeen to go. Training five to six days a week, twice a day, some of them, Saturday is the long day out on my feet.
Honestly, it scares me.
I don't know if I'm capable of twenty-odd hours on my feet in one sitting, and I've never done it.
And yet, there’s something in me that wants to find out anyway.
Here's what I do know.
My fitness will improve if I stick to the plan.
My confidence will improve alongside it, not because I've reasoned my way into believing I can do it, but because I've put in the training.
I train mostly off my watch. It sets the pace, keeps my heart rate in the right zone, and tells me whether the effort is actually working, not how hard the session feels in the moment.
That's been the biggest shift in this programme: an objective measure that doesn't care what my head is telling me on any given day.
It's the same measure I trust with clients: not whether a session felt good in the room, but whether they keep coming back, whether they're still enjoying it, whether I can see them benefiting over time. That's the actual read.
That's the exact same shape as the fear I had standing in front of my first Legends 50+ group session.
Being responsible for other people.
Standing in a room full of people who might not agree with a word you're saying.
That fear had a shape I recognised.
A few years back, I stepped into a role coaching other coaches on the fifty-plus market, on a Zoom call with fifty or sixty of them watching.
You can do all the training, understand every system, prep your notes and know your script cold. None of that prepares you for the moment the camera goes live, and every one of those faces is looking back at you.
Some of the coaches on that call had more experience than me, some ran gyms that made more money than mine, and a few were just starting out.
Every one of them was weighing up whether what I was about to say was worth anything at all.
Somebody had put their trust in me to be on that call.
That's the same shape as the first session with a new client. They've said yes. They believe in you in that moment, and nothing about you has actually changed yet.
Everybody else had confidence in me. The job was building confidence in myself.
The thing that got me through it, the same thing I fell back on running my first programme back in 2017, was a bit of self-deprecating humour to let people relax with me.
Nobody logs on to hear someone talk and thinks this person doesn't know what they're doing. They're expecting someone who can.
All you need to do is lean into the knowledge you actually have and the preparation you've actually done, and let yourself relax.
Reps are what make you relax.
I hear this a lot from newer coaches.
They don't think they've got the reps, the experience, or the life experience yet to work with a fifty-plus client. What they're actually doing is robbing themselves of the only thing that builds that experience.
Nobody is ever fully ready for the first time they stand in front of a client or a room, and are relied on.
Donald Miller, of Building A Storybrand fame, has a line I come back to often:
If you believe you have the ability to improve someone's life, to share something that could help someone, you have a moral responsibility to do it.
The 50+ demographic has been poorly served by the fitness industry, for a long time.
If you believe you can do better by them, waiting until you feel ready is costing them the help you could already be giving.
Confidence is the thing that shows up after the practice, not the thing you need before you start it.
If you're waiting to feel ready before you take the client, run the session, or have the harder conversation, you're waiting for something that only arrives once you've already started.
That's exactly what we're building at the live workshop on the 30th, The Relational Coaching Method.
The actual skills that build the kind of relationship with a client that shows up in your own objective measure: they keep coming back, they keep referring, they keep benefiting.
Ninety minutes, practical from the first ten minutes.
If you've been waiting to feel ready before you build that side of your coaching, this is the rep to start with. Reply LEGEND, and I'll send you the link.
Paul
