Personal Trainers: what specific mistakes did you make when you first started?

When you first started out did you make any mistakes as a rookie? have any examples? Like "my first client I had I did ____"? Or maybe any recent ones you've made?

Sharing trade secrets with strangers?

Only doing one course and thinking that was enough, expose yourself to as much as possible and specialize from there in what interests you.

I think the list of things I did wrong starting out would be a lot longer than the list of things I did right. I was 19, came from a family of highly dysfunctional people with Asperger's Syndrome, and so I had social skills on par with the common rock. I had very little life experience (I only have slightly more of that now), I was somehow both incredibly insecure and incredibly arrogant, I was frequently rude without realising it or apologising when I did realise it, I had no idea how to approach anyone for anything or to even say hi to people in passing on the gym floor, and the sum total of the advice given to me to deal with all of these problems was: "You've just gotta be confident." That, of course, is about as helpful as telling someone who has never lifted before but wants to be stronger that they just need to squat 250kg.

What I did have going for me was a good understanding of anatomy and physiology, which allowed me to do good exercise programming, and has consistently proven to be more valuable than any program anyone's pointed me towards online -- even ones that go into a lot of detail about why they do it the way they do, like SS and 5/3/1. I remember reading so much praise about 5/3/1 being this huge wealth of information, and then finally buying a copy and feeling ripped off because it told me nothing I didn't already know. That probably should have been a cue for me to acknowledge that I've got a lot of professional knowledge that I take for granted -- somehow, in my arrogance I translated the whole situation into "everyone's an idiot for not knowing this." In hindsight, there's no surprise that I was doing abysmally at business at the time. It's pretty hard to convince someone that you care about them, want to help them and can help them when the subtext of everything you do with them is that they're lazy fcktards for not knowing/doing everything you know already. Again, arrogance. Some more terrible advice came from one of my managers around this time, which was to be more cocky.

One of the other key things I did wrong for a very long time was to be ashamed to call myself a personal trainer, because "personal trainers are all idiots." Shying away from the fact that I was a PT and avoiding that terminology was at best a hindrance, but ultimately I think it cost me a lot of business. In the same way that I thought all random potential clients were crap for not knowing what I knew, I thought all the other trainers out there who didn't have the same knowledge base as me were incompetent idiots. It's the whole moronic "there's only one right way to train, and it's my way" mentality. Part of this mentality came from being on the bb.com forums. A lot of it also came from the casual jabs that my lecturers at SBIT gave to all other fitness colleges, which may have had some factual merit but ultimately taught me and my peers that, on the whole, PT's are morons. Not a good inner monologue to be carrying around. There are trainers around who legitimately aren't experts at what they do, but even the least informed trainer with the least experience, if qualified, is still miles ahead of most people in the gym and has a lot to offer them. It turns out that a lot of the PT's I saw around me who I judged as being incompetent simply specialised in other areas.

By carrying around my "PT's are stupid" mentality, I kept myself from being open with prospective clients about the fact that I was a trainer and that I wanted to help them reach their goals. This was at least partially reinforced by the gym I was working at in 2010-2011, which actually told us not to mention PT during consultations/free sessions right up until the last couple minutes in which we were supposed to deliver a closing spiel which was full of lies. Hm, spend 25 minutes dodging the purpose of the session (why? should we be ashamed of what we do? should we keep prospects in the dark about it because if they knew that we might train them they might not be into that?) and then close without having actually opened. Sounds like a perfect strategy. If you're not open about what you do and how you can help someone, then you can't offer them any value in hiring you beyond them liking your personality -- and your personality sure as shit ain't worth them paying $80/hr (or more), unless they're incredibly lonely and need to pay by the hour for anything resembling friendship.

I'm glad that I took 2 years off from professional PT after all that, because it took stepping out of the situation and experiencing other aspects of life for me to start seeing all the ways in which I had historically given some appalling service as a trainer, and ultimately given a disservice to myself and to all the prospects/clients I came into contact with. Time off gave me a lot of perspective, helped me realise that some of the stuff I knew to be right was wrong, some of the stuff I knew to be wrong was right, and the world's a whole lot bigger than the stickies at bb.com. I've gone through a lot of personal development in that time which is helping me to take much better care of my clients now that I've returned to training. I've still got a lot of personal and business growth ahead of me, which means that I'm still making plenty of mistakes, but I've definitely come along way.