Only 30% of personal training clients get results
I don't know how it happened,
but I do know what it caused.
I'm sure if I dug around in my childhood long enough I would find its origin but that's not what this piece is about.
At school I was tested and graded like everyone else. An activity I now know is as much designed to see how the school and the teacher is doing as much as how well the pupil is doing.
The meaning that I took from it was that it was design to test how smart I was and how much boring information I was capable of retaining.
Having said that I can't say that I would take away anything different to that today.
My history teacher would entertain with story's of lions in his cupboard and do his best to make us laugh but the lesson was never anything more than reading from a history book for us to copy out.
My geography teacher, even more charming and entertaining had a dry wit and ability to capture the room no doubt aided by his special coffee. Again when it was time to deliver the material, out would come the book to read from or up would go the diagram to copy.
No doubt a product of the pressure placed on the teachers but the net result...
A child that believed that intelligence was fixed that was trapped in the middle of the scale with a glass ceiling placed above him.
A world sat above me to which I was genetically denied access.
My decision both conscious and unconscious was that sport and most likely football would be my only way out.
My attitude to school was indifferent. Most books became threatening to me, entire subjects made me nervous as I saw an entire world to which I was denied access. I hid this with humour and wit and entertainment, telling story's and generally messing around.
If I look back I wasn't alone in this, the most entertaining people at my school as I see it weren't sat far from me.
But when I looking back now I see things I was learning and skills that I possessed that far outweighed anyone else I knew.
That isn't to say I was better than everyone at everything or that anyone is. It is to say that we are all world class at something or something's, the best in our world anyway.
If school allowed us to see the micro and apply it to the macro we would all become serial learners.
If I saw my ability to tell stories that inspired or made people laugh while also teaching (Ironically) was my gift.
And that it was limited only by my ability to use the English language and understand the world and myself, then school would have been a different place for me entirely.
I would have approached it with what Psychologists Carol Dweck calls the growth mindset. The single greatest factor in determining whether we fulfil our potential and seek to constantly grow.
The truth is that we can all learn from setbacks, embrace challenges and grow our intelligence.
The truth is that the only way to learn how to read, to write, to eat, to sleep, to run, to exercise, to run a business, to meditate, to connect with other, is often, to do if first badly and then keep doing it, learn from our mistakes and keep going until it isn't bad anymore.
The amazing thing is that when we approach life with a growth mindset, when we approach everything as a beginner, we no longer fear judgment in the same way.
We become fully engaged in the world, fascinated like a child, constantly fulfilled
but equally hungry.
Each new skill enhances the next as we learn more and more about ourselves but most importantly we become what neuroscience tells us is the secret to long term mental and physical health.
We become serial learners.
And growth as neuroscience also explains is the secret to happiness.
I moved from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and I have been downloading skills, conducting experiments and voraciously learning ever since.
The catalyst for my change was a problem I need to solve but didn't know enough to solve it.
Why did only 30% of personal training clients, physio clients, nutritionist clients, doctors patients do the work to fix the problem they were paying for help to fix?
You may already be here, you may have always been here, you may be where I was, you may occasionally be here and occasionally there.
Where ever you find yourself at the moment my information and products are for people who are ready to embrace the growth mindset. Not only embrace it but jump in and start up grading one skill at a time and becoming a life long beginner.
Ed Ley
