3 keys to take fit pro's from good to great

We just wrapped up a three part series on learning and memory with my guest Collin Jewett  from Superhuman Academy. And I wanted to take a moment to pull out some key points from some of those episodes that I felt were really really important for fitness professionals. Or wellness providers or coaches in the fitness industry to hear.

1. The Creativity connection to great instruction
2. How to tap into embodied learning for our clients
3. How stress kills creativity, emotional intelligence and empathy for coaches.

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Transcript

3 keys to take fit pro’s from good to great

Transcript

Ericka Thomas  0:04  

Hi there, everyone and welcome back to the work in. I'm Erica. And dwe just wrapped up a three part series on learning and memory with my guest come do it from superhuman Academy. And I wanted to take a moment to pull out some key points from some of those episodes that I felt were really really important for fitness professionals. Or wellness providers or coaches in the fitness industry to hear an they were specific things that when we started talking about them in these episodes, I was like, Oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. And I don't know if I've ever heard it explained like that. But that's really, really important for an instructor to know, something I want you all to be thinking about as I go through these three key points today is the question of what makes a good instructor. Someone who knows what to teach you. What is it that takes that good instructor from being good into that great category? That category of oh my gosh, that person is a great coach, a great instructor. What is it? That makes an instructor great. So keep that question in mind as we go through these three keys. So I want to start with the big one for me. And that was this connection to creativity that happens in the brain. When we are learning any new behavior, any new skill. It was fascinating because I find for myself, I'm I feel like I'm a really creative person. Things that allow me to be creative, really, really light me up and that goes across the board for pretty much any activity that I'm doing. It doesn't really matter. It could be in my work. It could be you know, just playing around with crafts or antiques or whatever, whatever it is food. Like I just love that piece. of creativity that I can bring to something. So for me, that was really, really important. And the way Collin explained it was brilliant. He talked about creativity as combination, rather than origination. And I feel like that is key for instructors because that's really what we do. We are taking what is in front of us, whether that's a one on one client or roomful of students, and we are taking what we know and combining that in ways that will speak to the person or the people in front of us. So for me my I got my start in kickboxing. And really there's only a very small number of movements in a cardio kickboxing workout, you have a few punches if you kick some knee strikes, maybe some blocks in there. And if you are going to do the same thing every time it is gonna get really boring for everyone in there plus, there's all this overuse injury that can happen. And so what do we do? We take this list of movements and we start to mix them up. We combine them in lots of different ways. And those combinations are infinite. Right? So it is the same list of movements every time you put a class together but you're putting them together in different ways. You are combining them with different music for the different populations that you are teaching. And so it feels different. It feels new, it feels fresh, and yet the people in the room are learning through repetition because yes, they are the same movements over and over again. Same thing with any type of choreography. Same thing with any type of workout that we put together for one on one client, any type of movement can be fit into this creative connection. So that people can feel inspired by it right. But I know so many people who feel like they're not particularly creative, or

they kind of have creative blocks around this idea. The key here when we are trying to use this creative connection, either to help our students learn or to help us with our own repertoire, our own modalities, our own formats. The key here is learning what your natural talent is. And that can be difficult because we all come to the table with a little bit of baggage about what we're good at what we're not good at. And some of that is true. Most of it is not true. We have a lot of monkey mind around who we are anyway. And so this can kind of tap into some past stuff that maybe we haven't worked out yet. And it can really block us becoming our best self right when we want to use a deeper connection with creativity. So, first step, we need to learn what our natural talent is. You might think oh, I'm not talented, but you are you absolutely have natural talent. And here's how you find it. Here's how you start to recognize your zone of genius. The first way is to ask other people what you're good at. Sometimes we can't tell what we're good at. You know, what is it that other people appreciate about us? And this is important if you are really working into your business in the fitness industry because we need testimonials those can really boost our credibility in that professional space. But it's difficult sometimes to ask other people hey, can you give me a testimonial about our experience working together? That might be easier for you to say or might be harder for you to ask about. But you could just ask friends and family not necessarily people in your classes. Hey, what do you think I'm good at? And I think as scary as that might seem on the surface to do you might be surprised by what they say. And it would be interesting to look at what they tell you what they come back with. And think about it for a minute before you just knee jerk reactions say that you don't agree. Right? Because sometimes when someone pays you a compliment, what is the first reaction that you have? Is it to receive that compliment and say thank you, or is it to knee jerk say oh, no, no, I'm not really good at that. No, no, no. To minimize that. It's important to notice, because that kind of behavior can bleed over into other areas of your physical, mental and emotional state as well as your state of your business. Okay, so that's the first thing to do to find your zone of genius to recognize that. The second way is to really start to notice what feels easy to you what is it that you do that feels easy, fun, brings you joy, and just kind of flows with your energy. What is it? This could be a long list of things that might just be one or two things. But notice something about that. The things that feel easy to us sometimes we choose not to put any value on because they feel so easy to us. I just need to put this out there for you all. Just because something feels easy to you does not mean that everyone can do it. You are unique in your particular zone of genius. Even though there are many, many people out there that teach what you teach, that are a coach of what you are a coach of that provide services the way you provide services, but they don't do it exactly like you because you are an individual and what you bring to the table. What feels easy to you does not feel easy to everyone else, and that's why you're going to hire you. That's why they want you in front of them. So look at those two things. You can ask other people about what you're good at. And you can find what feels easy to you now when you do find those things that feel easy. Hold on to them. Maybe write them down somewhere so you don't forget and remind yourself and this is going to get into some deep stuff that we sometimes carry with us from childhood because sometimes the things that we're good at are not necessarily valued by our families and by our teachers, but they are valued by our people now, and those things change over time. So we want to hold on to those and maybe pull them in from outside our our workspace right. Sometimes the things that feel easy to us don't necessarily translate immediately into the work that you do, but you definitely can still use them in the work. That you do. That is the piece of creativity that I brought out of our three part series on learning and memory. I think it's super important for instructors, and I'm always surprised by how many instructors and coaches out there also have this beautiful, creative side whether they are actively applying it to their business or not. It's almost always there. So

let's move on the second key that I found really, really fascinating in our memory series, our learning and memory series was this idea of embodied learning and how we can use this as a skill to help fully engage our clients in their learning process. And also in our instruction process. Okay, so embodied learning was the idea of directing awareness throughout the body as we are moving through particular physical skills in really mindful ways. And that is something that many instructors I think naturally do, but not necessarily with an intention around that. So let me tell you just my own experience here with this that now this is something that I did without understanding anything about what embodied learning was So way back after my first introductory lesson to Taekwondo 25 years ago, I remember coming home from that being really really hooked. I could tell this was going to be something that I was going to love it made me feel really, really strong and powerful. But I remember going into the bathroom after that session and standing in front of the mirror and in slow motion. Going through the four blocks, the four blocks that I learned in that introductory lesson. That inside block, outside block, low block and high block and I just went I just did them slow motion with the same intensity of muscle contraction as I might if I were doing them, you know, for real, and I just did that over and over again. And it just was it just ingrained itself into the cells of my muscles. And it was exactly what we were discussing with Cullen about embodied learning where you are completely present in the body through the movement and you are feeling what does my fist feel like? What does this muscle feel like? What does my How does my elbow move? How does my shoulder move? All of these things? Are how the brain connects to the body to learn a new physical skill. Now, maybe you have been in a situation where you're teaching a class and it's very maybe it's a new piece of choreography, a new movement for the group. And it's really challenging for them to pick up. So what do we do about that? What do we what, what do we do about that? Do we just barrel through because we need to stay on that that eight count that 16 count that 32 Count? Or do we stop the class and we take them through slow so that everybody can move through? Can we do those things in half time when we slow those things down when we can let not just our students but ourselves when we can let ourselves slow down

and move through take those movements very, very slowly. It does so much more than just help muscle memory. We get really deep into our connection with the nervous system. Right? Because ultimately, that's what we are going for in our total body health and wellness. Ultimately, we want the nervous system to stay calm. But if we keep our students in this frantic state all the time of here's something new even though it's we know it's not completely new. It's just a new combination, right? We're just tapping into that creative source and finding a new combination. Can we slow this down for them and take that pressure off that that frantic pace so that everybody can stay mindful in the body? And eventually, we can start to move quicker? It's just another way that we can help our students and ourself intentionally. Bring something else away from our relationship, right? Bring some something else away from our time together, right? They're going to learn something different by moving slowly into these processes than they would if we are just boom, boom, boom, quick, quick, quick, quick step, double time, cardio, cardio cardio, right. So something to keep in mind in your instruction process and maybe we find ways to do a new combination to do a new movement really slowly. Maybe if you're not, you know, group instructor you're working one on one. What is the difference between moving through a series of lifts slowly and moving with a more quick pace? What is the difference moving through a yoga flow when you slow things down? On the actual breath, we talk about vinyasa a lot in our yoga classes. vinyasa moves on the breath, right? Everybody breathes at a different pace. So you can have half the room moving fairly quickly. It could be quite challenging for cardiovascular system. We could have the other half of the room going very, very slowly and how are you moving? Are you moving? Are you breathing? So just some really important things to think about as far as directing awareness in the body as an instructor. That piece is important and it is a part of the kinetic Grace navigation system to learn to direct awareness for our students, and other words, to help them follow this sensation in the body. Whatever that is that you're doing. It can be applied to any format, right? We want to help them follow this sensation. Many times people will come into our classes or come into a workout with the intention of not thinking, okay, and that's okay. It's okay to take yourself out of your day everybody steps into the room for a different reason. But

it doesn't negate the fact that we want to be present in the body. Right? You don't have to think about your work day, but we need to stay in the body. I used to call it keeping your mind in the muscle we stay with our mind in the muscle what is going on there. So often, people spend most of their day ignoring what's happening in their body directed awareness and embodied learning helps reconnect those sensations in ways that are non judgmental, and allow us to find a healthier, friendlier relationship with the body. And that brings us to this final key point that I wanted to pull out of our series on learning and memory and that is how stress affects your creativity. When you are an instructor how stress affects your emotional intelligence, and your empathy when you are a coach. And this is really, really important. Now in part of our series, Collin was talking about how stress kills creativity and I want to talk a little bit about how that happens, why that happens, and some of the ways that we can move out of that to kind of reset ourselves as instructors. So we know that stress eventually will overwhelm our nervous system. A little bit of stress is great. It kind of heightens our awareness. It heightens our alertness it, it makes us energized to get things done, right, a little bit is fine, but when we have too much of it, it can overwhelm the nervous system, and then several things happen. What does it mean to be overwhelmed? By stress, okay, how do you know you're there? Okay. So here's what's going on. You will be overwhelmed whenever there is too much of anything that is either too soon. In other words, you're not ready for it. It's unpredictable, or for too long. Alright. So if it's a sustained level of stress that takes you beyond, out beyond where you feel like you have ever been before, for too many months on end, okay. We are designed for short term stress. Our nervous system is designed to handle that. It's not designed to handle for too long for constant and a lot of us kind of live in this constant state. So how do we know we're there? What what is overwhelm? How does it show up? It can show up in indecision, where you just cannot make a decision where you feel stuck, right? Lots of distractions, you feel very very distractible, a lack of focus on anything there's just too many bouncing pinball ideas in your brain. You can't focus on any one. intrusive thoughts. So you might be in one place and then these other thoughts, all these other things are coming into your head, emotional dysregulation that's a fancy way to say really crazy mood swings, right? Where you just fly off the handle at any little thing. Maybe it's in anger, maybe it's in sadness, maybe it's anything really, you could be just irritable all the time, that kind of thing. That's emotional dysregulation, and it doesn't match the moment that your physical exhaustion could could be linked to overwhelm of the nervous system, physical exhaustion, even when you are sleeping, or like when you get you could say, Yeah, I got a good night's sleep, but I woke up tired, so it's not a good night's sleep right? Your something is wrong, you're not resting properly. So what would that look like outside of just you know, your physical mental environment might be like in your business, procrastination, you find yourself just pushing things off. And this is a big one, especially if you're working on your own this shiny object syndrome. And I will admit to that all the time, because I feel like if things are not hard enough, then they may not. I must be done with them. Right? If I figured it out, it's time to move on immediately to the next thing rather than really diving in and pouring myself into this. This one thing that I've been working on for two years, right? I'd rather go do something new than finish this. So that shiny object syndrome is a piece of overwhelm when things get to be, this might be there might be some risk here. I'm gonna go over here instead. Okay, so it can it can feel like not having any new ideas with zero creativity, or maybe finding difficulty being empathetic to your clients. So let me give you maybe an example here. Okay. So let's say you are sitting down to plan a class, your weekly class or a weekly workout with a client that you've been seeing for a while and you know them really well you sit down and sit down to plan and nothing you've got nothing. There's no ideas. You're just stuck. And you can't understand why because this is something you love to do. It's not that big of a deal. You only work maybe, I don't know, 1015 hours a week on this and why is this a problem? And now you start beating yourself up about it, but what you haven't taken into consideration is, you know, the conflicts that you may have had to deal with this week or month over finances with your partner or maybe things are going on with your kids or extended family members or maybe you are concerned about your health. Maybe there's some chronic injury going on. All of those things play into how we deal with everything, because they all affect our nervous system in some way. Here's the thing. You can't give what you haven't got. All right. So if you know that part of your zone of genius is usually usually your empathy with your clients and you find yourself without that anymore, or you have lost the joy of stepping up in front of a room or you know even the joy of being with your family when you are supposedly in your downtime, right? That is all indicative of nervous system overwhelm from not necessarily one source of stress, but maybe just all of it right doesn't have to just be one thing. It can be all of it. And the answer here, when these things happen. When we get to the point where the nervous system is starting to become overwhelmed for ourself, the answer here is yes, we need to do something for ourself. But that doesn't necessarily mean doing more. And I will say for myself that in the past, I was not clear on that. I thought doing something for myself meant doing more of what I was already doing, but only for myself. So I would go out for a run I would train for a marathon I would do you know 60 plus mile bike rides on the weekend because this is for myself. This is what I wanted to do for myself. But on top of all of the other things that I did, it was not acting in the way that I was hoping it would it was supposed to calm my nervous system. In order to do that we need to activate real recovery as we would for our clients, right? We teach recovery to our clients because we know that it is in recovery where the strength gains happen, where the resilience gains come in. That is where that happens. It's the secret sauce of fitness and health and wellness is in recovery. But in order for something to be recovery, it needs to be opposite from what we are doing.

We know that we can have recovery that's active or passive, right? There's a there's a wide range of those things. So we need to be very intentional. About what we choose to do for our own recovery. Just like we would be very intentional about our suggestions when we are programming for our clients for the nervous system. If we are coming from a place of overwhelm, and it is seeping into our physical, mental and emotional states. We need to pay very close attention to the intensity of what we choose for our recovery. So a good rule of thumb for this is to make sure that whatever it is that you choose for yourself, that is going to count as some kind of recovery that we keep it at about a five on a scale of one to 10 of effort and I am talking about physical, mental and emotional effort, all of those count all right. So we want it to be opposite. So let me give you an example of that. So if I am feeling very physically stressed, okay, a physical stress where my body is reacting in physical ways maybe panic attack every once in a while. Maybe chronic pain from joint injury some some overuse injury there. My choice for recovery, when the body is stressed physically should not be more physical stress on the body. It should be something completely opposite from that. So for me, I might choose something because I love the creative things I might choose something that's very easy physically, but that taps into that kind of creative mental picture for myself, maybe painting over COVID I did all kinds of adult coloring books just mindless color, right? Just small motor and color. And that was it. Right? So for me, that might be something that would work for other people. It might be you know, Sudoku, maybe it's just going for a walk. Now if you insist on doing something physical, we have to stay below that five on the effort level. Otherwise we are doing nothing but adding to that overwhelm. Okay, so we keep our intensity low. And then we want to take the time to learn and experiment with what is it that refills our well of energy. Okay? So again, we're talking physical, mental or emotional energy. So we want to be willing and opened to experiment and try new things. Right? You might be very mentally overwhelmed. There might be a lot of complexity going on a lot of things for you to think about. So for you, we want to find something that does not require a lot of mental effort for you right to balance that out to recover. That might mean taking on some kind of immediate mission or some kind of action, any kind of action that doesn't require a lot of mental capacity to complete. It's not necessarily specifically directed at the area where you are stuck. So if you feel like you're stuck in your business, then we're not going to recover there. By pushing harder into that space. We need to step out of that space and rest our brain rest our eyes from the screen. Maybe we need just a complete playtime, where we don't have to think where we can just have fun and tap into our sense of humor or something like that. So I do call these immediate mission moments. I'm a big believer that action is the antidote for fear in anything. So if we're feeling overwhelmed, sometimes that taps into this nervous system fear state.

It is very much rooted in the sympathetic nervous system. And any action that we take in any area of our life is going to start to build some kind of momentum. Part of overwhelm is feeling stuck, and sometimes we just start moving in one direction and that momentum will build so we want to stay within that low intensity range physically, mentally and emotionally and look for something opposite, because opposite creates balance. So what might a immediate mission moment look like? Okay, so I will just share that for me. Sometimes an immediate mission moment is decluttering some area of my space, okay. So that might mean writing a load of laundry might be cleaning the kitchen because what I have found is that in the middle of the day as I walk back into the kitchen, if there's dishes still left there from earlier in the day, it kind of sets off alarm bells for me. It just makes me cringe. I can feel it physically in my body. This tension like oh my gosh, this is just one more thing I have to do. It literally takes five minutes to clean the kitchen. This is not something that's going to derail your day, right? So choosing moments, it might be something different for you most likely will be but if you choose a moment, one small thing that can be completed that can be checked off the list as a success as something that you got done today that feeds into our brain and nervous system connection as a kind of a dopamine hit like you succeeded at that. Whether you feel that way or not, like look at all of these things that I was able to accomplish, right? And yes, if we're not careful, these can fall under the realm of procrastination like I'm going to do all this stuff before I can do this. But we have to find some kind of balance here where we feel comfortable in this space that we're working in and are able to relax the brain enough so that we can tap into that creativity because without calming the nervous system. Your cognitive creative focus in the brain is completely cut off. So if you are trying to be more productive, more creative in whatever it is that you do, even if you're not an instructor, you're not a teacher of anything, you still work with other people, right? You still have to accomplish certain things. It is impossible to do that. If you are in this heightened state of alert where the nervous system is, is just firing on overdrive all the time. So whatever your immediate mission might be, it might be taking the dog for a walk, it might be changing your environment for just a moment. Maybe it is in the realm of something that can help you move forward. For example, reorganizing your planner or moving your planner forward the next you know three months I use I use rocket book I'm not an affiliate with them yet, but I really should be because I recommend rocket book as a organizational tool all the time. But rocket book if you've not heard about it, it's it's a notebook system. You can get planners, you can get just blank notebooks, but it's like a reusable notebook where there's a bunch of whiteboard pages and you write on them with friction pens, and then you can keep them for as long as you like but when you're done you kind of wipe it clean, you wipe the slate clean. And for me that feels really good. So I can go through my planner it lasts me about four to six weeks. And once it's filled up with all the notes I go through take the pictures load them up into my Google Drive and and save them there. And then I wipe that slate clean and fill out my next

My next few days, weeks months in that planner and for me it feels really good. Anytime you can wipe your slate clean is amazing. Right? So that is another idea. No, you don't have a rocket book. Just a fresh page on your planner sometimes is enough. But you have to find what works for you. So experiment with things and don't be afraid to throw things out if they're not working. Right. Now when you find your list of activities, immediate mission activities. You might think of this like your comfort list or recovery skill list that we talked about in our series on burnout with Dr. Cates Steiner you can keep that list handy. I know some of us are really big on structure where we have to plan every little moment in time. I personally am not so much like that I go back and forth on it. But if you have a list, you can draw from it whenever you need to, in increments of time that you have available, right so if you have a bunch of things that take you five minutes, that's great. You know, you can pull from there whenever you want to. You just need to give yourself permission to do it as these moments of overwhelming stress come up so that you're not like oh, I don't know what to do. You've got this comfort list right there. You've got this recovery skill list. You've got resources that you can pull into your day in really creative ways. That will help you reset that nervous system and get you back on track into that amazing creative zone of genius that you have at your fingertips. All of those things will take a good instructor and make them great will take a good coach and make them amazing. And we'll also give you resources to help explode your business. testimonials from your people. Specific copy about what makes you unique will be invaluable as far as marketing tools go. I mean all of these things kind of layered together. And it's a really fantastic way to take your own work in into these concepts about learning and memory and how the brain works. That creative connection and our recovery tools. And really, why them not just to ourself but to our relationships with our family, our relationships with our clients and our students. It's just an incredible thing. The way the brain and the body Connect. Those are some of the things that I pulled out of this series. I'm interested to know what it was that stood out for you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ericka Thomas  0:01  

When you listened to this three part series on partnering with your brain, and I'd love to hear about that. So if you want to reach out to me through social media, I'm happy to connect. If we're not friends already, you can reach out to me on Facebook at elemental kinetics move well, and then at elemental kinetics on Instagram and and then you can also head over to the website, elemental kinetics calm. For all of our show notes. You'll find a transcript to this particular podcast as well as our past podcasts on memory and learning. And lots of ways to get in touch there. If you are interested in a deep dive into basically how these connections with the nervous system can really help boost your performance as an instructor. And up level, your instruction and your teaching ability and your professional development. We are getting ready to open the well net workshop and retreat and I'm super excited to share this with you I wanted to create a space where fitness professionals and wellness providers could refill their energy personally and professionally, with mentorship, connection and community. All of those things that go missing in the lonely frontier of the solopreneur in the fitness industry. So I'm inviting you to check out the well net workshop and retreat and I would love to have you the well is an inclusive communal immersion weekend with an exclusive group of fitness sisters. Sorry, guys. This time around. It's a women only. We are doing a network, a workshop and a retreat all in one and it's rooted first in giving you ways to shake off stress and tension and then setting personal and professional boundaries to avoid future burnout. It's a mastermind for fitness industry specific business skills, including systems to make anyone tech savvy, social media sanity, and money mindset around how to place value on the invaluable work that you do. The well is going to be a place where you can get real with yourself about what it is that you want out of your business without fear of judgment, expectations or competition. So I hope you will head over to elemental kinetics.com forward slash the well net workshop and check out all of the details there. I would love to see you at this retreat. It's a very small exclusive group. So space is limited. I would urge you not to wait here this is an amazing gift that you can give to yourself. And if you have any questions you can reach me at Ericka Thomas at elemental kinetics.com and I will see you all next time on the work in. Thanks everybody. Take care