You’ve heard the term “overnight success.”
Some people say there’s no such thing. But these days — if you consider that having lots of people being aware of you equals “success” — I’d argue it’s completely possible.
One viral clip (good or bad) can instantly catapult someone into the global social media spotlight, whether there’s years of work behind it or not.
At least, it certainly looks like success. A sudden reputation as an expert in the field. Thousands of new followers. A dramatic increase in demand for your products or services.
But from a professional perspective, there’s a lot more to success than that. In fact, it’s all about what we don’t see — and hadn’t noticed.
The occasional fluke aside, an “overnight success” is in fact usually the product of persistence and iteration. And lots of it.
People don’t become great coaches overnight. Sure, the soft skills can be there from Day 1. And the right education can immediately inspire a change in approach.
But anyone who has achieved meaningful, measurable success in this industry — and now we’re talking about clients, not content — has used a very standard template that exists almost everywhere else in life:
Do. Observe. Learn. Iterate. Repeat.
This is what “experience” really means. There are plenty of trainers who have been in the game a very long time without success, and it’s because they never became experienced.
Their decade on the gym floor looked more like:
Do. Do. Do. Do. Repeat.
And most of the time, that's because we’ve never been taught how to think about exercise. We’ve been told there’s a certain way for everyone to do it, and so we just deliver that.
We don’t treat every client as a design case; we treat them as a delivery task.
And this is what lets us down.
If you’ve been in the PT game for a while and don’t feel like you’ve been successful, a change in mindset could help. It’s all about leaving “the way” behind and figuring out an approach that really creates the value that paying customers are looking for from a personal trainer.
And then it’s all about persistence, iteration, and building experience. Figuring out the way that works best for us and our clients at this moment in time.
When that happens, and it all falls into place, they’ll might start calling you an overnight success.
Let them.
Want to change the way you see exercise forever?
RTS teaches an objective, science-based approach to exercise analysis and design. No more cookie-cutter coaching — only customised, optimised exercise experiences for your clients.
RTS Global deliver courses worldwide from Australia to Abu Dhabi. Find a RTS Level 1 course near you and transform your approach to personal training.