What’s your biggest challenge with health and fitness? So that what? Knowing the right questions to ask has had a massive impact on the quality of service I can provide for my clients.

In 2015, I met an amazing coach in James Wedmore. He’s not even in the fitness industry. But his coaching has had a profound impact on the quality of service I provide my clients. He explained a lot to me about how to ask the right questions and once I figured that out, my business took off. 

People will come to you with a problem. They will often be able to easily tell you what they want. But they won’t always be able to tell you what they need. If they knew that, it probably wouldn’t be a problem for them. That’s where you come in. That’s where you can help. 

It’s important to give your clients what they want. But it’s even more important to give them what they need. This is where deeply understanding your client and their core reason/s for change is so important. Asking one simple question can be the difference between, “Yeah, he helped me but…” and, “He’s awesome. You gotta contact him!” 

That one question is ‘so that’. When you ask your audience or prospective client what they want to achieve in a particular area of their life, they will give you an answer. But there’s always a ‘so that’. So that what? The tricky thing is that in some industries there’s a second ‘so that’. The fitness industry is one of those industries. Let me give you an example of a dialogue between myself (M) and a prospective client (PC). 

M: What’s your biggest challenge with health and fitness?

PC: Staying on track.

M: So that what?

PC: I can lose 10kgs. 

M: So that?

PC: I have more energy and feel better about myself. 

That’s a very basic example but it effectively demonstrates that if I only solved the problem they first told me they had, I wouldn’t have solved their real problem. They would lose 10kgs as they said they wanted and I’d think I had done my job. They too would have a feeling of success. But they’d likely still feel as though something is missing. They’d feel slightly unfulfilled. And that’s because I didn’t take the time to get to know them and their core reasons for change. 

There’s obviously much more to questioning techniques. You could spend your entire lifetime studying the whole subject of language and still not master it. Courses are dedicated to this and to comprehensively cover this topic I’d need to write a book. However, there a simple wins you can have by taking the time to get to know your audience and asking the right questions. 

What’s your biggest challenge in health and fitness? So that what?

Leave your answer to that question in the comments section below.