Do Your Biggest F*ck Ups Make The Best Stories?

Read time: 5 minutes

Hey Coach,

In this week’s edition of Coach’s Corner, we’re taking a counterintuitive look at how your biggest mistakes can turn into your best stories (and therefore your best content).

I could write a thick book about all the colossal coaching fuck-ups I’ve made. Let me share a brief handful with you...

One of my first 1on1 clients was a lovely lady named Jane. She was in her mid forties and told me she wanted to get stronger. I put her on a 5×5 program and a month later she told me she didn’t want to continue.

I was shocked. She’d hit PR’s on all her lifts.. how could she be unhappy? Well, turns out in her mind when she said she wanted to get stronger she meant she could hold a plank for a minute and have more energy for gardening.

Whoops.

Or when I first started online coaching. My thought process was I’m going to be the best coach I can be, I’m going to over-deliver in every area. I had my clients track everything I could think of.

I’m talking;

• Bodyweight

• Resting Heart Rate

• HRV

• Sleep Score

• Recovery Sore

• RPE of lifts

• RPE of session

• Macros

• Blood Pressure

• etc etc etc

To my surprise, client adherence was terrible. What was my mistake?

I didn’t understand what value was, so I wasn’t delivering it. I was essentially giving my clients homework to complete each week. I was making their life harder.

(This is a trap a lot of coaches I speak with still fall into btw).

I’ve sent the wrong client a check in video, I’ve missed client check-ins, I even once sent a group of 30+ clients a shirtless selfie that I was meant to send to my girlfriend.

But, you know what?

If I had the chance to go back and change them.. I wouldn’t. For two main reasons. Firstly, because they’ve turned me into the coach I am today. But secondly, because I’ve learned how to use these to my advantage in another way - by turning them in to content.

Game-Changing Play: Humanising Yourself

What’s the Problem?

In the eyes of your clients, you’re probably not ‘human’. You don’t deal with the same things they do, you’re just super motivated and dedicated to being fit and healthy (it doesn’t matter if this is true or not, it matters if they believe it).

Because of this, many of your clients struggle to connect with you.

The Play: Sharing More You

Here’s a proven strategy to solve that problem:

• Step 1: Share Your Mistakes/Failures

• Step 2: Share How You Learned From Them

• Step 3: Share How You Now Don’t Deal With Those Problems

There are lessons and corrective actions associated with all these stories. Some of these corrective actions will be useful to your potential clients. Essentially if you’re showing them the learning curve so they don’t have to make the same mistakes.

Sharing these stories doesn’t (in my opinion) diminish people’s trust in you. It just shows you’ve navigated the trenches, taken some hits, and survived to tell the tale.

Sometimes mistakes come from doing things in a hurry. Other times, mistakes come from pushing the envelope a little. If you never push the envelope, how can you be the expert you claim you are??

The Science Behind It

Why does this strategy work? Here’s the science:

• Relatability: We all want to work with people who are like us, people who ‘get it’.

• Proof: The most powerful form of proof is yourself. This is either from you having gone through the process that you now coach OR you having coached a lot of people through it.

Next Steps

Try applying this with your content this week and track the changes you see. Let me know how it goes!

Until next time,
Max Waldron