Guest: Lynda Lippin

Podcast Release Date: 3/24/2021

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Welcome to Trulyfit the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through unique fitness business software. 

Steve Washuta: Welcome to the choice podcast. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s podcast, we will be speaking with Linda Lippin. Linda is a Pilates instructor. She owns a renowned Pilates studio in New York City. She has taught the likes of Donna Karen and Joe Walsh.

Her students love her rave reviews. But today we’re not going to be talking Pilates, we’re going to be talking about one of our other specialties, which is a mindset Coach, what exactly is a mindset coach? How can these techniques and these terms help you as a personal trainer or help your clients? And we really get into all the things surrounding business and how that mindset coaching approach that mindset coaching approach can help both your business and your clients. This is a great episode, and I’m excited to share all the information with you. with no further ado, here’s Linda. Linda, thanks for being on the Trulyfit podcast. We spoke a little bit on the front end. But let’s give the listeners in the audience a background on your fitness life.

Lynda Lippin : All right. It’s really great to be here. Steve, by the way, thank you very much for having me. So guys, my name is Linda lip, and I’ve been in the fitness business for about 32 years now. It’s been a really long time. I’m 54 years old, and I was probably the least likely person to get into the fitness business that anyone would have thought of. So I you know, I’ve always moved in my life, right? Like I started out taking ballet from the age of six. And when I was in college at SUNY Purchase as a philosophy major, I started doing Pilates.

We actually had a dedicated Pilates studio on campus, I hadn’t really been doing a lot of exercises, you know, per se. But I was interested in seeing what they were doing. And I was the vice president of finance for student government, and we directed some of their budgets. So I also wanted to see what this equipment was what they were teaching. And I loved it. And I so loved it that when I left to purchase, and once you graduate school to get my Ph.D. in philosophy at Temple, I got a part-time job teaching Pilates, and my first year of graduate school. It was really nice for me to be doing something not academia related.

And I really discovered that I loved teaching exercise that I loved helping people solve problems, like get through back pain or get through, you know, foot ankle injuries and different things like that. And that I was really good at it. So I basically started teaching before there weren’t any real Pilates certifications, you know, you just kind of apprenticed with somebody and taught alongside them for a long time. And then they said, okay, teach. And I did that with a woman named Carrie Carlson in Philadelphia, who’s now in her 70s still teaching.

Then I was a founding member of the physical MIND Institute and just, you know, kind of kept going within the Pilates sphere. I became an a certified personal trainer in 2000. And had been with them ever since. And I’ve been kind of combining Pilates with you know, standard weight training kettlebells and trs x, to really just help my clients achieve their goals. Then I also teach Pilates teachers and I run online programs and I do a lot of mindset coaching and a lot work with Pilates teachers and fitness professionals on pivoting their businesses online finding their ideal clients and basically moving forward and scaling up and being successful.

Steve Washuta: Well, that’s great. And I know the meat of this conversation will certainly center around that mindset coaching but you know, I’d be remiss to not touch on your your Pilates journey because I also have a background in Pilates and I think it was key not just in the Pilates world but for all fitness professionals to listen to how it’s not always just about certification, you learn more shadowing somebody before the certification even existed than you would in any single level certification.

And I think that’s gone beyond the wayside. It’s not a normal process, even for personal trainers to go shadow somebody they go, they take a test, they get a certification, they think they’re ready. That’s not how you get ready. How you get ready is to watch industry professionals who have been doing it for years. Take tips from them, find out things you like and things you don’t like, and then integrate them with your style. And that’s really how you build it. Proper fitness business.

Lynda Lippin : Definitely. And like just learning how to talk to clients, how to go through the initial meetings, where to put your hands on people or not, you know, the best cues to use for different people, you know, when you kind of shadow somebody, and you come up in that apprentice way, right? You, you see things that go badly. Things that go, Well, you see what works and what doesn’t work, yeah.

And then you’re better able to sort of go out there and work with actual human beings because that’s the piece that let’s face it, the certifications, you know, plenty certifications, I think, can be a little bit better than that. Because, you know, you’re doing several 100 hours of observation, and, you know, supervised teaching. So there are, you know, a lot of that, take, you know, a national exam, and just try to go out there and deal with people. But then it just becomes usually something that goes badly, because you don’t know how to charge what you’re worth, you don’t even know what you’re worth. And you don’t know how to deal with people.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, that’s a great point, all the all subtle nuances of a business, learning the pricing systems and how you charge people and, you know, High Times and low times of the day, and all in all, all of these things that you would never otherwise know, to think of unless you’ve you had some sort of apprenticeship or internship and, and not to get into like a rant here. But it’s really this isn’t just a fitness industry.

This is a, this is sort of a systemic issue in society. I mean, like, you know, I were I majored in public relations, I learned more in one week on the job in public relations than I did in four years and my major, right, because when you’re in the business, and you’re watching how it works, nothing gives you more of a, you know, sort of stimulation on, okay, this is how I need to pivot, or this is, these are the people that I want to be like, or these are the people I don’t want to be like, and I hope that moving forward that people take the time I and I’ll go ahead and speak for you now.

I guarantee if some young Pilates teacher right now came up to you and said, Do you mind if I come by your place for five hours a week? And watch you, you would say, Please, I would absolutely love that. Because people like you and me, we dedicate our lives to helping others. So why wouldn’t we want to help young teachers? And I know you already do help young teachers? That’s correct, right?

Lynda Lippin : Yeah, I have you know, I help people both on the consumer side and the business side for free. I have a Facebook group called Pilates profit lab. And I actually I have a free five-day workshop, that’s really a nine Day event with bonus days, and you know, extra that starts. I run it about every six to eight weeks. And in this five-day event. It’s everything you need to know about that back-end business. You know, what are your core values? How do you define your mission? What’s your ideal client? Have you talked to your ideal client? A lot of Pilates teachers don’t even think about things like thinking in terms of programs or programming.

Because we tend to if we’re in the studio, just kind of get clients from the studio that either stay with us or don’t. But as I explained to every Pilates teacher, we all do programs all the time, right? Your client comes in who’s getting married in eight weeks and wants to look right in the sleep discount, right, and we like do an arms program. Your client comes in who’s suddenly going mountain trekking in Nepal and a few months, and you put together something that’s going to specifically get them conditioned for that.

So you know, when I realized teaching online, especially and if people you know, because in New York, we’re not really teaching in the studio yet at all, especially for groups, is if you can take a client’s goal. And there are millions of people out there with these goals and actually create a program that solves that problem and gets them to their goal faster or easier than they can on their own. They’re going to pay you for that.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, I mean, and in this day and age, as you know, with all that’s going on between COVID and just technology, to not have your foot at least dipped into the online environment is is is a mistake. It’s not only for the scalability aspect but just because you never know what’s around the corner. And it’s important to have at least a base understanding of how to run your business. I guess you would say virtually, or at least again, tie the New Age social media to your business.

Lynda Lippin : Right, and then the truthful like real way So that you’re not just kind of posing for the camera. But you’re kind of showing up in a way where people can know like and trust you, because you’re you. And I always say, you know, one of my old coaches, Mark wiping, used to say, show up at the coffee shop version of yourself. Like, if you and I went out for coffee, Steve, like your next trip to New York, I pretty much be the same human that I am right now.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, I think I think that’s important. And I think, for me, at least, it was tough doing that online, virtually. When I’m one on one with somebody working with them, it comes naturally. But we all have this. I don’t know, this natural inclination to try to be almost like celebrity ask, when we’re either in front of the camera, or we’re doing some things online, and you change your personality for not the better. And I, I’ve worked my way back to just saying, I need to do what got me to where I am, and just and be myself.

Lynda Lippin : Right, right. And, you know, and it’s tough nowadays to because we are in this era of like the celebrity trainer, and the celebrity chefs and the celebrity. And, you know, what I tell my people is, all of us are service workers. We are all service workers, I don’t care how much you charge, I charge a lot for my for my work, I do. Because I’m very good at it. And I will get you to your goal quicker and quicker and easier than most other trainers, let alone you on your own.

But at the end of the day, I’m still a service worker, I am no better than the person who brings me my food when I order takeout or the cashier at the whole foods, or you know, any other service person that I’m dealing with, we serve our clients, we’re here to help them get better, right, and help them reach their goals.

And I think we have to get out of this mindset that doing that, that if you happen to do that for somebody really well and get recognized publicly for it, which is great. Or if you do that for celebrities, and I think you know, most trainers, at some point have done it for a celebrity, or two or three or four. I mean, I ran Pilates and fitness that at parity and Turks and Caicos, which is an elite private Island Resort. I’ve worked train planning. But that doesn’t make me a celebrity. You know, that’s it makes me still Linda, the service worker who’s out there every day just trying to serve the most number of clients who I can with the best information that’s going to help them

Steve Washuta : yeah, no, you’re right. I couldn’t agree more. That’s that’s fantastic information. And it’s something that I push in my in my book, which is behind me Fitness Business 101, it’s, it’s about providing a high value experience for your clients, because we are service workers, they’re paying us and they deserve all of our attention and all of our efforts in working with them and and our honesty and and being being frank with them.

And, you know, I had a conversation on, I lead my last podcast about what I consider sort of the the initial conversation you have, which which I call the the catch up every day with your client, to understand how you need to potentially shape shift that that one hour you’re working with them. So for instance, you might have a client come to you, who says, You know what, Steve, my, my toddler was crying all night, I’m on two hours of sleep. And I just, you know, I’m not feeling that great today.

Well, maybe we had a very tough regimen plan for them that day. And now I have to I have to switch that out to say, you know what, today we’re gonna focus on the things that you like to do, or maybe some dynamic stretching, or some you know, some of our easier exercises, because it’s important that you get this relief. Here, maybe you need to talk to me during this right gets to vent, because that’s part of the reason we’re there too, right. We’re there for the psychological premise of that, but and I think there’s there’s a lot of trainers who only look at themselves in a scalable way where they say, I’m just gonna build you a program, this is what we’re gonna do every day. And they’re not there to provide the high-value experience. And I think that’s, that’s a mistake.

Lynda Lippin : It’s a huge mistake. I mean, you know, even taking myself for an example, right? Like I tend to, I love creating workouts for other people. And I love helping my Pilates teacher clients and my fitness professional clients do their jobs for their people as well. I’m not a big fan of creating workouts for myself. I would rather pay somebody else to do it in the same way that other people say us. Right.

So I am happy to kind of farm that out to somebody. But some days like normally Mondays and Tuesdays I do hit. That’s my thing. Well, you know, last Thursday, I had my first COVID vaccine. By Monday, I was not feeling up to hit Could I? Could I? Sure, I could have. But did I know I didn’t. And luckily enough, you know, I’ve worked with folks who are able to give me what I need. And Monday and Tuesday, I did not need hit.

Steve Washuta: Yeah! And it’s so important for, for people to, you know, obviously, as professionals, we need to have a plan when we go into something, but, you know, just like a, you know, a fireman may have a plan when he goes into a building, but things don’t always go right. So you have to be able to pivot and have an understanding of your client and their needs. And speaking of that, we’re going to lead into the next thing. I assume mindset coaching may also play into that a little bit. I don’t know much about mindset coaching. So I’m excited to find out more of this, can you give me a definition or describe what exactly mindset coaching is?

Lynda Lippin : Okay, well, in the same way that that kind of fitness or Pilates coaching is about kind of, you know, helping people find their goals in terms of what they want physically right, or what they want in terms of their fitness or how they’re feeling and functioning on a physical level. mindset coaching kind of does the same thing, but more on a brain and emotional level. I became very familiar with mindset coaching, from one of my mentors, and actually, the person who trained me originally in mindset coaching, his name is DAX Malloy, and he’s an extremely well-known personal trainer from the UK. And DAX actually came over to the US and actually, a few years ago, so we were I, you know, cruise over the bridge.

Went and learned. Basically, the way I approached mindset coaching and training is in a very neuroscientific kind of way, which I think is also a way that most fitness professionals and Pilates teachers tend to identify with, I don’t make attorney namby-pamby, okay, and our brains, our thoughts get in our way, all the time, because we all think our thoughts are real. We all not only think our thoughts are real but that everybody else must pretty much agree with them. It just so happens that a lot of our thoughts are not about real things. We may think they’re real to us. They’re not. And the second thing is that we cannot assume that everybody else shares our thoughts, or feels the same way about our thoughts. Right.

So I think we’ve all had it happen, say where you’ve tried to connect with a new client, they come in and had them you know, not, not respond right away. Right. And for a lot of traders, for a lot of my clients, the first, the first thing we tend to think is, they just don’t like us, and they’re going to go work with somebody else.

That’s why they’re not getting back to us. It never actually seems to occur to us that they might have had an emergency, that they might be fine with a 48-hour turnaround on emails. You know, that our intensity, and this might not be their intensity in this. And what I found through mindset coaching was that if you can recap situations for people, and retask things for people in a way that says, Look, this is the piece of your brain that’s interested in survival. And a lot of your history getting in the way if you were actually seeing what’s going on and moving forward.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, that’s, that’s fantastic information. I see. One of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace talks about in his commencement speech, says something similar, where, you know, you might see a mom dragging her kid screaming as a kid in the grocery store. And, you know, you think that she’s a bad mother. Meanwhile, you don’t know that she’s been up all night, because, you know, her husband’s got cancer, and he’s, you know, he’s vomiting in the toilet, and that she’s just, you know, she’s on lack of sleep. So it’s, it’s one of these things where we think we know what’s going on in our client’s heads because we’re too far into our heads where sometimes the best thing to do is just ask them.

Lynda Lippin : Right. Exactly, exactly. And that’s the other thing is being able to just kind of have clear communication with people and kind of seeing what’s happening. You know, a lot of our clients are afraid of exercising, for whatever reason, they’re afraid of trainers. Right? That, you know, they may have only heard stories from their friends of trainers who hurt them. They might go to the gym and only see what I mean, and I I’m not disparaging most of our community because most of us aren’t like this. But we’ve all seen those trainers who were reading their messages on their phone, while their Clients are on the treadmill.

Yeah, totally right. Like, you’re not putting your client on your tread on treadmill, so that you can read your phone, you should still be actively engaged with your client, who’s still paying for money for that time. You know, clients have all kinds of reasons for wanting to seek us out. And I think it’s important, you know, for us to be able to really see where they’re coming from, and what’s going to work for them.

You know, for some folks, a very strict regimen is great. That’s what they want. That’s what they need. They’re good with that. For some folks, they need something a lot looser, they get, you know, scared and pull away, the minute they see that kind of strictness comes out, and you have to ease them in. I mean, I’ve had clients who have started seeing me maybe twice a month, who now see me three times a week.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, and I think, you know, to add to that, it’s not an affront to us, personally, we have to, we have to take our egos out of it. So I have, you know, clients I work with who only they want 30 minutes of apps, why they’re in great shape, they do things on their own, they’re in better shape than I’ll ever be. And they just don’t like doing apps. So they come to me, I give them new fun exercises, and they take those exercises, they do them on their own.

And I have clients who want to work with me seven days a week, and neither is an issue, but it’s what they want. And I need to take my ego out of it and say, if this person only wants to work with me for 30 minutes, on one thing, that doesn’t mean they don’t think I know the full spectrum of health and wellness and how to help them.

That’s what they want. So that’s what I’m going to give them if someone came to you and says, Hey, I love the reformer. But honestly, all I want to do is you know, work in, I don’t want to work on the reformer, all I want to do is mat Pilates, you’re not going to say no, you’re going to say Hey, I’ll work with you and try to get you to your goals through that medium. Because as a professional I, I can, I can use a bunch of different tools to get you to where you need to be.

Lynda Lippin : Well, and I also think this then gets into the mindset of the trainers, right? So when I’m teaching my when I’m doing my Pilates profit lab work in my Pilates teacher mastermind program, what I find is that a lot of fitness professionals and Pilates teachers suffer from, you know, something we could globally call imposter syndrome, right? So, we’re always questioning and not necessarily in a healthy way, I think, I think it’s always healthy.

And it just comes I think, from my philosophy background and my love of Plato and Socrates, that I think it’s always appropriate for us to question do we really know what we know? I think it’s always appropriate to be looking for new knowledge and new ways of doing things. However, if you do know what you’re doing, and you actually have pieces of paper, and client testimonial, and all of this proof around you, that you do help people and you do know what they’re doing, you can kind of rest assured that that you do know, and that you can be out there talking to clients and selling programs and doing things because you can offer the benefits, right? Because you can get those clients to their goals.

And what I find what happens with a lot of trainers who are scared to go out there, and they’re like, no, I couldn’t do that. I’m just the general trainer. Oh, I just follow the method. I don’t really put together programs or I you know, whatever, whatever it is, we kind of sit there and talk ourselves out of it. Oh, but what if I put this out there, and everybody comes down on me and tells me I don’t know what I’m doing? Well, you know, the chances of that happening are pretty much slim to none for the majority of us. You’ve been in business and you’ve been doing this work, and people pay you for it.

Chances are, you’re fine. But so many of us don’t do that. And it’s really, I think it’s a detriment almost to the entire industry. I think this is why we have personal trainers and Pilates teachers in this country and mean even in New York City who are working for 20 or 30 bucks an hour. You know, I mean, you have the pricing around here, like you can’t live here on that. And most and that’s frankly what I was paying people in my Studios 20 years ago. Clearly, the cost of living has gone up in 20 years. Clearly the cost of payment, even in big box gyms, you know, depending on your trainer tier level and all this other selling stuff going on. You know, people are still really making in that 20 to $30 range and they think that’s all there is.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, and that’s a great point. I want to talk about that pricing. The second But I want to go back to what you said about imposter syndrome. I think that that’s a great point, I think, to add to that a part of the issue that at least I see with the trainers that I work with is they haven’t done enough networking. And once you’ve done that networking, you’re you understand how to then say, I don’t know, I do know someone who does no, I will send you to them, right? All doctors do this.

My wife is a pediatric sports medicine doctor, right? She she refers 10 people out a day, somebody comes in, and they stuffed a Lego in their nose. That’s not what she does. She sends them to the E and T, right? There’s a specialist to deal with that. So people can come to me and they can ask me questions and say, Hey, Steve, you know, I’m really concerned with exactly all of my macronutrients and what I’m doing, I’ll say, Hey, listen, that’s not my specialty. I can guide you, I can give you a general vague plan and outline and look over things.

But I know registered dieticians I know, I know, people who focus specifically on nutrition, I’ll send them to you. And guess what, you’re not losing a client guys, that client now trust in you. So they’re even more likely to come back to you knowing that number one, you’re doing your best to help them further themselves and their health and wellness. But number two, that you have those connections, you’re somebody who knows people, you’re a mover and shaker that also kind of helps you and your and your personality in the industry?

Lynda Lippin : Yeah, you know, I think it’s very much You know, it comes from a place of fear, right? Like, our, our little our lizard brains, you know, our most primal brains are just sitting back there going. I don’t like change, I don’t like newness. I would really like things to stay the same. And what I’m really concerned with is Do I have a place to sleep? Am I safe? And can I eat? That’s like base level. And obviously, if you’re plugging along at 20 to 30 bucks an hour, those base-level fears can very much be a part of your life in general.

But there’s also this kind of people are scared to niche down. You know, I mean, look, I’ve trained to all kinds of people lives. You know, I’ve been in business for a very long time. But I specialize in women over 50 with osteoporosis right and maybe back pain or neck pain but that’s my kind of niche group as well as working with the fitness professionals and Pilates teachers and huge generalists right and not be very specific. And I thought about this when you were using your wife as an example, right? Because obviously, a pediatric sports medicine person is going to be more than stepping but also make more money and be in more demand, than a general practitioner or a general surgeon, period and the discussion.

Because you’re you do a very specific thing, you do it very well, and you attract those patients who need that thing. And then like you said if you get other people, and you can’t deal with them, then you farm them out to all of your friends and associates who handle those issues. niching is never bad. I don’t know why we think that talking to everybody is better than talking to a very specific client pool, who we can easily serve. Totally. And I think too, it’s like picking the low-hanging fruit.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, people are afraid to do it. And they, they think they need to pick something. Right away, you have time when you hop into an industry, like we talked about, especially if you do the right things and you apprentice and you look things over to get a feel for all the different avenues that you can take and take your time. And and when you feel like there’s something that you you’re either very good at or that you cling to or that you like or even more important, sometimes that’s missing in that area.

Well, that’s what you go after. Right and I talk about that a lot in my book is that it’s good to sometimes Of course, you want to you want to niche down into places that you enjoy. You don’t want to do things you don’t enjoy. But it’s also important to see what is missing in the area. Everybody in the Upper East Side happens to be a Pilates instructor for dancers, and they only do these people who are you know, who are in wicked, then guess what? There’s going to be a larger pool of people who are over the age of 50 who don’t have somebody who’s there looking for them to help them with their needs.

So it’s also it’s important to kind of look around your area if your area-specific or if you’re not area-specific and you’re running a fitness business virtually to say, you know, what is an out-there What haven’t people cornered the market in and be strategic?

Lynda Lippin : Right? You want to look for the gap in the market. You want to look for where clients need service, who really aren’t being served, and then kind of show up with that service. Like, you know, here we are. You know, it’s like in New York, we have a delivery service caviar, and they came up by becoming like independent delivery people.

So suddenly the restaurants who didn’t normally do delivery could now work with the service that sent their own couriers to pick up the food and deliver it. Right. Perfect. worked well, for those of us who wanted to order food from places that don’t do delivery. worked well, for those places to get them, you know, more money, because they’re still doing all their sit down business. And now, magically, they have added delivery without having to deal with it themselves.

Right. Great idea. And I think you know, in fitness, and fitness also was like, not like, you have to stay in your niche forever. Right? When I lived in the Caribbean, it was great, because my, I could be more of a generalist, because there were only two Pilates teachers on the entire big islands when I was unpacking Cialis, and I was the only one at parity.

So I could pretty much be who you needed me to be for your session, you know, in terms of what you wanted. But when I first came back to New York, I mean, I work in Tribeca, which is, you know, full of young families and new moms. So for many, many years, my specialty was diathesis, repti, pre and postnatal Well, yeah. And I do that, you know, I still do some of that I still do teacher training in that and but, you know, as I got older, my client base got a little bit old. Now, I pretty much work with my peers.

Steve Washuta : Well, I can tell you that’s another whole podcast, I have coming up with someone, but it’s one of the biggest questions that people who are exactly in just National Academy, sports medicine, Ace, personal trainers, they’re nervous about it. I’m talking specifically about the prenatal stuff. They don’t know a lot about it. It’s not taught a lot about and it’s it comes up a lot. I think also because young trainers haven’t had the experience with friends who have had kids yet. So you have these 2223 2425-year-olds, and it’s because it hasn’t been in their life. Right? If you ask them for proper squat form, it’s no problem.

They know how to squat. Everyone seems squat before but because they haven’t been in these, like smaller communities who have dealt with the pregnancy issues. It’s new to them. And it’s honestly, so I keep tabs on this. It’s the second most asked question in my national academy sports medicine group. Wow, how to deal with diastasis recti how to deal with prenatal postnatal all of these different things. And I think it’s so we can have a whole other conversation on that. Maybe we will soon but I want to get back to the mindset coaching. And I want to talk about, do you think it’s vital? Let’s say I’m starting out in the fitness industry? Should I maybe reach out to somebody to get mindset coaching beforehand? Or is it mostly used as like to break a plateau in my business?

Lynda Lippin : I think it can go either way. I think that if you want to start out at your strongest then doing the mindset coaching at the very beginning, like I wish I had done it much earlier in my business cycles, right? I was extremely successful as a Pilates studio owner and as a trainer when I first started out, I I laugh because I’m not sure how I did that. Do you know what I mean? I didn’t have profit first accounting, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t even have the internet, frankly, at that point.

You know, we were doing phone calls and direct mailers and, you know, brochures in local area businesses and trying to get as much actual press as we close the actual people coming into, you know, record and do photos and, and articles. And I did it right. And I did it. Well. One that does silly was you know, extraordinarily successful. But I feel like if I had actually had some coaching going into it and had really a better idea of how, how I needed to approach things because there were there were leaps that I didn’t take because I was scared. Right leaps that could have taken me a lot further forward in my business.

I kept thinking about scale in terms of opening more physical businesses and physical studios, which you know, in the Pilates and fitness world is the only version of scale we really, it’s like you train until you have no more time to train. And then you bring people in to train the clients that you can write and then that keeps going until you own a facility have multiple trainers and, but there’s a host of issues I felt with that, you know, I’m not very good at managing staff and other people. I’m just not, it’s not my forte, I’m great at managing myself, my clients, my family, my friends, nothing my staff.

But now I know that now, if I had had some coaching around that early on, I probably could have done even better and had, you know, even happier teachers and trainers working with me. But I didn’t. So there were a lot of things that I came up against, that I didn’t feel I was ready for that I didn’t feel like I could do that. I was scared to do it on my own or at you know, whatever it was that if I had had the mindset coaching, then I probably would have gone further faster.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, I think it sounds like, you know, if you recognize you’re I hesitate to use the term flaws. But if I should say, if you recognize your strengths and weaknesses, that’s a that’s a better way to build your business and, and scale long term, there’s a lot of fitness professionals, their only goal is to get as many people as they can.

And why that’s typically a mistake is, a lot of times they’re not ready for it. I have all these young trainers come to me and say, How can I get 100 clients said, You’re not ready for 100 clients, you’re going to lose 99 of them.

Because you don’t know how to do a good job yet, right. So you’re not going to keep those clients, it’s more important that you would have 10 clients that you can keep for the rest of your life, then you’d have hundreds of clients walking through your doors, and then walking back out because you’re not actually getting them to their goals. And I think, you know, with the mindset coaching, it seems like you can, you can focus in, this is what I do great. Like you said, This is what I don’t do great. And let me build my business off of the things I do create.

Lynda Lippin : Exactly, exactly. And also learning when it’s okay to refer out when it’s okay to farm stuff out. I know a lot of trainers and Pilates teachers are scared to kind of pivot their businesses online and really scale because they’re not familiar with Kajabi, or they’re not familiar with social media, or they’re not familiar with podcasting, or whatever it is. All of these are things you can get training in.

All of these are things you can farm out easily to other people who can do those things for you and do them really well so that you can focus on your zone of excellence and, you know, do what you love to do and serve your clients. Look. That’s why trainers burn out and leave the field. Right? Because they think, Oh, I want those. I want 100 clients.

Well, first of all, how are you going to serve 100 clients? If you’re teaching one on one, there’s no way in a week, you’re going to serve 100 clients, especially if those clients want you more than once a week as a goal itself, that sort of nebulous, unattainable, and impossible to reach the why in which, you know, and then I come back to my people, and I’m like, Okay. I often tell trainers, why don’t we go back to how much money do you actually need to make? What do you want out of your life? How many hours a week do you really want to work? Because you see these young trainers, they bust out and they’re working 4050 hours a week, that doesn’t last so long.

You get injured, you get burnt out, if you also happen to be doing a lot of demonstrating and things like that, which we tend to do more of as younger trainers, that’s when you see people getting rhabdo simply because they’ve just overworked themselves between doing their own workouts and demonstrating for their clients, your bicep can only take so much. Right? We see people getting injured, we see people getting tired. And you end up running around so much that you’re not even putting away your money. Right? or dealing with you know, retirement income and all in all of these things that are things that we’re supposed to be thinking about. And, you know, that’s not a guarantee of long-term success.

That’s a good guarantee of long-term failure, actually. So I’m like, sit down and figure out you know, I don’t I was talking to a new client the other day, and she said to me, so what do you work like 5060 hours a week? And I was like, no. And I think you know, if my busiest weeks like this coming week, I’ve got a launch. Right, so I’m adding an hour a day for nine days to my schedule. Even with that, I try not to work more than six or seven hours a day. I take at least one day a week off often, you know more than one and a half or two or I spread out that time. But you know, I get done with the lunch I take the next day off. I take a Friday off every single month.

So that’s I you know, a long weekend. It’s like you need to Sit down and figure out for yourself what works for you long term, and what you need to make money-wise in order to have that work. And then that’s how you figure out pricing. That’s how you figure out who your clients are going to be. That’s how you figure everything else out after that. But that’s not typically what we do. We just run out there, we take the first job, we get to taste 20 bucks an hour, we decide we need 100 clients, so we can make $2,000. You know, or 20,000, or whatever it is, and then it is, and then we just sent up first out and pissed off.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, you’re totally right. I mean, you know, a few, a few months or a year of really sitting down, and shadowing and figuring out your game plan. And having mindset coaching can save you years of sort of slow earning and overworking yourself and not knowing the proper niche to be in. And I feel like people, again, I don’t want to like a bust on certifications here. But part of the reason is that the certifications don’t do enough to tell you, you’re not ready yet.

This is the first step people think they get their certification. And now I’m in right, that’s not the case. It’s more like, you know, even people coming out of med school, again, to relate it to something I’m close with, you still got to go to a residency program, you still have to be in the hospitals and learn and understand it. But that’s just the first step. And I and, and the people are too quick to rush into it.

Again, like you pointed out, that hurts you financially, but long term, it puts you on almost the wrong path sometimes. And you don’t notice it until four or five years from now how, if you would have taken a step back, you could have taken two steps forward faster just by not trying to worry so much about getting 100 clients but doing a good job and figuring out what it is I’m good at what it is that I’m not good at? And how I’m going to structure that around what I want in my life long term.

Lynda Lippin : Exactly. So that, you know, the question does always have to come back to us. It’s like, why are we doing this? Why do we want to do this? What is the goal of this for us, I also encourage trainers, again to, you know, I did a video in my Pilates profit lab group last week where I said, you need to get continuing education outside of the Pilates field. You just need to get out there, I don’t care, learn kettlebells, learn bags, get, you know, whatever, whatever it is just get out of Pilates for a moment, learn some business stuff, learn, get some mindset coaching, whatever it is, but just get out of that space and learn something different. Because it’s going to help you in the long run.

And it’s going to help your brain to be thinking about something different yet still related, you know, something still useful? Because what I find is people just they generally just go Oh, well, yeah, like I have to do that. I have to do those continuing education hours. Right. And they get whatever is most convenient, cheapest or easiest. Instead of being strategic even about continued continuing education. Who are the clients who I work with? Who are the clients who I help reach their goal?

What else could I do for them that might help them reach their goals, right? I mean, if you’re working with clients on fat loss, and maybe doing some work in macro nutrition, and micro nutrition might be really useful for your practice, right? Because then that way you kind of understand how that works together with the exercises that you’re doing and your exercise timeline and food timelines and whatever.

That’s useful. You know, if you work with women with if you like me, and you work with women over 50, then taking lots of continuing education in bone density training, and work on menopause and things like that are going to be really useful. If you have no idea how to charge people or how to deal with stuff, then you need education on that, you know, you can get training for all of this, but I feel like you know, we literally are kind of set up in fitness and Pilates in this kind of pre-existing system that’s existed for a long time.

No one knows quite why. Like, why are packages only five or 10 sessions? Just Why are they round numbers? Who knows, because we’ve always done it. You know, you could charge monthly, you could, there, there are all kinds of different ways that you could charge for things that are out of that model. And that can give you more, you know, at least more fluid income than you know, if not more income. So I think you know, in all of these ways we sort You know, we don’t think about things necessarily, we approach things from a survival instinct, versus really, as humans, what we want, you know, and what we need and what we would like moving forward.

And it’s not a horrible thing to go out of your zone of genius, you know, then, especially, I guess, especially here in New York, because it happens more often, like fitness professionals go to everybody else’s classes. Like, that’s just the thing. You could walk into real Pilates on any given day, and we would have people there from SoulCycle, you know, we would have the top SoulCycle teachers, people would be walking in like, Oh, is that so? And, like, Yeah, because people need to do other things for their bodies. Then what they do, and I feel like getting out there seeing what other folks are doing. If you’re not sure where you want to niche or how you want your business to move forward, get out there and see what other people are doing.

Take some classes, take some sessions, like go to different places, pretty COVID. I was very, very into the electric muscle stimulation while working out, right, yeah. Now post COVID, I would probably never do that again, because I’m not sharing a suit with Sandy. And I’m not so interested in being inside. But, you know, but then I was and I went out there. And I found the people who did it in my area who were really good added and went and that trained. You know, because it was fun. And it was different for me. And then I understood how it worked and why.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think, you know, speaking to part of what you said before, you know, there’s going to be times in your career where you’re going to shift, you’re going to niche in different directions, for lack of a better term, you’re, I’ve even taken times where I’ve, I did the opposite. I stepped out of it, I got sick of doing things that were very specific because for me, it was about spending time with my clients.

That’s what I enjoyed. And I had a waitlist. So I had the luxury because I had a waitlist to say, guess what, if you want to lose 10 pounds, or get abs, find another trainer, I’m only working with people whose goal is long-term health and wellness. Trust, that’s what I’m there to do. Because that’s what I enjoyed doing. I wanted someone to come in, I wanted to provide a fun, healthy workout that day, maybe Sundays or do Pilates, maybe some days we do hit maybe some days we do swimming. But trust, they trusted me that because they worked with me for long enough.

And I built up a name and a reputation. So then I sort of nished backward, so to speak, right? Because I didn’t want to do specifics that made me happier, right, that made me kind of get reinvigorated into the fitness game. And you’re going to have that throughout your career where you’re going to take steps in different directions and you’re going to pivot from one area to the next.

But unless you understand, like you brought up through the mindset coaching, what is it exactly that you want long term in your career? And what is it that you’re good at? And what is it that you can provide your clients and all of these things, you know, you’re going to be stuck in that box, you’re not going to be able to think outside the box, you’re going to go in, you’re going to accept the job, you’re going to get hourly wages, you’re going to do exactly what you were taught on your certification, you’re going to go home, and you’re not going to be happy.

Lynda Lippin : Right? And there’s, you know, once again, with the whole online situation, I mean, there are so many ways that we can build our businesses reach new clients, and really, you know, pivot and get out there. I think, you know, it’s so interesting to me, you know, another one of the coaches who I work with is a woman named Carol Lowenthal. And, her podcast is called unfuck. Your brain? Like, yeah, right. I mean, I loved I just saw the name. I was like, you’re saying, I love that I love you. And here we go.

But, you know, she’s she constantly talks about how we just think that everybody else has the same pattern in their head that we do and all the same assumptions about life that we do, you know, I was raised by Well, my mother was mentally ill. She was bipolar, schizophrenic. B, but before bipolar, like she was diagnosed when I was around 10 because bipolar wasn’t a diagnosis before that. And, you know, my, my father was ill in his own way and kind of enabled her and so I was really left to deal with most things by myself, which led to me being very strong in many ways and being extraordinary relief, fearful in many ways, you know, No, I’ve never done that.

I know that I need to do that. But my father had a lot of financial issues, and he had a lot of issues around money. And so it took a lot have worked for me to get in there and into my brain and realize that a lot of like the just shit in my head about money was not anything real and wasn’t shared by everybody else. I just thought everybody knew that you shouldn’t invest in the stock market because it could be volatile. Right? Everybody knows that? It turns out that no, that’s really not a thing.

And I just, you know, and I let that you know, early enough to to make it interesting but, but late enough that I wish I had known it earlier. And I partly learned that through diving into my own brain. So that’s, that’s the other pieces, even if folks they want to go through mindset coaching or even do mindset coaching, is that when you learn to do it, you basically learn to do it by going through it yourself.

Steve Washuta : Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s no better way to go through things is the best way to learn them, right. And then reteach them to other people. And then it gets reinforced in your brain. It’s like when they say, the best way to absorb information is to like write it and say it and read it all at one time, right? All the different, like mediums in which your brain can can handle it gets it more sort of solidified in your brain speaking to that, can you give the listeners a path to go through if they want mindset coaching? Or if they want to be a mindset coach? How does one start that process?

Lynda Lippin : Okay, so if folks want mindset coaching, I offer mindset coaching, they can go to my website, Linda Lipson comm, they’ll just like my name. And you know, you’ll see right on the first page where they can book a free consultation, and chat with me and you know, see if, if I work for them. Obviously, if you’re doing mindset coaching, you want to kind of get along with your coach. It’s like Personal Training, we spend a lot of time with our clients that help if we get along. For folks, and I really recommend doing some of that work before you decide you want to teach that work or do that work.

But they do recommend it strongly for fitness professionals, Pilates teachers, yoga teachers, anyone who’s working with folks who are making big changes in their lives. making big changes immediately invokes all kinds of fear. That’s why moving and marriage and things like that having a child are like the biggest life stressors because they might be fabulous, but we don’t know. And then again, uprooting any of those basics like food, place to sleep, roof overhead sustenance, is, is super scary. But for folks who want to go that coaching route, there are several ways to do it, I would first literally I would send people over to DAX Moy spelled exactly like it sounds.

He has a free Facebook group, he also runs a free group for coaches on a network off of Facebook. For those folks who don’t love Facebook, and aren’t on big blue anymore. He does a lot of his teaching work for free. Since he was a fitness professional, he works mostly with fitness professionals. You know, he totally gets what’s going on in our brains and what we really need to be looking at in ourselves in order to effectively move forward with clients. And then he also does teach a full certification program as well. So I really think for fitness professionals and I’ve got no affiliate attachment. With DAX, by the way, I’ve known him for over 10 years, we’ve met online in one of his free groups. I’ve met him personally, I’ve done multiple trainings with him online and in-person and he’s the deal.

Steve Washuta : That’s great information. And you know, just to, you know, in summation here, like we talked about having both your mindset in mind, no pun intended, and then understanding that your clients’ mindset might not be the same as yours, right? Your thought patterns in grains might not be the same. And having that mindset coaching and taking a step back what I call like zooming out, and looking at things from a psychological perspective. And the building is going to allow you to build those connections better with your clients and have better strategic two-way communication, which in turn is only going to help your business become fruitful and long term. So thank you for all that information today. It was fantastic. And you know, you give us your website. Can you plug anything else of yours into the listeners?

Lynda Lippin : Well, it’s People are interested in joining the fitness professionals and personal trainers who might be interested in the free information that I give in the Facebook group. They can just go to Pilates profit labs.com for anyone in the consumer space who’s dealing with osteoporosis or anything like that, strong women over 55 Oh, calm.

Steve Washuta : Fantastic, easy enough. Thank you for talking about everything about mindset coaching today with the TrulyFit Podcast. Mindset coaching is something I will look into certainly.

Lynda Lippin : That’s about it. And you can also again, just go to my website, which is my name, Lyndalippin.com and everything is there.

Steve Washuta: Visit the website, guys. Linda, thank you so much, and I hope we talk soon on another podcast. Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.

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