Mentors Don't Just Teach You Business

You know how clients will often have 5 or 6 stories of things people have said to them that changed how they think about their body, food, training etc?

A nasty comment from someone at school, a comment about their weight from their mum, an ex making a comment about their dad bod?

Exposure to certain phrases at certain times have this unbelievable power over us, that is incredibly fascinating.

Now that we’re a good few years in to fitness business mentoring really taking off, we’re starting to see the same thing in the industry

The mentor that people choose at the start of their journey will shape a large part of how you think about business, for at least the next few years if not forever.

That’s the power of language - If someone uses words frequently enough, we adopt them without noticing.

Will Storr suggests that people who adopt their group’s language are significantly more likely to succeed within it, and those who don’t are 4x more likely to be expelled.

This is reasonable and sounds helpful, until we understand the cost of that conformity.

The first couple of years function as a linguistic imprinting window - you absorb the vocabulary of your mentor, which shapes not only how you communicate, but also what you think is possible

If your mentor only talks about ‘High ticket’, ‘Objection Handling’. ‘10k months’ and ‘DM strategies’

Those become the walls for your thinking. You didn’t choose those walls, but you don’t have words for anything else. You can’t think about your intellectual positioning if nobody gave you the language for it. You can’t build an ideas-based business if the only business vocab you have is transactional.

I can think of two coaches who have very similar businesses - one that is shaping the industry that they are in, and they have potential over the next 5 years to genuinely impact a whole sector.

And another who had the same opportunity, but couldn’t break free from the trappings of their old mentor’s language - they were so obsessed with scaling DMs, close rates, objections - they were blinded to the possibility in front of them.

I’m not saying that these things aren’t important - it’s not a ‘profitable business or impact’ dichotomy, you can (and should) have both

It’s just that the language that gets you into a group, keeps you there. So coaches stay in the group, even if it’s a limitation, often even though it’s at the expense of their business growth

It’s worth reflecting on the language you use around business - whether it’s helping you, or whether it’s a glass ceiling.