Nobody In This Is Being Irrational

It’s funny how much of fitness coach content is built on telling that audience that they are irrational.

‘You say you want a certain goal and that you know what you need to do, but then you don’t do it.’

‘You pick a plan because you saw someone in the office doing it, but you’ve got no idea if it’s right for you.’

‘You’ll spend loads of money on coffee and takeaways every week but won’t pay for coaching - even though you say that health is important to you.’

Coaches post this kind of stuff as a gotcha.

But none of it is actually irrational.

Under imperfect information, the human brain will try to avoid a catastrophe rather than try to find the optimal solution.

We run two defaults that are millions of years old - what has worked before, and what does everyone else do.

The coffee and takeaway survives every cull because you know exactly how it’s going to make you feel. There’s no downside left to find out about.

And you copy what Deborah in the office did because it’s safest to do what everyone else is doing.

Because from an evolutionary perspective, if they didn’t die when they did it, it’s probably safe for you to do as well.

It’s interesting to me that the people who make that content are quite often coaches who are angry because they spent £10,000 on a mentor who didn’t help them and feel ripped off.

And we shouldn’t laugh at that coach either.

If you go and read the marketing that we’re all exposed to:

‘Everyone’s doing this.’

‘You’ll get left behind.’

‘You’d be silly to be the one not investing where everyone else is.’

It’s not a coincidence.

That blueprint of persuasion worked on the coach - but the coach doesn’t understand the things that drive behaviour when they’re doing their own marketing.

That coach isn’t a mug. They’re just doing the same thing that they’re laughing at their audience for doing, which is defaulting to decisions based on social proof and what feels like a safe decision.

When you understand this, you can understand both decisions - and you stop needing somebody in the story to be stupid, for it all to make sense.

Our instincts are calibrated for catastrophe, and when there is a catastrophe, that is brilliant. We won’t eat the berry that no one else is eating, and we probably won’t die.

The problem is that most of the decisions in your business are not catastrophes. They’re reversible, and usually they’re quite cheap to reverse.

The question that you need to ask isn’t ‘am I copying?’ - because you normally are, and you will continue to do so, because that’s how this human hardware runs.

What you need to ask is whether you’re making a decision based on avoiding catastrophe when you’re not actually in one.

A lot of the mentoring marketing is based on making you feel like you are seconds away from a catastrophe, even if that isn’t actually the case.

So sometimes the simplest thing you can do before making a big decision like this is just to look at your business, your income and your outgoings, and say:

‘Do I need to make a big swing on this and spend this much money - or am I being made to feel like I’m seconds away from collapse, when actually I’m doing fine?’