It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
~ Ram Dass
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On this day
April 25thAdam McClellan | Double Your Profits, Double Your Fun
On Castbox.fm — Adam McClellan | Double Your Profits, Double Your Fun
How can Parkour coaches and gym owners enhance their programs and business practices to better serve their clients and staff while addressing unique challenges?
A coach explores the challenge of bridging personal values with the priorities of clients.
What’s the path that my students and their parents, if they have them, are going to walk through and make that really easy for them to do? It might start as just starting or beginner program. And then there might be another choice, take this path, or that path. Here’s the value in one, here’s the value in the other, but let them decide, give them the freedom to choose.
~ Adam McClellan (3:42)
The conversation addresses challenges faced by Parkour coaches and gym owners in aligning their values with those of their clients. It emphasizes understanding that parents often seek benefits like confidence, discipline, and community for their children, beyond athletic skills. Strategies for effectively presenting program options to clients and balancing simplicity with flexibility are also discussed.
The discussion explores broader topics such as staff management, including gaining buy-in for new initiatives and recognizing individual strengths within the team. Insights are shared on leadership, trust-building, and leveraging the collective wisdom of experienced professionals to guide conversations and decision-making.
Takeaways
Understanding client priorities — Recognizing that clients may value outcomes like confidence, discipline, and community over purely athletic development.
Balancing simplicity and choice — Creating guided pathways that provide clear options without overwhelming clients with too many choices.
Implementing upgrade programs — Offering higher-value, optional services as a way to grow the business without alienating existing clients.
Gaining staff buy-in — Addressing the challenge of aligning staff perspectives with the goals of new initiatives and higher-priced programs.
Trusting team members — Encouraging leadership through identifying and developing individual strengths within the team.
Shifting presentation strategies — Adopting a flexible and discussion-driven approach to group sessions, allowing collective wisdom to guide outcomes.
Bridging knowledge gaps — Helping clients and staff see the value of programs through tailored explanations and processes.
Navigating pricing challenges — Exploring ways to offer premium services without making clients feel pressured or alienated.
Adapting leadership styles — Understanding that effective leadership involves trust, delegation, and allowing room for learning through mistakes.
Leveraging group insights — Recognizing the value of collaborative discussion for solving complex problems and generating new ideas.
Addressing misconceptions in coaching — Acknowledging that coaches may need to adjust their expectations to align with client priorities and perceptions.
Resources
Parkour Generations — A global organization promoting Parkour through classes, events, and community.
adam.mcclellan@parkourgenerations.com
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
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Self-reliant
Being self-reliant is critical. To make yourself less dependent on others and so-called experts, you need to expand your repertoire of skills. And you need to feel more confident in your own judgement. Understand: We tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.
~ Robert Greene
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Failures
Without failures I would not be here. I learned most of what I know today through them. Maybe it was my partner, or the equipment was not proper, or the training—especially the mental training, which is the most important thing—were not good enough. With success, you don’t always know why you succeed, but when you fail, it’s clear what you did wrong. Then you can make changes and learn.
~ Reinhold Messner
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Ya don’t say!
Another factor to consider is that this was a study in “lean” adults, and it is possible that results would be different if the investigators included people who actually need to lose weight.
~ Peter Attia from, Is alternate-day fasting superior to calorie restriction for fat loss in lean adults?
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Some times I read stuff that is really disappointing. (This is one such case, don’t bother clicking through.) Attia’s content is almost entirely really good… no idea what happened here.
My BMI is currently above 33. Say what you will about BMI—but, please don’t, I know what you’re considering telling me—but I am over-weight. I should drop 20 pounds. Then drop another 20 pounds… and guess what. I still wouldn’t be down to a BMI where they’d let me into the study Attia was writing about. What— why would you do a weight-loss study on people whose weight is, (according to BMI,) normal?? Face palm.
Here’s what I know about alternate day fasting: It really works if you are fat, (like me.) Presuming your body can metabolize fat—caution, the average western diet down-regulates that ability to near zero… But presuming your body can metabolize fat, a day of not eating is pleasant. I’m serious. And then the second morning, 40+ hours of not eating, I’m actually hungry. Meanwhile, my body just used up thousands of calories of fat. Then I simply go back to eating. Anyway. That’s my experience.
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Two roles in a conversation
I assist in an online podcasting workshop where a student recently asked:
Could knowing all these [interviewing] techniques be making us more aware of the style, and […] getting us further away from the natural, inherent style we all have […] ?
I’ve mentioned before that I distinguish between “interview” and “conversation” in what I’m currently recording for podcast publication, (for Movers Mindset and other shows.) Today, I’m just going to gloss over that distinction and riff off this student’s excellent observation. Whether we label it “interview” or “conversation,” there’s a key milestone people go through when they realize that practicing something intentionally, is going to—at least partially—paper over their own innate style. This is a normal step in any journey involving mastery practice. After sufficient practice, you will find you still have an innate style; It’s simply different than the one you started with.
I believe that my role as a conversation partner, (being who my guest needs me to be for us to have a great conversation,) and my role in serving my listeners, (being who the listeners need me to be for them to enjoy and/or learn from a great conversation,) are antagonistic. The better I perform at one of those roles, the worse I perform at the other. That’s the balance I’m trying to work out each time I press record. Techniques which serve well for one role, can be detrimental to the other role.
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Tension
I’ve been thinking about ways to create more opportunity for engagement among the people who are following the work of the Movers Mindset project. We’ve reached a point where we’re creating plenty of content and sharing ideas—but currently almost entirely in the broadcast direction. We’ve a considerable collection of people who are passively consuming.
Meanwhile, every time I manage to engage with someone [in this context of Movers Mindset], it’s an energizing exchange of ideas about movement, movement’s place in society, and sometimes even philosophy in general.
The whole project is intentionally aimed at people who are becoming, or already are, reflective. Such people tend to have made the growth step beyond low-value interaction and engagement and are increasingly aware of how they engage and expend their time especially online. I suppose the key is to simply engage with them one by one, until that becomes untenable for me.
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The power to break your back
If you can lighten your burden you must do so. There is no straw which lacks the power to break your back.
~ unknown
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So implausible
Not long ago, what we have today was so implausible that nobody bothered to say it would never happen.
~ Marc Andreessen
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Does not require feet
Those of us living in the United States have enshrined in our founding documents the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, a concept that has older roots in European philosophers such as John Locke. These documents, of course, provide not the slightest bit of instruction about how to embark upon this pursuit, wisely leaving this conundrum to the individual and the communities to which he or she belongs.
~ Chris Masterjohn from The Pursuit of Happiness Does Not Require Feet
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Curious children
Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
~ Albert Einstein
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Creating habits that stick
Rather than try to force myself every day, I simply created a “micro-habit” that I knew would lead to the intended behavior. A micro-habit is a single, tiny action that necessarily leads to a bigger action.
. . .
But here’s the trick: Once you perform the micro-habit enough times, it becomes much harder NOT to complete the entire habit than to simply do the whole thing.
~ Maneesh Sethi from, How to Create Habits That Stick
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Bruce and Terry
“Who are these people? …and what are they doing in our photographs?!”
This one is from a “Highlights of the Caribbean” carousel tray of a 100 slides. I’m guessing the 70s from the outfits.
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