Category: Doing Something New

In many of the leadership books and blogs, the notion of mistakes comes up a lot. To be a leader, you need to take action and any time you take action, there is a chance that this action will not lead to the desired outcome. Mistakes are a big part of learning and the best leaders in any industry tend to make more than their fair share of them.

It makes a lot of sense to regard any mistake as lesson. This will make them more powerful because it will reduce the long term consequences of the action. Letting go of a poor decision is easier when we know that we are less likely to make the same decision again in the future.

But I question the validity of the assumption that actual learning has occurred when one habitually label mistakes lessons, given the apparent tendency for people to do the same things over and over again. What may actually be occurring is more akin to a karmic cleanse vs. a real lesson. It is easier to call something a lesson and to state that the outcome was the result of a lack of knowledge / experience than to really dig into what happened and to accept that you had the resources to think the thing through and still chose to act impulsively.

To be clear, I’m not talking about innovation here. Making something new that performs its function perfectly necessitates it having been made and NOT perform that function perfectly more than once. Each previous iteration was not a mistake because the inventor could not have known better. Each version is a lesson that builds upon all of the lessons from before. The outcome was not a result of having information / resources and choosing not to use them.

What I am talking about are all of the times when taking a few minutes to think things through beforehand would likely have revealed a lot of the blind spots or things that did not immediately come to mind.

For example, I used to say “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” without any sense of irony. I had heard it when I started working at a gym and it was something that we were encouraged to say to new or potential members to let them know that changing course to move towards a more healthful life requires some effort but that the effort doesn’t really need to be sustained (3 weeks was all that was needed before the body would do it on its own). The lack of irony was due to my missing the fact that I had created the habit of saying that saying in about 30 seconds.

Some behaviors will require 21 days, others 1, some 261, etc. I was wrong. I wasn’t learning a lesson, I was making a mistake every time I lazily repeated a simple phrase that served a sales purpose. It turns out that I was lying because I should have known better than to repeat something so trite and catchy. If I had taken the required 3 moments to consider what was going on in the context of my own life I would have realized that 21 days was not an average, was not an actual and did not reflect how things progressed in my own life. When I was learning to become a cycling instructor, I started practicing every day the day after the training workshop ended; so less than 48 hours to create the habit – I didn’t need to convince myself to practice, I was excited to do it. When I decide to wake-up earlier in the morning, it takes me about a week of deliberately getting out of bed at 5:15 am before I find myself walking around at 5:16 am without a desire to push snooze and stay in bed. The habit of mindfulness as it applies to my baseline level of anxiety has yet to full take hold, even after years of knowing that I can be an anxious person and will seek out the experiences that will create anxiety. My journeys down the rabbit hole though are much shorter than before but I am still starting them.

On some level I knew I was talking nonsense. However, it was my job to sell gym memberships so I just kept saying the line over and over again. I got good at it. Prospective members believed me and I think I started to believe me.

The funny thing about an honest person who actually believes nonsense is that they are telling the truth when they are lying to people. Someone who is that convinced that life will be completely different in 3 weeks is able to convince other people of that “fact.” There I was, pouring out sincerity, stoking the flames of hope that their future would be better and all it would take was a few weeks of effort before the body just did the work willingly. I closed a lot of sales because I believed what I was saying, and that made it easier for the people on the other side of the table to believe it too.

It didn’t take long, about 22 days after my first sale, before the evidence began to grow that my silly little phrase wasn’t true. Over a few months it became evident that I wasn’t going to be able to excel at selling gym memberships for much longer because it was clear that people have a baseline and it can take months and maybe years for it to be updated.

I moved on to management, then personal training, and finally fitness class instruction growing further away from the notion that “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit.” For me, selling gym memberships for that club was like convincing someone to convert all of their dollars into the currency of a country that doesn’t exist anymore – it was something that can be done but was probably going to be a mistake and when it came time to correct it, the exchange rate would ensure that the customer lost money. Going from zero to a sustained full speed, which is what is required when someone makes the decision to transform their body composition, is going to require that they create a bunch of new behaviors, put a lot of effort into continuing to do them, and endure whatever sense of loss going without the things that got them to the position of needing to change their body composition in the first place causes. It is possible, but for almost everyone it is going to SUCK.

And that is the power of labeling a mistake a lesson in the fitness industry. There is no cost to it, so doing it eliminates the incentive to actually change future actions. In fact, there is a disincentive to changing because you move away from doing what you know works and into the realm of the unknown. The new actions may not work so you will be, at the very least, going without the sense of certainty that what you are doing is going to be effective, and, more likely, be going without the money. Better to call it a lesson so you get to continue to do what you did before and get the same outcome. This is what immunizes the fitness professional from the pain associated with making a mistake because the reframe allows the “lesson” to be the cost of knowing something and because it ultimately is the responsibility of the member / client / participant to put in the work. If the habit doesn’t take after exactly 3 weeks it is probably the clients fault for doing something wrong. The mistake was not in the BS statement, it was to belief that the client or member was willing to put in the work to form that new habit.

So long as there is no pain associated with the action, the motivation to do anything different will never grow. The client will experience the pain. When, on the 22nd day, going to the gym and eating more healthful food is not the automatic, they will begin to feel the pain of their blown expectation. And this is the problem with not being completely honest with people when it comes to the fitness industry. People are hopeful about their future and very much want to believe that it will not only get very easy to do, but that it won’t take very long for that to happen. “It takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” is tailor-made to capitalize on their vulnerable state of mind. They are coached into thinking “sure, it’ll be tough for a couple of weeks but then it will get easy and after that, it’s only a matter of time before I look and feel amazing.”

That just isn’t true. Well, the second part of it might be, that it will be just a matter of time before they look and feel amazing so long as they continue to consistently put in the work in the gym and the kitchen. But for 95% of the people who take-up fitness it can be months or years before their body and brain make the pursuit of physical improvement automatic. Until then, and even occasionally afterwards, it will require will-power. In my experience, the only people for which the 21 days saying actually applies are for those who have taken a short period of time away from their exercise habit. For everyone else there is an almost 100% chance that the saying is false and for those who sign-up for services based on their belief of it will be disappointed and have less money because of it.

My approach now is almost complete honesty and to even attempt to talk someone out of joining or starting because a lot of people do not want to improve their fitness, they simply want to be happier. While becoming a regular exerciser can improve happiness and improve someone’s feelings of well-being, it can also contribute to a lot of suffering, misery, and feelings of shame and inadequacy. If you don’t believe this, consider what goes through someone’s mind when they hit day 22 and find that they haven’t really learned a new skill and have definitely not made it a habit. When they find going to the gym on week 4 to be as tough as or even tougher than they did on week 1, what are they going to think about themselves? When they start to compare themselves to the other members who seem to be showing up 3-5 times a week without any effort and when they remember the certainty in which the sales person or personal trainer told them that it would only take 21 days it will be nearly impossible to not be flooded with feelings of inadequacy and failure. Experiencing these feelings is not conducive to being happy.

I made a mistake and I changed course because I felt horrible for lying to people when they were vulnerable, easily influenced, and when I stood to gain from saying something that sounded true but was clearly false. When I had to face myself in the mirror I realized that I had been using BS to harvest peoples hope in an attempt to help sell them gym memberships. And morally I felt awful because I knew that I had contributed to their suffering. It wasn’t a mistake because I SHOULD have known better and it wasn’t a lesson because I already knew better.

This brings me to some of the other things I was told when I was learning how to sell gym memberships. The sales managers and sales coaches tried to make me feel bad for applying what I knew about people. The statement “how are they supposed to believe in themselves if you don’t even believe in them?” was directed towards me more than once. As was “who are you to judge them for something that might happen in the future? Who are you to deny them the opportunity to have a better life?” These statements feel like they might be true, except I knew that they were not. It wasn’t that I was a pessimist, it was that I was both a realist and someone with a back ground in psychology / human behavior. I believed in the prospective members as much as I believe in people. I knew what it took for me to change my behavior and I knew a lot of the theories about what is required for human beings to be ready for change. The truth is that there are only a couple of short cuts to the process and unless someone arrives at the gym for the first time having taken one of them, having had one of the requisite experiences OR is actually ready to change, they will have extreme difficult making the changes.

Informed consent is a thing that is very important and it was the only thing that we were NOT seeking. We needed and wanted their consent in terms of a signature on a legally binding agreement to allow the gym to access their bank account to withdraw the membership dues. The act of informing them of the actions they were going to need to do was vacated in favor of cultivating their hope and filling their mind with grand ideas that do not hold up. When they failed to form the new habit it was their decision and completely their own responsibility. When I would talk about my concerns about the entire transaction I was reminded that maybe the habit didn’t take because I didn’t believe in the member enough. The fact that behavior change is hard and requires sustained unreasonable effort was completely ignored. My crappy attitude was probably contributing to the member’s challenges in automating a difficult set of complex behaviors that are both physical challenging and are experienced as psychological pain. Initially I adjusted my attitude but it became obvious very quickly that my sincere belief in other people is not sufficient to move them to do anything more than to sign-up and come in a few times during the first few weeks. The heavy lifting needed to be done by them.

This all comes down to the following couple of facts:

The first is that people operate using a system of rewards and punishments. Rewards serve to fuel action and to repeat an action that lead to the reward. Punishments serve to reduce action in general but specifically the action that caused the punishment. At the shallowest level, things that feel good are rewards and things that feel bad are punishments. With references to the “it takes 21 days” line I learned, it was initially reinforced because it seemed to be effective at getting people to sign-up for a gym membership. The closing of the sale felt good because it meant that I had performed my job well and would result in higher wages come pay-day. However, after the first month, I began to notice that the new members were not that much different from me and many were having difficult forming that habit. Their pain and eventual disillusionment started to weigh on me. They had a desire to finally make the life of their dreams and started with such hope that it would become a habit very quickly. Reality landed on them HARD after the first few weeks turned into a month and it remained a constant challenge to eat better and drive to the gym to do movements that are not innately rewarding. Either because they were telling me this, I was reading it on their faces, or because they stopped coming into the gym, I was getting absolutely clear that the exercise habit is a tough one to create. The words that had once been powerfully reinforced though sales began to be experienced as punishments when I realized that I had lied to the people who had trusted me.

On a deeper level, the pleasure and pain can be perceived as either reward or punishment, and this is the area that my NOT taking the effort to more fully inform them of what would be required to become an habitual exerciser and more effective eater came back to haunt me. At this deeper level, were pain can be viewed as a reward and pleasure can be viewed as a punishment, the person needs to take the time to think about what is going on in order to manufacture the meaning that matches reward or punishment. For me, as a sales person, closing a sale would only feel good when I made it as clear as possible what the first few months of the gym would be like for them and the sense of loss or sacrifice that comes along with changing your diet to remove sugar and junk food while increasing the consumption of highly nutritious foods. My aim became disclosing as possible about how long it would take to reach their goal and the number of times they would have to say “no” to something they wanted and “yes” to something that felt uncomfortable in the short term.

Of course two things happened here. The first was that the sales managers and coaches did not like me going off script and tried to move me back on course; which I wasn’t having any of because I had grown tired of feeling like a lying jerk. The second was that the members who signed-up became active members because they were fully aware of what was about to happen, had considered it, and had still made the decision to join. When, 8 weeks later, they still found that they had to call upon their willpower to come to the gym at the end of their work day, they were not plagued with any feelings of “why hasn’t this become a habit yet?” or “what is wrong with me, why can’t I like this?” They did not like it, but they accepted it as something that they were going to have to do in order to get the thing that they wanted. This, more than anything else, is the formula for success – consistent hard work over time. They were able to view showing-up and making it to the end of a workout as rewarding in spite of the fact that NOTHING about it brought them any measurable pleasure. They manufactured a meaning that served as a proxy for pleasure to allow their brain to reward the behavior.

This is what is called the “discipline high.” You trigger chemical rewards in response to doing things that are hard, require will power, and for which there is a big disincentive to doing. Pain becomes pleasure-like, pleasure becomes pain-like and the person takes the actions they accepted as part of the journey. This type of meaning manufacturing might have been what the “21 days to learn…” statement was getting at, but it was never outlined or explained to me this way.

Now it turned out that because of my updated approach, the powers that be thought that I would be a better manager than sales person and I got the opportunity to perform that role at a different club. I employed the same updated approach with managing the team as I had with selling memberships and they responded in more or less the same way. Improving at anything will take sustained work, a lot of which will not be directly rewarding. The sooner you accept this fact and just start doing it the better the process is going to go for you.

Years later, when I look at those first steps into to the fitness field I smile and feel grateful that they are behind me. At the time I didn’t realize that it is a self-help industry and that no matter what I bring to the table the members, participants, or clients will need to perform the work. I can motivate, want, coach, etc. until I’m exhausted, but if they do not put in the effort there will be NO transformation. They need to help themselves and until they are willing AND doing it, nothing is going to happen.

It is a fun job for many but for me it is only fun when there has been full disclosure and the person is agreeing to perform their role KNOWING that it is going to be hard work, mostly thankless, void of any physical reward and is not something that feels good initially. Each of us have the potential to learn how to work our muscles in a way that causes them to release feel good chemicals but reaching this point requires the body to work at a particularly hard level for an unpleasantly long period of time. Put another way, you need to be very fit, have strong muscles, and the ability to tolerate a large amount of discomfort before the body will respond by releasing endorphins to numb the pain and boost the pleasure. This can take 3 to 9 months, which is a lot longer than the 21 days I used to promise. BUT when you know that it will happen and that the journey towards that moment might just suck completely, you are much more likely to accept the work as part of it and just do it.

I’m now much more inclined to consider a mistake both a mistake AND a lesson. It is a mistake because the pain is a necessary part of the process. It reduces the chances of me repeating an action that causes pain. This simultaneously creates the opportunity of a future perceived contrast reward in so far as any elimination of pain is experienced as pleasure when contrasted to the possibility of that pain. The pain eliminates the actions that do not work as the prospect of pleasure serves to fuel different actions in the future. In the absence of certainty that an action WILL lead to a rewarding outcome, we leverage this hope of a rewarding outcome to keep trying.

Don’t let yourself off the hook by labeling a mistake a lesson. Your brain learns better when there is something on the line so keep it there and learn from your mistakes.

In Choosing A Fitness Club – Post Revisited I covered some of the considerations a person might have when making a decision on what gym to join. There was a section in which I made reference to the five distinct types of people and how they tend to self-select their training times:

They are early morning, off-hour, after work, late evening lifters, and the generalists. As rules of thumb, anyone who is willing to get out of bed to go to the gym will likely be highly driven and have less time to waste on things they deem as unimportant. The after work people will have a similar desire to waste as little time as possible. The late evening lifters tend to have a very focused lifting intensity but a more laid back approach to their between sets time. Off-hour people have selected these times because they work for them in terms of traffic flow and life management. The generalists workout whenever they can or feel like it.

This is an interesting topic that I need to expand on because, in general, people unconsciously and automatically find the time that works for them and just stick with it. With the exception of the generalists, the people who workout whenever they can make the time or feel like it, the chances of people remaining as active members at a gym are determined by their ability to get this time of day selection correct. Rephrased, most people who cancel their gym memberships or stop going to the gym / working out do so as a consequence of choosing to train at the wrong time. My belief is that it isn’t that the time was not convenient for them it is that who they are is not convenient for the time they picked. Who they are is NOT so malleable as to become whatever they want it to be.

There are five different types of people which correspond to five specific time frames in terms of when people train at the gym. Anytime, or what I referred to as generalist, early morning, off-hour, after work and late evening. Let’s talk about each one specifically because being able to identify which one you are will go a long way in making sure that you get the best start on your deliberate fitness journey:

Anytime / generalist – these are people who can workout whenever they feel like and will tend to do so based more on their availability than any other factor. These people tend to be lifers who enjoy working out for its own sake. Moving feels good and being healthy is not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of necessity. There is a very good chance that if you are one of these people you already know you are and you are already a member at a gym and working out regularly. Of those who are not regular exercisers, only a very small percentage of them belong to this group. It is possible for people to become a member of this group by joining one of the other four groups first, developing the exercise habit, learning how to really enjoy it for its own sake, and them transitioning.

Personality traits include independence, internal locus of control, lack of a need for social approval, strong time management skills, self awareness and a tendency towards free-thinking. They probably won’t talk much about their training or workouts and will simply just do them. There is a very good chance that they will look like they workout and their food choices will tend to be on the healthy side of the scale. Consider these people to be the doers and not the talkers who roll with the punches in order to accomplish unreasonable amounts of work.

Early morning – these are people who need to workout early in the morning, usually within an hour or so of waking and their first venture out of the house will be to the gym. Their training goals will primarily be to improve fitness and improve body composition with a higher focus on reducing body fat. They may not necessarily be morning people and may drag themselves through the first thirty minutes of being awake, but they will show a dramatic surge of energy once their workout begins and will always leave the gym feeling WAY more energetic than how they arrived. They will show a propensity towards “all or nothing thinking” and this will manifest as a need to get to the gym by a certain time or else not going. Missed workouts will not be made-up later in the day and will only be made-up later in the week.

Personality traits will include being highly driven, goal oriented, binary in their thinking, a tendency towards accountability to other people leading them to benefit from group fitness or personal training experiences. On days that they miss their morning workouts, as opposed to off days, they will be a little insufferable and will operate very differently compared to the days they worked out or took a planned off day. It is be as though one bad decision first thing in the morning serves to set the tone for more bad decisions through out the day. These people are best served by getting out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning, so to NEVER push snooze, and get up at the same time every day REGARDLESS of what they have planned. A successful first five minutes will result in a day of massive action and the creation of a lot of forward momentum.

Off-hour – these are people who have the flexibility to workout more or less anytime and choose to get to the gym when it is less busy. There reasons for training will be varied – strength, body composition, muscle growth, fitness, cardio performance, or for pleasure. They will have a similar mind set to the early morning people in terms of there being a cut off time for going to the gym although they will have a wider range in terms of when they can go. If they miss a workout, they can catch-up later in the week or will do more work in the remaining workouts of the week to make sure they get the training time in. The people will be the first to have training partners or to form more obvious social groups. For example, the early morning people might participate in fitness classes and spend time socially with the other participants, but their conversation during class will have a transactional flair and may lack a closeness or softness that is afforded by having more time to fully engage someone. Off-hour people, on the other hand, will be able to take the time to engage other people in a more connected way. Their closeness will be obvious to others and it can often be interpreted as cliquey. This is usually not the case however as they will welcome new members in and will quickly begin to look out for the needs of others.

Not all off-hour people are joiners or part of a group. Some will be as single minded as the anytime / generalists or the early morning people, but just have the flexibility to go to the gym whenever they like. With these specific people, they will display the same “no nonsense” approach to their time at the gym and will come across as transactional vs. collaborative. They have a mission while they are at the gym and nothing is going to get in their way from achieving their objective.

Personality traits for those who are not like the anytime or early morning people might include a more calm, deliberate or laid back approach to life, having a success pattern that includes a social or connection component, an absence of any perceivable sense of urgency, and the heightened quality of relationships with the staff.

After work – these are the people who workout right after work and for which the gym represents “me” time in terms of throwing way the days stress. Their training objectives will be very similar to those of the early morning – general fitness and body composition with a higher focus towards reducing body fat – and they will have an awareness that they will be able to have a higher degree of flexibility with their dinner as a result of working out so close to it. Their food choices will be positively impacted by this proximity and their workout will serve to empower / improved decision making – their meals on workout days will be healthier than their non-workout days , with particularly positive impact on their dinner choices. They will have slightly more flexibility when if comes to delaying their gym visit, but there will be a cut off and most of them will NOT come to the gym if they go home first. Missed workouts will only be made-up later in the week and the effect of missing a planned workout will very often lead to a series of bad health choices in the hours between the missed workout and going to bed. The elation that is experienced by the early morning people will not be so obvious or may not even be present. However, the workout will serve to refocus them for the rest of the day and the massive reduction in physiological and emotional stress that their training causes will manifest itself as a enhanced sense of well-being, contentment or peace of mind.

Personality traits include being driven, goal oriented, determined, the ability to manage time and balance many competing demands. There will be a more or less equal mix between those who are accountable to themselves and those who are accountable to other people, although most will have an internal locus of control in terms of determining what they want for their future. The mix of energies will be broad ranging from almost manic with an exceptionally high sense of urgency to a low almost sedated “I don’t give a crap” / “nothing matters” which will have a lot to do with the evening responsibilities of the people – parents will still be getting after it because their day is about to begin again while those with fewer responsibilities might be crossing off the final item on their daily “to do” list.

The after work group will be the largest of the five. It will show the greatest diversity in how they use the gym space and services. There will be a high number of group fitness enthusiasts and a higher percentage of personal training consumers. Monday and Tuesday between 4:45 pm and 7:15 pm tend to be the busiest times of the week, with Saturday morning being a distant third, although there are regional specific patterns based on demographics.

Late evening – these are the people who, for the most part, go home after work to eat dinner before coming to the gym. Their training goals are very much on body composition with a big focus on gaining muscle, and on the development of strength. In general there will be a much higher percentage of males vs. females when compared to any other time of the day. The energy will be lower and slower with the exception of the periods of time spent under the bar when the people will be putting between 75% and 100% effort in. To a neutral observer it will seem like very little work is getting done when compared to early morning and after work. However, it will only seem this way. The reality will be that while there are fewer calories being burned via the cardio equipment and classes, there will be a lot more work being done in terms of force X distance. The time needed by the central nervous system to recover from these great efforts is the reason why the energy between sets will be very low. There is a great sense of urgency but these people have learned how to channel it into the lifting.

Personality traits include being driven, goal oriented, strong willed to stubborn, with an almost complete self-accountability to oneself for the work that needs to get done, with mixed accountability to others for showing-up. This is the realm of training partners because of the need for spotters and because progress is so slow the lifting of heavy objects can become a hyper competitive way of keep things interesting. These people tend to never miss workouts and will usually create and stick to a very rigid schedule that does not change often or vary much. The physiological reasons for this are clear and fairly well supported by evidence – building muscle is a process that requires you to train a muscle a particular way, give it a specific length of time to recover and then train it again, over and over again for years. Getting massive is not something that happens by accident or as a consequence of achieving any other fitness goal. This is different from fat loss, improved general fitness or specific cardiovascular health which are complementary objectives – by training for one you inevitably achieve the others.

There will be a much lower percentage of people who are doing intense cardio training because of how that type of training ramps up metabolic rate and tends to make falling asleep very difficult. This is why there will be very few people training to reduce body fat at this time of day. Very few general interest classes will be offered during this time and those classes that are available will tend to be very skills focused with a narrow appeal – boxing or other combat type sports.

How do you make use of this information? The first thing you will need to do is figure out what you are trying to achieve and consider what your schedule looks like in terms of open times you have or can make to train. The next thing you will need to do is take an honest inventory of your traits and begin to compare them to what is outlined above. Once you start to get a feeling for the type of person you are, factor in your training goals and consider what the ideal time of day is to fit that training is. Re-look at your schedule to see if you can make this time available for training three to five times a week.

None of what I have said above should be taken to mean that you cannot make a less than ideal situation work. You absolutely can, but knowing that you are moving forward into a head wind is often the only thing that is needed to ensure that you keep moving forward. No matter what your goals are, you will need to do a lot of work and this work is not ever easy, even when you learn to love doing it. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to learn to love working this hard when your training time matches who you are. The weights will give you enough resistance, there is no point in adding more friction by trying to do something that you have never done during a time that doesn’t suit you doing it.