The entrepreneurial landscape can be a pretty scary place for a health and fitness professional.
All we want to do is help more people improve their lives, but, the knowledge we have on program design and nutrition does not transcend into the business world.
Meaning, just because you’re a great coach it doesn’t mean that you will have a successful business.
In fact, this is normally what frustrates personal trainers and coaches the most.
They attend countless seminars on program design and nutrition, their knowledge reaches a much higher level, but they aren’t making any more money than they used to.
Of course, money isn’t the only goal, freedom all around is what we are after.
Freedom of schedule.
Financial freedom.
Freedom of choice.
Freedom of everything — when you run your own show, you’re the boss of everything you do.
An urge to become the boss leads health and fitness coaches to invest in their business and give the online world a shot.
But, with no business background, they are crippled by fear of the unknown.
Unsure of what blueprint you should be using to ensure your business is a success is the true root of fear in business.
Let’s talk about how you can overcome that so you have no more hurdles in front of you in your pursuit of freedom.
Investment Risk
A psychologist named Paul Slovic has spent his life researching how humans decide what’s risky and what isn’t.
He has multiple published studies at this point in time and the shocking part about the results is that he has demonstrated that how risky something actually is has nothing to do with how risky we think it is.
For example, his research has demonstrated that people think skiing is safer than flying in an airplane, that smoking is less dangerous than being around handguns, and that nuclear power plants are riskier than cars.
But, in each instance, the complete opposite is true.
Flying is the safest way to travel and years often pass between deaths on a passenger plane. Yet, skiing and snowboarding leads to an average of 40 deaths every year.
The two deadliest things by far in developed countries are cars and cigarettes, yet people think things such as nuclear power are more dangerous even though they are one of the safest forms of power generation.
In fact, a study out of NASA demonstrated that using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels would save many lives.
Now, let’s test your ability to wage the severity of a risk.
Do more Americans die from homicide or suicide every year?
Which is worse, kidney disease or AIDS?
According to statistics published by the US government, there are nearly twice as many suicides as there are homicides each year, and kidney disease killed three times as many people as AIDS does.
I like to think we can extrapolate that type of data into how our brains work in the business world.
We see opportunities and we see risks, but, without the correct criteria to evaluate them, we are liable to make a critical error.
How To Overcome Your Fears In Business
Whenever you face a moment of fear due to indecisiveness, answer the following questions to work your way through it:
- What’s the worst possible thing that could happen if my fear came true?
- What’s the worst possible thing that could happen if I never overcome this fear?
- What’s the best possible outcome I can expect if I don’t overcome this fear?
- What’s the best possible outcome I can expect if I do overcome this fear?
Answering the above questions will allow you to consciously deal with your unconscious and sometimes poorly evaluated fear of a given opportunity.
It helps you realize that the outcome of not productively dealing with your fears is often much worse than trying to avoid them altogether.
What are you afraid of in business?
Get that fear out in the open and deal with it now.
And if you want to be fearless in the business world, use our How To Be A Successful Online Coach course as it will give you the exact blueprint you need to have a long, successful, and rewarding career in the health industry.
Dan Garner
