If you are eager to attend fitness classes/personal training sessions to challenge yourself more, get support and expertise from a professional in order to get a physically fitter, healthier and a stronger body, why wouldn’t you do the same for your mind and your thinking?
The Analogy of a Coach to a Personal Trainer
A personal training session is a deliberate time you schedule with a personal trainer who is skilled in the field of physical activity and nutrition. Although one could quite easily attend a gym and do their own exercises, many people find a personal training session far more challenging which lead to increased results and outcomes.
A coach is like a personal trainer for thinking. Yes you can think by yourself but a coach pushes you to think differently, think better and challenges the blind spots in your thinking. Just like a personal trainer would do with working out.
Goal-Driven
During a personal training session, your trainer gives you their undivided attention and customises the workout routine specifically for you. Usually there is an agreed upon outcome: for instance you would like to have stronger legs, loose 10 kg or want to focus on exercising your core muscles on a particular day. This goal-driven approach is similar to coaching.
The trainer is there to demonstrate different techniques, hold the space and keep track of time and order whilst you focus fully on working out. The personal trainer will support, encourage and challenge you when you feel like giving up (on that hundredth squat).
Challenge Your Comfort Zone
Personal trainers will stretch your comfort zone to make sure your workout is effective. During these training sessions, often the personal trainer identifies your weak points and encourages you to exercise these areas even more in order to strengthen them.
Sometimes trainers suggest and introduce exercises that you can work on in your own time in order to get closer to reaching your desired outcomes. Ultimately, personal training aims to get you closer to operating at your desired physical fitness level.
Many people attend personal training to boost motivation, challenge themselves, or to get a few new exercise ideas to work specific areas of their bodies. Once people are satisfied with personal training sessions, they may opt to continue working out themselves, with the new knowledge gained from the sessions. This is very similar to coaching.
Sometimes, even when people have reached a fitness level they are happy with, they choose to continue the personal training sessions as a way to ensure that they challenge themselves even further; often they are surprised by just how much they can achieve or change. Just like with personal training sessions, some may only want a check in session every couple of weeks or months to keep them on track.
External versus Internal Fitness
The major difference between coaching and personal training is that the latter focuses primarily on enhancing your physical fitness, while coaching focuses predominantly on enhancing your thinking and emotional fitness. Yes of course you can think, reflect and plan by yourself, but just as personal training does with physical fitness, coaching challenges you and supports you to enhance your thinking that much further.
Strengthen, challenge and improve your thinking and your emotional intelligence in coaching sessions just as you would your muscles and fitness levels in personal training sessions.
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