Now, how do we take this and make it practical? I’m going to ask you to do something that probably no one has ever done with you before.
Today we’re going to talk about an article that I read recently and it really struck me. It was actually a business article. It wasn’t a health article. What came out of it was my thinking about myself, thinking about clients that I work with. The concept of the article was very simple. It said, “Clients don’t buy solutions. They buy problem definitions.”
Article Link: Client’s Don’t By Solutions, They Buy Problem Definitions
It was a very interesting idea because the author of the article was saying, “Sales people typically sell the value of what they’re providing.” If you choose us, you’re going to get great value from it.
What he noted after years and years of consulting is that the problem that most people have in their businesses is almost never what they say and that runs completely in concert with what we see all the time in working with the human body.
When I work with clients, especially the first time I meeting with people, we spend an hour and the first hour is normally spent in 35 to 40 minutes of history taking because I want to know your story. I need to know your story because somewhere within your story of what’s happened to you usually lies in an area that has never been addressed.
It’s never been looked at.
What I want to do in today’s blog is basically encourage you around a couple different things. Number one. I want you to think about your body and I want you to think about what you believe your problems are. All right? Think about that.
Think about your body. What do you think your problems are and what you think you need to do to fix those problems? You got that? Your body, your problems, what do you need to do to fix it.
Now, what I want you to do is take a deep breath because I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to be offended. You’re probably incorrect. All right? Whatever you think you need to do to fix the problem, you probably are at least missing some components that could be critical in creating the success that you want.
In Z-Health we talk about the pillars of fitness. All right. The things that I tell people that you need to be able to do. You need to be able to see well. You need to be able to balance well and you need to be able to move well. Now, we can also include some other stuff in there about breathing well and be strong and all those things.
Ultimately these are the three pillars of human performance. If you think about the big wide world out there of health and fitness 99-plus% of everyone I believe is stuck right there wondering about what’s wrong with your movement? What’s wrong with your movement? What’s wrong with your movement? What’s wrong with your movement?
The fact is that your movement may very well be disorganized or dysfunctional because you have vision issues or you have balance issues. This is one of the real challenges that we run into all the time. People come to us, they go, “Hey, I have knee pain. I must have something wrong with my knee.”
Remember what I said. Think about the problems that you have with you body. Think about what you need to do to fix them. You’re probably incorrect. Very often knee issues, foot issues, back issues, whatever, they are brain issues. This is a thing we always talk about in Z.
Now, it doesn’t mean that there’s not something going on locally but ultimately the information that’s in charge of what you feel and how you move is coming from your brain and all of these systems are playing a big role in that.
Now, how do we take this and make it practical? I’m going to ask you to do something that probably no one has ever done with you before. Your next steps from this video are to this. I would like for you to take a history on yourself. Now that may sound very strange but if you have been fighting with your body, either from a pain perspective or performance perspective for a long period of time or you are plateauing and you’re like, “I just feel that there’s so much more in me that haven’t ever been ever been able to achieve.”
Taking 20 to 30 minutes and writing out your own history in terms of what’s happened to your body, things that you’ve noticed; maybe one of the most valuable things that you literally ever do.
Because what will happen as a result of this exercise is you’ll begin to think a little bit differently about your problem. Right? It’s not about the solution. Remember it’s about problem definitions.
The way that I get clients to do this… Pretty simple. I say, “Sit down with a piece of paper and what I want you to start off with is write down every injury that you can ever remember having.”
Whenever I was 5 I fell off a swing set and I broke my arm. Whenever I was 8 I got hit in the face by my brother. Maybe that actually happened to you. With a stick and I had a scar or I had a cut and it had to be stitched. Even the most minuscule things, I want you to actually go ahead and write down.
Because ultimately one of the things that we’re going to tell you is the body’s very interconnected neurologically. Things that may have happened in the distant past that were never rehabilitated corrected can manifest now and create problems for you.
What you’re going to do is in essence create a time line of your own person history saying, “I’ve had these injuries. I had this car accident. Whenever I was 20, I had to get glasses. That was a little bit weird because no one else in my family ever had to wear glasses, etc, etc.”
Usually what comes out of this is that you will find a problem. An issue that cropped up prior to the big thing that bothers you the most.
Most of the people that I deal with in health and fitness industry, they come to me for pain or they come to me for performance or they come to me because they have body comp issues. If I ask them questions, “When you really begin gaining weight?” “It happened when I was 32.” “Why do you think that happened?” “Well, I quit playing in a football league or a soccer league or whatever. I had kids, I started to work a lot.”
Somewhere in that history there’s usually something else. “Tell me about that. You started working more.” “Yeah. I went from having a non-office job to an office job.” “You’re reading at a computer all day.” “Yeah.” “Did you eyes start to deteriorate?” “Funny that you mentioned that. Yeah, they did and I actually wound up getting glasses.”
Now all of a sudden personally I now I have information that I can work with. That sounds weird. People say, “You’re saying me having vision problems could eventually lead to me having weight problems?” Yes. Now, is it a direct correlation that I can go here’s some research to definitively prove this to you? Not yet. What I can tell you is that every time one of your pillars of fitness is compromised there is a reaction in the body. Very often when we take care of things that are seemingly not correlated, we see amazing changes happen in the body.
That’s the task for you this week. Take you own history, every injury that you’ve had, a time line of the process that you’ve gone through.
Once you’ve done this, take it to you fitness trainer; take to your healthcare provider and say, “I did this for you.” Have them read it. See what kind of conversations come out of it. The article that I’m talking about … I’m going to go ahead and put a link here for you to read. The coolest part about it is the very last section where he says, “Really what we’re seeing in today’s world is when two people sit down. Two companies sit down and both of them go, ‘You know what? We’re both human. We both have problems. We don’t really know what’s going on but can we work together to figure it out?’ That’s when real magic happens.”
Article Link: Client’s Don’t By Solutions, They Buy Problem Definitions
That’s what we actually aim to do in Z-Health by getting as much information as we can from you and then having a conversation with you along with a lot of testing to figure out what exactly you need. Remember all of us because we’re so close to our own lives very often think we need the wrong things and that’s where experts can be handy.
All right? That’s your task for the week.
If you have questions about this, please let us know.
Thanks for sitting through that, very powerful exercise so give it a shot.
