What’s up guys. It’s Nick from Fit Futures here with yet another answer to yet another question.
Today’s question comes from Trevor down in Fiordland. Nick, ‘what happens when a client asks you something and you don’t know the answer to it?’. What do you do? This is a very, very good question and this is something that comes up a lot especially in my capacity as a tutor, especially while working with face-to-face students or in workshops. Students are naturally inquisitive and your clients will be – what I mean by that is they will quiz you on certain things, they will ask you the whys behind the hows and it is important that we have answers to those questions. For example; you might prescribe a certain exercise and then you might introduce a variation to that exercise. A little further along the track the client may say to you,’ Nick, why am I now performing this variation when I was quite enjoying the other one?’. And you may say ‘well this is because we want to progressively overload things in order to keep your progress from declining’. Right so it’s just a way of varying things up. Perhaps but there’s way more tricky questions where that came from.
If you don’t know anything, it is important to do one of two things in my opinion. If a client was to ask you a question and you didn’t know the answer to it, it’s not to say that you don’t know the answer to it, perhaps it’s something that you think you might know the answer to but you’re not entirely sure. Feel free to opt out at that point and tell the client that you’ll get back to him on it. Go away and do a bit of research. Probably a good thing anyway in terms of professional development, upskilling and ensuring that you’re staying up with trends and the latest learnings from various academic literature. So go away, do a little bit of research and find the answers to those particular questions.
Now the other thing that you can do, and this is what I do quite a bit of when don’t know the answer to a question. I’ll do my best Jeremy Clarkson impression from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire UK. You know the one where they ask him to be their lifeline and they say ‘Jeremy, I want to ask you the answer to the question’ and he typically says, if he doesn’t know, ‘I don’t know but, this is what I think’ and then he proceeds to give them a somewhat educated (not guess) but an educated response to the question.
Now I do that quite a bit. I’ll say ‘guys look I don’t know but this is what I think’ and then based on the knowledge that I do have handy I will provide them with an answer, but I’ll tell them not to take my word for it necessarily. Then what do I do? Well of course, I’m gonna go away and I’m gonna research it because I’m the type of individual that just has to know the answer to these questions. And then, once I find out, I’ll go back to them say ‘you know what I was right, this is exactly what it was’ or I’ll say ‘I was slightly off, this is the answer to your question’. It’s important that we are dealing with clients in a way that is transparent, so when they are asking questions of us it is important to find the answers for them because they are coming to us for the answers and a lot of the times it is questions that maybe we should know, or we could know and maybe the answer to a question means that you learn, maybe the answer to a question leads you to another service that you can offer somewhere down the track, if you would have become specialized in there.
So give that some thought. Make sure that we’re not shying away from answering questions but make sure that we are appropriately answering the questions because we cannot be seen to providing misinformation and that really is the take-home point there guys.
So, keep an eye out for future videos. Click the link if you’re interested in viewing more and of course, if you have any questions that you would like answered, please feel free to get in touch.
Until next time guys, stay well.
Recent Comments