When I started in fitness 21 years ago, I thought my job was to be a personal trainer.
Someone came to me because they wanted to get fitter, lose some weight or start training consistently.
My job was to help them do it.
That was pretty much the scope of it.
After working with hundreds of clients, many of them business owners and executives, I see my job very differently.
Training is actually quite a small part of it now.
The real work starts with diagnosis.
Why doesn’t this person feel how they used to?
Why can’t they perform or lead like they used to?
Why is their energy disappearing?
Why are they struggling to think clearly?
Why have they gained weight?
Why aren’t they sleeping properly?
And why, despite being successful and disciplined in almost every other area of their life, can’t they seem to fix it?
Once you understand what’s actually causing the problem, you can build the right plan and coach somebody through it step by step.
That’s a very different job from the one I thought I had 21 years ago.
I started noticing the same pattern
Over the years I’ve worked with business owners who, on paper, are doing incredibly well.
The business is growing.
They’re employing people.
They’re making money.
Their responsibilities are increasing.
But personally, they’ve started moving in the opposite direction.
They’ve gained weight.
They’re sleeping badly.
They’re drinking more.
Their energy isn’t what it was.
They have brain fog.
They’re more easily overwhelmed.
They’re less patient at work and at home.
And the strange thing is that most of the time there isn’t one dramatic moment where everything goes wrong.
It happens gradually.
That’s why I’ve started using the term Executive Health Drift to describe it.
It’s the slow decline in someone’s health and performance that can happen while they’re busy building a business and dealing with everything that comes with it.
One of the most important things I’ve learned is just how easy it is for someone to get used to it.
Billy taught me that the goal isn’t always the real goal
Billy was in his 60s when he came to us.
He was overweight and his shoulders were in agony. They were so inflamed he couldn’t properly lift his arms above his head.
He was drinking Guinness every day.
He felt flat and depressed.
And underneath all of that was a genuine worry about his health and the possibility of having a heart attack.
We started with some fairly obvious things.
We fixed his nutrition and his weight started coming down quickly.
But then we started noticing other changes.
His brain fog began to disappear.
His decision making improved.
He wasn’t feeling as overwhelmed.
His energy came back.
The pain in his shoulders gradually dissipated to the point where he could play golf again.
By the end of 16 weeks, he’d lost 20kg, his blood pressure was back in range and he was sleeping through the night.
If I’d looked at Billy through the lens I had 21 years ago, I probably would have seen an overweight man who needed an exercise and nutrition programme.
That’s technically true.
But it misses most of the picture.
Losing the weight mattered.
Being able to function properly again mattered more.
That experience, and many others like it, changed how I thought about what I was actually trying to achieve with people.
Tony was a completely different problem
Tony was 52 when he came to us.
He was overweight, depressed and his confidence and self esteem were very low.
This wasn’t just affecting how he felt personally.
It was affecting his ability to run and grow his new business.
He knew that growing the company was going to require him to put himself out there more.
More PR.
More visibility.
More conversations.
More leadership.
But at 52, he didn’t feel like the person he needed to be to do it.
His food was poor.
He was pretty much sedentary.
He worked mainly from home and spent a lot of his working life on Zoom.
He was becoming snappy at work and at home.
His brain fog was bad and he knew his decision making wasn’t where it should be.
Tony taught us something different.
You can’t take a system that works for one business owner and assume it’ll work for another.
His working environment was completely different.
We had to work with the reality of someone who was at home most of the day, relatively sedentary and working through a screen.
That meant looking beyond exercise.
We had to look at his food, movement, working patterns and the behaviours that had gradually got him into that position.
As his physical health improved, so did his confidence.
And the impact went beyond Tony. We subsequently went on to work with members of his family too.
That’s another thing I’ve learned over the years.
You rarely change one thing.
Health, work, confidence, relationships and performance are far more connected than I appreciated when I started doing this.
I don’t guess anymore
One of the biggest differences between how I coached earlier in my career and how I coach now is that I don’t want to guess.
If a CEO tells me they’re exhausted, there could be all sorts of reasons for it.
Giving them a harder training programme might actually make things worse.
So now we diagnose first.
We look at the whole person.
Sleep.
Habits.
Exercise.
Food.
Daily movement.
But also what’s happening in the business.
How much pressure are they under?
Are they delegating?
What’s happening to their decision making?
When does the brain fog appear?
How are they handling stress?
What does their working week actually look like?
Where appropriate, we’ll go deeper into areas such as supplementation or hormones.
The point isn’t to make health unnecessarily complicated.
It’s the opposite.
It’s to identify the areas actually causing the problem so we can focus on those rather than asking someone to change everything at once.
The plan has to fit the person
This sounds obvious, but I’ve seen it missed repeatedly.
A founder CEO doesn’t necessarily have a predictable week.
They travel.
Meetings overrun.
Clients want dinner.
There are periods of enormous pressure.
Family life doesn’t stop because they’ve decided to get healthy.
And sometimes work just explodes.
If the plan only works when everything else is perfect, it’s not a very useful plan.
That’s why I now spend far more time looking at someone’s actual life before deciding what they need to do.
Tony working from home needed something different from somebody commuting into an office every morning.
A CEO travelling internationally needs something different again.
Somebody sleeping five hours a night doesn’t necessarily need me to add five hard training sessions to their week.
It’s about meeting the person where they are and then moving them towards where they want to be.
Training is only one part of the answer
If you’d told me when I started that I’d eventually spend so much time talking to business owners about psychology, sleep, stress, decision making and delegation, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
But that’s where 21 years of doing this has taken me.
Exercise matters.
Nutrition matters.
But so do sleep, daily movement, habits, psychology and the environment somebody is trying to operate in.
And increasingly I think we need to stop pretending that someone’s health exists separately from their ability to lead.
If you’re exhausted, that affects your work.
If you can’t think clearly in the afternoon, that affects your work.
If you’re constantly overwhelmed, that affects your work.
If you have no confidence, that affects how you show up.
And if the business is creating enormous stress, that affects your health in return.
They’re connected.
You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your health to become successful
After 21 years and more than 400 clients, this is probably the thing I wish more business owners understood.
You don’t have to lose your health in the pursuit of wealth and financial freedom.
You can have both.
I meet too many people who almost accept that deteriorating health is the price they have to pay for building something successful.
I’ll sort myself out when the business is quieter.
I’ll lose the weight after this busy period.
I’ll start sleeping properly when things calm down.
I’ll drink less when I’m not as stressed.
The problem is that running a business doesn’t tend to suddenly become easy.
There’s always something else.
And if you keep putting yourself at the bottom of the list, eventually the person running the business can become one of its limitations.
That’s why I believe diagnosis needs to happen before crisis.
Look at where you are now.
Look at where you’ve drifted.
Work out what’s actually causing it.
Then build a plan that fits the reality of your life and start changing things one step at a time.
You don’t need to build your life around your health.
But you shouldn’t have to build your business at the expense of it either.
The goal is to have the business, the financial freedom and enough health and capacity to actually enjoy what you’ve spent all those years building.
For me, that’s what this work has become about.
