Flipping 50 Fitness Specialist

Introduction to Deborah Atkinson 0:00

Welcome back folks. Today we have best selling author Deborah Atkinson. She's an amazing person known for quite a few years remembers some of the same groups have a lot of the same friends. And she's one of those people, she's a health coach certification course, uh founder and one of the ones that I think is a true leader in the field and that's why she's here today. We're trying to provide some leadership and let people know that if you want to be a health coach, there's a lot of ways to get into the game And we're especially interested in creating more professional health coaches.

Now I have a health coaching course but I've invited over 20 other experts and founders and leaders in the field and we're just sharing and let's get to know Deborah, so let me start by saying that she's an industry expert to fitness industry expert with over 3.5 decades, I think that's 35 years Of experience and she's the founder of a wonderful program. She was on a summit undermined last year and talked about this flipping 50. So we can't wait to hear about that because a lot of clients are over, 50 you know.

now she's a hormone balancing exercise expert that works with women for optimal energy and vitality before during and long after menopause. And she's a frequent keynote speaker for women in business health care associations, health coaching summits and corporate athletes of course endeavor is also the creator of the flip and 50 fitness specialist course, which will ask her to tell us about and that's of course that you can all take where she serves the formula that has improved the lives of thousands of women with personal trainers and the like.

So she's also the author of the health and fitness professionals Guide to social media healthy learning and that was 2018, but she's also been a senior lecturer in kinesiology, A subject matter expert for the American Council on exercise and an international fitness presenter. Her books include you still got it girl navigating fitness after 5050 hot but not bothered and the health and fitness professionals guide to social media marketing as I mentioned, so Deborah thanks so much for being here and for providing uh leadership direction and guidance for those who are maybe just getting into the business.

Give us your white, tell us about your background a little bit how you got into it and why flipping 50 Wow, okay, so I'll give you two wise. So first of all the why I even changed majors, I was destined to be a graphic

Why She Shifted Into Fitness and Flipping 50 2:37

designer in college and and back then so you can do the math. 35 years ago everybody in graphic design and art smoked and drank and stayed up all night and I was just getting into running and health and fitness and I was like I don't belong here. This is like the square peg over here and so I put one ft in physical education and never looked back, so changed my major after that semester and had some great instructors. But the why then was I want to give people this feeling this empowerment that I had just to be better at everything, had some great instructors and I thought I want to do that. I want to give them that.

It wasn't about, you know, of course we all get motivated by looking better and our genes looking better and all of the compliments but but it was so much more, I was just thinking more clearly being more optimistic and all of that that happens when you're taking good care of yourself. I wanted to help people understand How to do it without killing themselves, you know, and spending hours because even then people really didn't have it, but you know, for 29 years I went through my life and I was raised by older parents, so I kept getting given older clients, it was just natural.

Even in college I was in the exercise clinic and I would always be given the older clients and I was comfortable with them and they were with me and I knew how to build rapport and get to know them and I thought I really got it and then I turned 49 and then I quit my job and I said I wanted to have a bigger reach and as I do too often as I jump in with both feet and I don't look back and then the next day I panicked. So I had had a really rough year and it spent building a business online, things I knew nothing about, I had to suddenly know something about, but I wouldn't allow myself away from that computer to exercise in the way that I had for decades. I've done years where, you know, it's hours a day of movement teaching, doing my own and you know, if you're a trainer or fitness instructor, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right, we tend to overdo and I couldn't, you know, 20 minutes a day was often what I would do because I was like, this has to work, you know, eight months from having no income, you know, and I had a little in the bank and no debt, but I was gonna start paying college tuition, you know, and I had no revenue coming in, I was like, what? I have no net, this has to work.

So About 14 months later, you know, I've got it online, I'm editing videos and finally getting things out there to sell and I realized I, those videos are me and I look better and leaner and stronger than I ever had before. And so I dug into why, because that runs against everything that I've been taught right, more exercise, less food, you know, and that in fact has become the opposite of flipping fifties mantra. It's about less exercise, just making it matter more and more food of the right kind and that's where we turn things around and when I realized now I get it, you know, we, we are doing ourselves and you know, fitness industry is doing midlife women a disservice by suggesting to them they do exercise based on research mostly on men, young fit men. So that's my big y and in the big y underneath that is, I think really when we nail it down, there's no one, no one more influential on health changes in the world than a midlife woman. She impacts three generations, you know, her kids, her peers and spouse and then her in laws and outlaws, they're all looking to her.

So if we can get her to take care of her. I mean that's game changing. Not just for her but for the world. Yeah, absolutely. It's an amazing, uh, you know, demographic, if you will. And it's pretty much where I started. And I was in my mid-40s, 20 years ago when I started in this field and almost every customer was a woman. Matter of fact, they're all women, it was just women and they were hormonal cause you know, in that age group, they were being told they were perimenopause or pre menopause or just messed up and here's your and here's your antidepressants to make it all go away.

You know, and uh, and then then we were having some success. So they start, that's when I started, they were bringing me their kids or their husbands and things. But it was all women, they have their own checkbooks, you know, they can write the check, they they care, they're willing to learn and it's just a fantastic market and they and they like to look good, you know, and that's that's always a good thing. So now you you you were when you were making all those videos and things that I hear you say that you were, you know, you didn't have the time to spend in the gym doing the hours and and that worked out better. You kind of discovered it by accident on your own. I discovered, yeah, discovered it by accident and then realized, okay, I've got to, I need to know is this a study of one?

It just worked for me or you know, is there more to this? So digging through the research. What I realized is 39%, just 39% of all sports medicine and exercise research features women, you know, and so that's not so bad. But when you think about the fact that women go

Research Gaps and Training Women Through Midlife 8:43

through potentially seven different hormonal phases in their life. Not every woman goes through everyone by choice or just by circumstance, but every one of those seven phases really demands a different exercise prescription. And so 39 divided by seven, you do the math. That's that's less than 10%. So you would probably never go to Las Vegas and gamble with the odds that bad. Right. And yet when we've been exercising our entire lives, that's kind of what we've been doing is gambling with really bad odds, that this might work for me.

That's really funny to say that because I was just in Vegas and I think they go there and they gamble really saying they have no chance of winning and they do it anyway for some reason department personally. Yeah, Yeah. So, so tell us, um, you know what, what some of your students, because you, you have your own robust, you know, directed consumer program. You've helped a lot of women in this flip flipping 50 things. So how do you go about or tell us, you know what your most successful students are doing who you've trained to kind of copy your thing. How does that look For those that might want to take your training and become a flipping 5050 specialist?

Yeah. So you know what, what we're doing really is walking through. Honestly, I would tell you this that the best Candidate for the flipping 50s specialist is probably a woman between 40 and 60 because that's who a woman between 40 and 60 wants most to work with because she's she's had an experience maybe and you know, no disrespect to any of you who are 20 and I truly believe if you want to accelerate your experience, we can't do that biologically. But taking the training is what will really help you because you need to be able to be in their head and you can't be there if you haven't lived there yet.

So you've got to really study it. But we walk them through, here's here's what it's like and you go through this, you go through this program, think about it, applying to you experience it. And then on the flip side we give them, Here's the coaching audio and the why we laid it out in this order and the why we said these specific things at this specific time based on her socialization when she was 20 and 30 and 40 and what she's thinking now so that you can walk away, with here's how I would teach, this here's the order that I I want to do this in. Here's the platform, that makes the most sense.

Maybe you like to speak it, you like to be on camera, Maybe you like to write it so you can come up with the delivery of it the way you want to. But you can understand the psychology as well as the physiology behind what it is she needs and how she needs to get it. Okay. So if someone's a trainer, health coach, um Allied professional and they're working with women already between 40-60, like you just said, how is this going to uh you know, how do we get them to know they need us um what would you say to that?

How do we leverage it? Yeah, we we really need to do, we need to do education. So I would say everyone who's trying to attract that market and support them with, here's why it's not working. We need to send them a message first of all that. It's not you you're not doing something wrong. It's not a lack of willpower. The system has failed you. We've given you a lot of programs potentially that were based on research on someone else and your hormones, metabolism, body composition and even your socialization Is very different than a man.

So you're not a mini man and you're also not a 20 year old female or right, right. That's it was by design. Yeah. So we need to have those kind of marketing words and you need to, we all need to have some kind of regular content creation coming out. I mean, that's how you're going to, first of all open the door, you know, and give them something that they can understand why it wasn't working. So they begin to realize there is a solution and it's not, you know, surgery and it's not spending hours in the gym to exhaustion and driving themselves deeper into that hole. It's actually much simpler than they might have thought in the first place. So it's believing there's an answer.

So that as you're the one telling them, it's not you there is a solution? They automatically begin to believe you are my solution. So you've got to be that person providing content. And, and you find, uh, well, let me ask you about the hormones because you've mentioned the seven possible phases, you know, and obviously at this age group we're talking past childbearing years. Right? So how does the hormones play into it then?

How the Flipping 50 Specialist Program Works 14:21

Yeah. So for most of the people, so we're talking forties generally, although that can happen late thirties, perimenopause. So it's when those symptoms actually start and they don't even realize that that's about menopause yet. So women who's potentially in 40 with young Children or maybe wants to get pregnant still that last time who's started to gain weight whose exercise program is no longer working. The word she will say is what I used to do, doesn't work anymore because she had to go to write for cutting the calories or for doing something and for exercising more and now it's not working or she's exhausted.

She's working out feeling guilty if she can't work out but exhausted all the time. And it's, you know, pointing to this is not healthier. This is worse and yet at all costs women in 50 and over are, so I'm the tail end of baby boomers, I'm 56 you know, we've been conditioned that it no matter how we feel, if we look good will feel better and so we keep chasing that, that mythological, you know, if I exercise hard enough, I will lose the fat and then I will feel good even if I'm miserable while I'm doing it right then of course we're gonna feel good right away. And it's really crazy when you think about that.

But that is truly what's going on in a woman's head, the thought that if she's depriving herself and you know, um exercising so much, she's constantly sore, maybe even injured that ultimately she'll get to the destination she wants that's in her head. Yeah, I get that A lot of it's in the head and yet I find women don't like to be told that very much. You know, like, you know, they go to a doctor and he, he runs a lab test, you know, the blood, typical blood panel says everything's normal yet they feel like crap, you know, like, well everything and so then, well, here's a pill to make it, you know, chill and, and they don't want that either.

You know, they don't want to be told what what would be, would you change the program if they let's say they do want to have that, you know, pop another one out, you know, like get pregnant again and they're 40. I don't know if that's too late or what, But um, you know, would you treat them differently? Say again? I said, I don't think you get to choose, I don't get it, that's, that's probably a good thing. But um, you know, Would you treat them differently than if they were 55 and like done, that's not their their thing definitely. You know, it's still for both is going to come back to what are your signs and your symptoms, you know, and that whether they've had labs or not.

So a lot of women haven't yet, they don't even know that labs might suggest to them a change in their exercise, not just, you know, whether they want to do bio identical hormones and that's gonna give them a prescription, but they don't always stop to realize it might be having to do with the way I'm exercising, including the type of exercise or the timing of day, because that comes up into part plays a big part with their sleeping circuiting and rhythm and all of their hormones, how I'm eating, you know, or how I'm sleeping because very few women will prioritize sleep for themselves as much as they want everybody else to be in bed on time. It's, you know, she's staying up late, she's getting up early and then she's not sleeping well if her hormones have begun to change. But the difference for most women in perimenopause is that they're beginning potentially to experience hot flashes, night sweats. So the sleep issue is starting to happen.

But the very first thing that'll get a woman usually to pay attention is she looks down and she's like that wasn't here yesterday and you know, she's got belly fat that wasn't there. She's starting to see cellulite that's never been there. Those are the things that will get her attention first and that nothing is working. Yeah. Yeah, maybe the pants aren't fitting. You know, like uh yeah. Well, coming out of Covid 19, I think we're all in trouble when lulu lemons will not be the rule of the day again, How how how has this been influenced by that?

Covid, 19? Have you noticed the big Yeah. Well yeah, to actually to diverse things have come up. So knock on wood. A lot of women in my community because I grabbed them right away and I said listen, we're gonna do live workouts together, whether it's in your time zone and it works for you or not, but you're gonna know it's here and we're doing, I started out doing every day a live workout and then I thought, no, no, what did I just do? So I backed off and and was doing three

Marketing to Women 40 to 60 19:48

a week, monday Wednesday friday nine a.m. We do short interval training every week or every three times a week with them. So I embrace them, telling them, listen, let's boost your immune system if we do that, the same thing is actually gonna help balance your hormones because right now you need less, but you need more frequent exercise, let's shorten the duration, get good frequency so you can sleep at night. You can help reduce some of that mental chaos and stress and many of them are actually in better shape than when Covid started.

But on the flip side, the outside of things, I'm hearing a lot of things like people who are now working at home, there are five steps from the bathroom, It's not down the hall. They, you know, don't get up and go talk to colleagues, they're sitting talking by phone or computer doing that. The pantry is within arm's reach for a lot of, I mean it's bad news and then they're drinking wine, staying up late because they can, they don't have a commute anymore and it's bad news. Yeah. Party time, but the party's over.

So I'm actually starting to hear from some of those people who are very intelligent people and realized they just like fell into this coma and uh, wanted it to be, you know, a dream that they'd wake up from and realize I'm gonna have to do something here to regroup. Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually in a way help businesses in different ways because like my, I have a trainer, she's, she's a Pilates instructor. I've been seeing for 10 years, I moved out in the country three years ago. So she's been coming out, I used to go three times a week to her studio. So I, I bought a reform or a really good one. It's in my, um, and now she comes out once a week and, you know, her studio has closed, but she just started doing um like the online classes and people like kept up their memberships at least for a while. And um I think it's dissipated a bit now, but she's not. So I think, you know, I need to say that 11 thing about health coaching is you can do it from home, you know, I've been teaching teaching people to work from home for over 10 years and uh, I had a brick and mortar for for 10 years and found out that, you know, we could close it, just do distance coaching and, and we've been like I say, teaching it for over 10 years.

So I think the covid thing has, uh, we we didn't get that effective because we were already working from home and you know, but you have to be disciplined, you know, like that fridge is right there. It's so true. You know, I honestly think for, for health coaching and and for personal trainers who really maybe hadn't embraced the value of themselves beyond programming, fitness exercises, but really tapping into their ability to coach the behavior change, you know, between there's an advantage here, I mean, you're, you're now coming into somebody's home, like literally just like we're doing right now, you know, we're in their home and that's what it feels like to them, whereas before if somebody had to come physically to you, you know, that's different. They're in control, truly, I mean, do they come or do they not come cancel?

You know, and when it's just virtual, you know, they can be there at any point and you're inside their house. I mean, so as I sit in my office, it feels like you're across the desk for me. And I think that's really becomes a more intimate relationship with your clients. It's, it's wonderful. I love the technology. I'm not a real tech high tech guy. I built a really, really big business with just a pager and a fax machine, you know, at one point, that's all we had back then. So this is like a dream come true.

You know, video was actually face to face and things and um, you know, I've had some injuries over the years, motorcycles, surfing, football, wrestling for sure. And, and now I'm, you know, in paying sometimes, you know, like that, that was very hard. I say I have a well used body, you know, and, and um, so I'm looking for, but I need, I need to, you know, get treatment and stuff. I'm looking at stem cells and PRP and I've had a bunch of it. And so recently, um, I just had a virtual visit with a new guy that I'm, I'm getting to know and it's really cool that we could just, you know, I didn't have to drive 30 miles to his office.

You know, now I will have to, for treatment, you know, to get any injections or whatever they're gonna do. But I just think it's fantastic that everybody's kind of getting on board with it. And uh I hate that expression new normal but it's it's kind of cool and it's it's normal now

Hormones, Perimenopause, and Exercise Changes 25:18

to just to Skype or zoom or whatever it is a beautiful thing and you can you can build your whole business around that Now. Um what kind of, let's say someone's uh flipping 50 fitness specialist now they've got a market that's women 40-60. Do you have to have a lot of health coaching experience already or could someone who just wants to become a health coach start off in an area like this? Yeah. Great question. And honestly I think I got that question like five times in the last three days because I think people are interested right now and you know so there isn't there's not a prerequisite that you already have like an N. C. A.

Accredited certification already. You know I think that my personal recommendation would be that most likely if you're serious about that you'll get one, you're gonna want that physiology and kinesiology background as well to build on this. But I just spoke with a woman yesterday whose background is actually much more um like energy field based and more holistic and meditation and teaching joy and happiness for this demographic of life women and she sees it as a way where there may be obstacles to the joy and the happiness and the energy for these women doing only what she suggests if they've got hormone issues right now. So she wants to know more about using that to incorporate into it because she's got the tools to help them go forward.

But you know, if they're accelerating to a roadblock, you know, she won't be able to help. So that's how she sees it. So I think anyone who, especially if you have, I think it's if you get the idea you get the feeling and you can see yourself doing it. I think you most likely have the skills and the talent and that that intuitive piece that it takes to be a good coach. So I would, I would say, no, no, you don't need any prerequisite. We're all gonna start from where we are and they're gonna do it on themselves first, right, They're going to experience it and they're on their personal journey, which is uh, I think critical, you know, I personally didn't have a real tough health challenge when I started in the health field. Um, I just really wanted to help people and I had that I wanted the intellectual challenge, you know, like, just the research and development. I wanted to be the last person, someone needed to see to get healthy. You know, it really frustrated me that people had already been to five or eight or 10 different practitioners and they weren't better yet. You know, I thought I was gonna Be the last, you know, figure it all out now.

We did a lot of work and we figured a lot of things out. But there's so many pieces of the puzzle, there's so many millions, I mean millions of people and they're all different. So what I loved seeing over the last 20 years and especially in the last five or six maybe is the amount of like specialists like this. Like, you know, because your niche ng down, your health coach, but you've niche it down and I just think it's fantastic. Look at all the people you could help just in that niche and you're never ever gonna run out of customers.

No. And so yeah, as far as snitching down yes. But 46 million women in menopause right now, six million more every day, 6000 more every day and menopause. So like you said, yeah, not gonna dry up. And those are the women who have all the qualities, right? They are looking for an answer actively. You know, they, they know they have a problem and they have money to spend and they've got urgency. Like most of them want it fixed yesterday, right? Yeah, yeah. No. Um, it's exactly right. They can, and, and there there just, just find them more motivated than men, you know, to, to get healthy and stay healthy and be healthy and and looking good may be more important to them and things like that. Um I told my dad that when I first got in the business, I said, hey, dad did, did you know that women live longer?

And he goes, yeah, I heard something about that and I go, you know why I go, because they care more about their health, they actually do more. If they get an away, they do something about it. And he says, no, my son, he goes, uh the reason men buy die sooner is because they want to. Anyway, that's that's my desk humor. So, oh, you know, anyway, so you gotta have a sense of humor in this business, right? So tell me one thing you mentioned earlier about, you know, we've been kind of misrepresented to, you know, like, like if you think it's just about pumping iron and the more the better you're you're wrong. But there's also just the idea of conventional medicine, conventional hormone Treatment and I went through a whole, you know, working with those women even 20 years ago, it was amazing what was being done to women. I I thought it was a crime actually.

But tell me about that, how does it differ from conventional traditional versus what they call functional medicine? Now, let's talk about that. Yeah. Well, as far as said that what we're gonna do, um in terms of fitness, you know, looking at hormone balancing fitness versus conventional traditional fitness. And I would have to say that it's basically old school is based on a quota. Like, you know, everybody should have, you know, five or six days of cardiovascular fitness exercise a day or a week. Everybody should have two or three times a week.

You should be doing strength training for major muscle growth. You know, we should be doing flexibility or mobility most days of the week. Now that one doesn't change. But you know, that is like norms coming back from a lab, that that's an assessment of a whole lot of people that don't feel very good.

COVID, Virtual Coaching, and Home-Based Business 31:48

Right? So, you know, if we just apply a blanket statement to both genders and all ages and say, here you go, this is what's true for good health and fitness. You know, we don't look at any one demographic very closely. And if you take women and tell them when they're already exhausted When estrogen tanks kind of menopause hit, you know, you're in perimenopause is starting to go down as soon as you hit menopause that 12 months since your last period boom, you're you're gonna try to do a traditional exercise program or you're gonna follow that fat burning trend out there, you're gonna dig yourself into a hole of adrenal fatigue. And we're not looking at, you know, here's what they're doing and here's how they're feeling as, as a disconnect. I mean, we're looking at it like you must be cheating. Are you going through the drive thru on the way home? We make it about they must not be doing the exercise between, they're not really working hard enough.

We make it her fault because in some, some arenas we don't want to be wrong. Right? So I think, you know, talking collectively fitness professionals, we have to look really strongly at, okay, how are we, how are we like making logical sense of, you know, if we're doing this and we're exhausted, what if we just stop doing that? What if we, you know, one of the, one of the tenants of flipping 50 is restore before more, Right? So we we've dug ourselves in an adrenal fatigue hole. We're gonna fill that back up with rest and better nutrition and, you know, a little bit of movement but not overtaxing.

And then when we're rested, we've got energy. Again, our thoughts are clear, digestion and elimination are better. We've got all signs that okay, I'm functioning much better now. We try to build up and get stronger and your body will move much more likely if your women 40-60 to shed extra weight once that extra stress and fatigue are gone. So we've really got to just look at what are the signs it's working or not working. And you know, women often don't don't connect the dots. So you've got to do it for them. So as a health coach or a trainer that's your job is to really help them see that, you know, no waking up multiple times a night or having insomnia. That's not normal.

It's common. It's not normal, right? So you don't have to tolerate that, you know? And likewise, with your constipated, that's not normal either. That's a sign. Something's going on. Let's look at that and fix it because you could be a whole lot more comfortable and a lot happier probably if we fix that. So, I think it's looking at, you know what somebody is settling for and may not even be complaining about that. You're gonna dig with the right questions and get to the bottom of all right, Let's take a look at what you're doing and what we're getting for feedback in your body and we'll start from there.

That's a really astute observation, you know, and another we look at the same thing. Uh, and I tell all our health coaches, you know, if you're not getting a lot of referrals, then you're probably blaming it on the lack of success. The reason you're not getting referrals is you're not having really great results with your clients because if you're having great results with all your clients, you'll be getting a lot of referrals, That's the measurement, that's the barometer. And so if you find you're not getting referrals, It could be the program that you're running on those people, you know, it's it's not always their fault. You know, you got to really take a hard look and get extra training, you know, there's there's training available, like if you're working with women between 40 and 60, why wouldn't you take this course and and add to your repertoire to your skills, to your toolbox, to your, your bag of tricks, you know, and all the different things that we do and and the basic principles that come along with it, of course. So that's really good.

So I noticed something else about the books that you've written, most of them are about, you know, health uh guide of some sort. Um but what about this one? The health and fitness professionals guide to social media, marketing. How did you know, because when you're if you come to be a professional health coach trainer, what have you, you know, it's, you're gonna have to know a few things about that. Do you provide that kind of support for your, for your trainees or where does that fit in? Yeah, absolutely. So that's my favorite part if you want to know the truth. So, way back when I taught, so I used to go to all the associations and present for idea and National Strength and conditioning Association for International Council and Active aging, but I would do the marketing and the sales Presentations.

So, you know, there were three and five people in my room back in 2000, you know, and everybody else was next door doing pound and you know, throwing medicine balls on the wall and we could barely hear and here now it's changed. I mean everybody understands. They've got to be able to market, they've got to be able to ask for the sale, you know, and they've got to do that with some strategy and timing in language. So it's right person, right message, right time. And so, You know what I realize is I need to actually be doing this. I can't just stop everything and do teach marketing and sales because if I'm not doing it, I suddenly become, you know, I'm obsolete. You know, if I'm not doing it, I can't point to what works anymore. So when I started growing flipping 50, what happened is it just grew so much faster, you know, and then the fitness professionals, marketing and sales.

But that's my passion is to take smart, intelligent trainers with a good heart. They've got something great to give and give

Certification, Business Support, and Professional Standards 38:18

them the skills to keep doing it and get a thriving business that they love, but also still have a life that they love. I mean that's the fun part. We want to keep the good ones in business right? So as a part of, we do an advanced flipping 50 specialist, they go through the program, they get the certification and then I teach them how to leverage that with packaging and pricing and language and what kind of a model that you want to deliver if you'd rather teach an online course, you want to deliver it face to face literally or you want to have some kind of hybrid business which I highly recommend all of us do if you like to do for to face.

I think we've all learned in our last few months that we need a hybrid business just in case, right, no matter what. So um that's a huge part of it and that's the most fun, that's the putting the puzzle together because if you really want to do this so you can help people we want to get you in front of as many people who are your right ideal customer as possible. Yeah, it's beautiful because it is a profession. We have one more question for you about that, you know what like what separates the professional from hobbyist, you know with me it's kind of like hobbies costume money, you know, professions make you money, that's a big difference but but so we are professionals who want to promote professional health coaching um but before I ask you that, tell us a little bit about the goal of your certification, how long it takes.

Um Yeah. Yeah. So going through the literal the modules, finishing the studying takes about eight or nine weeks, depending on how quickly you go through the the extra study and then you take the quiz at the end, so you've got to get a passing score on that to be ready to you know, grab your certificate and as you're doing that? So all the way through. We're communicating in your private facebook group with your questions. But I highly encourage anybody already working with clients to start applying it not just to themselves but also to the people you're working with because you learn it, you take that in but you turn it around and you say it to someone else in a way that they can understand now you own it. That knowledge is really locked in much more.

So you're starting right away so you're not waiting until you're done necessarily. You're working through it and asking questions along the way of me. And then we're gonna leverage literally you know, do we want to change some packaging now to really monetize and leverage the knowledge you've got with new packages. Maybe it's an up sell to what you're already offering. It's a deeper dive. So there's V. I. P. So we talk about literally what we're gonna do an and you have four months of that advanced support in a mastermind. So a smaller group but all the while you're actually already operating and in business because the things you need to do never change.

So you know if you need to generate revenue today, you better be on the phone. Right? So you're gonna make a call today. Yeah. Plant plant seats. So uh final question. Just give us some top tip about like you know, again we're here together today to try to uplift health coaching as a profession, what do you, what else do you think we could be doing, what are some of the top standards or practices professionals can do, what separates a pro from a hobbyist, that kind of a thing. Anything on that discussion there?

Yeah, well I think it's always gonna be about education, education, education and communication. So I think there's a, you know, a lot of people will toss out, Well that's not professional, that's unprofessional. And I think we we need we need the certifications, we need the education with the background, but what we really need is the ability to communicate what we know in a way that somebody else can understand and we need to bring it to their level and be able to send a direct message. So I think for almost any profession, but especially for someone who's a personal trainer or a health coach, I would brush up on your communication skills as much as you do anything else. I mean being comfortable even being a guest on someone's podcast, I have a podcast, I'd be happy to have anybody as a guest on give you experience because even that is something you can leverage, you know, it becomes then a third party where you've expressed your expert area.

So doing things like that, doing presentations, you know, I think professionals use the skills and the talents in a way that helps people no matter what the situation. So I think in these past few months during Covid we've seen people step up leaders lead and when you've reached out and you said I have this skill, I can help people right now. People may not be able to buy right now and they may be, they may be stuck or paralyzed and not know what's coming, but I'm going to step in and help and off for my service in some way and I think that's what professionals do and you know, I'm not a, you know, we can't guarantee the money is going to come. But I think that you have to be responsible and then you do need to give generously share that knowledge at some point.

It is the right time to ask for what you're worth, but you're gonna teach using your skills and you're never gonna hold back. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Those are good words of wisdom and experience coming through from Deborah Atkinson, the fitness industry expert who has created the flipping 50 program flipping 50 fitness specialist training is available and all you have to do is look in your show notes, it's basically a nine week course, give any intention at all to work with or if you already work with 40 to 60 or even older women, you know, some of them are in pretty good shape.

I know some older women, they're, they're in great shape and um, you know, there's lots of customers around and uh, I wanna thank you so much for being here, appreciate it. And don't forget folks to go out and get your. Yeah, good job. Deborah. Thank you.