Grief, Loss and Your Fitness Business

This article is dedicated to the person who backed me through everything and believed in me when others walked away: my mum. I made a point of doing all the things you are not supposed to do with your mum when you are running a business. I took her to my interviews for General Manager jobs rather than spend time away from her. I employed her at my health club, which she loved and the members loved her for. When I flew international presenters in, like Annette Lang, I would take her along for the cool stuff. "You brought your mum to an interview and you are 30!" is still my favourite interview feedback ever. I look back on all of it with pride and a smile. Sharing our journey is my way of helping you, and it would have made her smile, because she lived to help and care for people.

Loss is part of the job

When you work for yourself, you feel loss regularly. Losing a client, missing a sale, leaving a gym, leaving an area, missing a course or a live day, missing credit for something you did, even just saying something you think cost you status with a client. All of it has triggered a feeling of loss in me.

I am writing this at a point when I have just lost someone far more than close to me. Around all the memories, I was reminded what it was like to live a life where I did not handle loss well. The magnitude is different, but the mechanism is the same.

Every feeling follows a process

It helps to remember that feelings run on a cycle:

• Trigger — internal or external
• Emotional response — the physical, chemical, physiological reaction
• Feeling — how you interpret the reason for that response
• Action — what you do next because of that interpretation

Your action then either reinforces or contradicts the feeling, which makes you more or less sensitive to the trigger next time. So the cycle can grow or shrink. In other words, when you interpret the response and choose your action, you control how much power that trigger has over you.

Loss is a correct feeling when you have genuinely lost something, someone or a place. It is okay to feel that something is missing. It is okay for it to be enough to pause your day. It is the action that decides how you meet the next trigger.

Here is the trap. You do a few great promotional sessions, you think three clients are coming, or even just one, and then nobody signs up. That feeling of loss carries into your next sales slot. Next time someone enquires and goes to say yes, you catch yourself asking if they are really sure. You talk them out of it.

Five steps for handling it

1. Take the feeling on the chin. It is okay to feel stuff.
2. Make your next action an analytical one. Review why you were triggered and what the feeling actually means. Define it.
3. Look at the big picture and decide whether your long-term plan needs a tweak.
4. Plan the changes.
5. Remind yourself there is nothing else you can do right now, then live in the moment.

What my mum taught me about the plan

My own loss has been softened by the advice I gave the person I lost, from the first day we had bad news about her health. We decided together that she would enjoy each day as much as possible, whatever that meant, no excuses and no guilt. So we did, from meals out to simply watching telly together. We both knew the ultimate result and what each decline meant, but that was never the focus. Dealing in the minute with feelings, aiming to feel the best possible, while keeping to the long-term plan of lasting as long as we could, meant that when she finally couldn't function any more, we did not have two years of sadness to look back on. We had two years of her best life, every day.

The saying goes, cross that bridge when you get to it. Some days I think I will cross it when the water throws me over as I am dragged through the lake. But the reality comes down to this:

• Plan in advance
• Keep daily tasks, most important first
• Embrace loss
• Analyse the situation and adjust if you need to
• Carry on living the best day you can

When you lose a client, you can still have a great day, do the work that helps in the long term, and not worry.