SUBJECT: Communication
APPLICATION: Understanding and interacting with client goals

Management Memo
By Thomas P. Sattler, Ed.D., and Julie E. Mullen, M.S.

Fitness professionals who are empathetic are likely to be the most successful in fostering adherence, retaining members and helping members reach their goals. More than just putting oneself in another person's shoes, empathy includes seeing through their eyes, as well. To be empathetic, the fitness specialist sets aside his/her own opinions, judgments and potential criticisms in order to understand the feelings and perceptions of another. The payoff of empathy is that it enhances relationships between members and staff, increases success of wellness programs and ultimately makes your club more valuable to members.

Although empathy is challenging to implement, there are some techniques that enhance empathetic capacity. Conscious identifications are a method of empathy training described in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Used by medical students, conscious identifications go beyond the objective, detached method of dealing with patients in order to better understand them and view the situation from their perspective. Fitness and wellness personnel can learn from this technique. So how does one make a conscious identification?

  1. During the initial interview, the professional carefully reviews and discusses the health history with the member in order to understand basic, background data. They ask about any health problems and listen closely to the member's perceptions of these issues. For example, is the person worried about their high blood pressure?
  2. Before beginning work, the specialist has the client specify goals. Why is individualized help being sought? What does he/she hope to accomplish? Have there been failures in previous attempts to reach their objectives? What is the real reason for achieving their goal?
  3. While working with the member, the professionals encourage conversation. After closely listening to a client during a session, the professional records objective and subjective data: "40 years old, female, 36 percent body fat. No exercise history-sedentary lifestyle. High-fat, high-sugar diet. Complains about 'feeling fat' at each session. Avoids looking in the mirror. Afraid to attend aerobic exercise classes, claiming 'people would laugh at me.' Not very confident."
  4. When the professional feels that he/she is getting to know the person fairly well, he/she spends more time reviewing recorded observations and reflects on that person's experience. Here, the professional uses his/her perception and imagination to attempt to enter the member's world.
  5. An empathetic training exercise is to have fitness staff use imagination to write a journal-type account in the first person from the client's point of view. This account constitutes the professional's approximation of the client's experience-an empathetic guess at the person's thoughts and feelings, rather than the person's actual statements. For example, for the 40-year old woman mentioned earlier, a conscious identification may read: "I hate mirrors. Why do they seem to be everywhere? I certainly don't want to look in the mirror while I'm huffing and puffing and different body parts are jiggling to their own beat."
  6. While the conscious identification may not be an absolute reproduction of the individual's thought process, it is a hypothesis about the client's experience that may be tested during further contact. This exercise may stimulate questions and allow more empathetic responses that may otherwise not have occurred. Just the process in itself is valuable to heighten awareness and understanding of the member.

Although the conscious identification process may seem quite formal for your staff to implement, its value is in its ability to enhance relationships. The more staff members use the technique, the more natural the process will become. No one will ever be able to identify with every feeling of their client. But remember, the more empathetic the fitness professional, the greater his/her success.

REFERENCE

Korner, T. "Making Conscious Identifications: A Means of Promoting Empathetic Contact." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1993, March 27, (1): 115-126.

 

Thomas P Sattler, Ed.D, is a professor of kinesiology and Julie E. Mullen is a graduate student in kinesiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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