Loving and caring too much can be dangerous and this is evident when certain professions get involved with testing and assessing your performance.
Testing fitness, function or any aspect of your human powers needs to be unbiased so guess who the top three most dangerous people are in testing you:
- Teachers
- Coaches
- Personal Trainers
Why? They care too much.
Feedback from allied professionals doing the GPTQA courses was crystal clear in that the most difficult part of the program was having to stay unbiased and NOT coach or help the patient during a movement or test.
Now this seems harsh but for the purest benefit to the patient (or athlete) it is really important not to help them achieve a result but to let them do it within their own capacity. Motivating comments, instruction or even supporting them physically in order to get a better result is just invalidating the test and causing a misdiagnosis of the actual capability.
Teachers, coaches and personal trainers can’t help but help. They find it incredibly difficult not to give that motivation yelp or advise how to jump a little higher in the moment or even push a little harder with heavier weights or higher speed in the gym just to beat that goal.
A test needs to be consistent in order to compare truly. If a client needs yelling motivational phrases at them to achieve that exercise, what is their capacity to deal with the issue when alone?
Don’t get me wrong, the need to motivate, support and encourage is essential for development, improvement and intervention but let’s remember when to open our eyes and ears and shut our mouths to make sure the client has the very best information to excel and achieve their goals. They are the only ones who actually feel the change.
As a side note, Global Wellness Tracking test staff are all independently trained to stay impartial and unbiased. It’s not that they don’t care…but they really don’t care 🙂