Some of you won’t have met me before, so hi! I’m just going to spend today talking to you about who I am – one of my favorite subjects. I started life professionally as a dentist and I still do it 3 days a week, so how does somebody go from dentistry into the world of health and fitness? It all started back in the toon during the uni days… (insert Wayne’s World style flashback music here).
I’d been on the rowing team as a cox for a little while and so I’d got involved in the land training with those guys and became a runner, got some injuries, classic story, ended up being a triathlete because I wasn’t really that good at running. So I just thought I’ll be mediocre at three sports instead of one. It turns out it’s not that easy, but there we are, it at least stopped me from breaking myself again. I really enjoyed the challenge and of course, the competition. Anyone who knows me will tell you I can find a way to make LITERALLY ANYTHING a competition. And usually, I’ll win. Or die trying. But what I enjoyed the most was I became part of this little club, this whole triathlon lifestyle. If you go and speak to any triathletes, they’re really boring. We just talk about triathlon, but we absolutely love it.
It overflows into our whole life, it’s a way that we live. It’s about nutrition and hydration. It’s about how we can eek out the last little bit of performance, can we push ourselves further? Can we endure just a little bit more? It’s about being better than the person we were yesterday and pushing the boundaries of being human. It’s about training. It’s about getting in the great outdoors. It’s about trying new things and challenging yourself and doing crazy races that are far too long and far too hard. It’s a challenging sport, but it’s a whole lifestyle more than that.
As a dentist, the thing that I liked most, and the reason I went into it as a profession is because I definitely wanted to do something medical. I knew I wanted to challenge my brain. I wanted to be able to improve people’s lives, but I actually thought, I don’t want to be seeing sick people all the time. I want to hang out with healthy people and I want to give them care every six months and build a relationship with these people, build a rapport and actually get to know them and REALLY help them. Perhaps I could actually PREVENT pain and suffering. I didn’t really see that approach in the doctor-ing profession. I saw that genre as illness and cure. Whereas when I looked at dentistry, I thought, I can do a lot more good here.
I began challenging the status quo and saying to people, actually you can take charge of your own health and you can take charge of your own teeth and your own mouth by making the right choices in your lifestyle; fillings, illness, it doesn’t have to be a normal part of life. And as dentists, we’re kind of guardians of the first part of the digestive tract – the mouth! that’s where all your food goes first! So it makes sense that one of the key parts of my clinical job is talking about nutrition as medicine – not a cure, but a prevention strategy.
As a baby dentist, we did our modules on nutrition, we understood what happened to macros and where they went, but as an athlete, I knew I needed to know more than that…so I started reading…learning…
I did the standard courses in nutrition and weight management, sports nutrition, I filled my spare time with papers and books on nutrition and more importantly, I employed the strategies I learnt about. I experimented. I began to learn exactly what effects different foods and approaches had on my body and my performance. I knew how to manipulate my body composition, my performance, even my mindset.
And then other people started asking for my help…and guess what? It worked for them too! And then I started to realize that one of the things that was giving me fantastic results with clients was not just the fact that I was saying, right, you need to eat this and that. And here’s a meal plan. It wasn’t a straightforward diet analysis with a “cookie cutter” plan, but we were focusing on how that fits into a bigger picture. Mindset, time management, goalsetting, self-care, I was doing all these things and I’d spent years perfecting strategies to make them completely foolproof. And when I shared these strategies with others, they had way more success than their usual boring weight loss strategies, which were all failing them. If you just focus on nutrition alone, or we just talk about fitness alone, then you will always get a mediocre very short-term result.
There’s a lot of people that have a very black and white view in the health and fitness industry, and they’re having very one-sided conversations. They’re using very conventional wisdom to solve very modern problems, rather than having the challenging conversations with their clients and trying to an individualized approach. And I realize that’s what I was doing with my clients. One of the things that I pride myself upon is allowing clients to ask me questions, not just the easy ones, but the hard ones too.
At the Wonder Clinic, performance coaching is all about teaching people the very basic things stuff we’ve forgotten about, got confused about, and creating an unshakeable foundation, which you can then build success on. If you’ve taken control of your own health, fitness and wellbeing, then you can pretty much conquer anything. I don’t believe that anybody should be deprived from taking part in the experiences that they want to because it’s too challenging. I believe that with the right mindset and the right attitude and the right approach, when you’re looking after those little decisions every day and you’re building healthier habits, day upon day, upon day, you can achieve whatever it is you want to.
So, that’s what I do. That’s my performance coaching, the little brief history in time of Stevie Potter: I create unshakeable, super humans.
If you want to find out how YOU can start taking charge and making a positive change TODAY, take my FREE Super Humans Scorecard and find out EXACTLY what’s standing between you and enjoying a carefree easy life. You’ll get a personalised breakdown of what your individual challenges are along with my top tips on how you can solve them now!