Advice From My Most Difficult Client.

She told me what everyone else was too polite to say. And yet she taught me something in the process.

My most difficult client isn’t really a client. She’s my sister.

Before I say anything else, I really do love her deeply. At the same time, we couldn’t be more opposite.

She’s the fun to my serious and the chaos to my calm. She’s also the self-appointed “voice of opposition.” The one who tells me everything everyone wishes they could say but doesn’t have the guts to.

Last year, she “participated” in the Summer Walking Club. I say that loosely. And with love. Because I think she’d rather do just about anything than work out, even though I tried to tell her that walking and working out don’t have to mean the same thing.

Her participation was best described as “aware that it was happening.”

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to understand what motivates her. She’s never been driven by what moves most people in the health space, changing her body.

Honestly, she’s probably one of the most confident humans I’ve ever met. And while I do think she cares about her health, it tends to come across the same way you care about your taxes in April. You know they exist. You know they matter. You’re just not really wanting to do anything about it.

So I asked her to give me the number one reason she doesn’t move her body.

I had my guesses. I thought she’d say the most common responses:

• Not enough time.

• Too overwhelming.

• No energy.

I even thought she might say pain, since she hates it. That’s another place we’re opposites. I’ve always been a pain-addict. She is aggressively pain-avoidant.

But she didn’t hesitate.

“It’s not fun.”

I really tried to stay in professional mode. I tried to be compassionate, curious, and non-judgmental.

But fun?!

We are out here with research on longevity and nervous system regulation, and the miracle that is a daily walk, and her answer is that it’s boring?

All I had at that moment was the words of my mom, running through my head: "If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

So I ghosted her.

Obviously, she didn’t notice. She stated the fact and moved on with her life. I, on the other hand, have been reeling ever since.

When I finally came back to the conversation, a week later, as non-judgmentally as possible (though she tends to have a problem with my tone), what would actually make it feel different?

She said: “I don’t know. Maybe if it didn’t feel like something I was supposed to do.”

On the surface, it sounds just like the excuse my girls give me when I ask them to clean their rooms. Can’t we ever do anything fun? And I’ll be honest, my first instinct was to call out her childish response.

But the more I sat with it, the more I think she was saying something much deeper. Something a lot of people feel but don’t always say out loud.

I think she was really saying: I can’t make myself move toward something that doesn’t feel alive.

And I think, if we’re honest, that’s where a lot of us have been. Not stuck in laziness. Not a lack of discipline. But in something deeper than either of those things.

A sort of running-on-empty that no program, no challenge, no fresh start on Monday has ever actually touched.

Because we’ve tried those things. Some of it worked for a season. Most of it, if we’re being real, we secretly hated. And then something in us went quiet again, and we slipped right back to knowing we should, without being able to make ourselves want to.

So we quit.

As much as I didn’t understand it at first, on a deeper level, I get it.

While I might not need it to be ‘fun,’ I don’t want to engage with things that take more than they give.

And honestly? I think a lot of what we’re doing, even the so-called-healthy things, is the opposite of healthy. Not because they can’t be, but because they drain us more than they add to us. And it leaves us feeling bad because we stop the action, all because we haven’t addressed what’s under the surface.

While I assumed my sister was bad at wellness (in fairness, she owned this). She was actually just pointing out something much bigger under the surface. She needed it to be real, to matter.

And the health space has done a terrible job at creating what matters. Which is why I know she’s not alone.

Do you feel the same way?

I’m not going to promise the Summer Walking Club is the same kind of fun as a summer concert or floating in a pool. But I do think if we expand our definition of fun to include feeling alive, movement is exactly what opens that up. Not because of the act itself, but because of what it unlocks in you.

I want to give you a taste of it. Because you have to experience it to know it.

Next Monday, we open the doors to the community called The Summer Walking Club.

We built it to change the way you experience movement this summer, and truthfully, how you experience health. And we don’t want to just tell you it’s good, but allow you to experience it for yourself.

Try it for free!

That’s why we’re giving you two weeks to try it out for yourself. You don’t even have to enter a payment option until you know you’re in. Enter your email address, and we’ll send you everything you need to get into the club, poke around, and be ready to hit the ground running walking on Monday.

Click here to try it for two weeks on us!

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