Why I'm building Sticky Coach

The short version of why I'm building Sticky Coach

1. I needed the Sticky coach app when I worked in health, it would have helped me a lot with my clients at the time.
2. I think there are a lack of tools that focus on behaviour change (when this is probably the most important aspect of achieving long term change).
3. People know what they need to do, but they still don't do it - I want to bridge this gap with behaviour change principles, habit coaching and coaching education.
4. The growth of obesity and type 2 diabetes is not slowing and with an existing network of health coaches (personal trainers, nutrition coaches etc), enabling these coaches to achieve higher quality results with their clients is an efficient way to create change.

The longer version of why I'm building Sticky Coach

A full decade ago back in 2014, I used to train my personal training clients on the leafy Tooting Common in London, just off the road where my flat was at the time.

Apart from the 5.30am wake up calls I used to love being outside most of the day, training my clients in fun and varied ways, often despite the rain.

When I became a PT I did it because I wanted to do it in my own way. No one to tell me what to do, no gym rent to pay and full freedom to take it in whatever direction I wanted to.

Most people think that a personal trainer only trains their clients with exercise (and many do) but really the role of a personal trainer is help their clients achieve their health goals through the most effective means.

At least 80% of my clients wanted to get to a healthier weight and body fat % and exercise is only one small solution to achieve this goal, so within and outside of sessions I'd support my clients with nutrition and lifestyle changes.

After some time of 'prescribing' my clients the ideal way to eat and the optimum lifestyle to achieve their goals, I soon realised that me just telling my clients what to do didn’t necessarily translate into them actually doing it.

After all, what matters most for successful change is consistent action & adherence.

This is where I really started to learn about coaching, behaviour change and habits and how I could use them to support my clients better and help them to tick to changes for longer.

Over time, instead of giving my clients whole meal plans to follow or radical changes to their schedule I started to work with them to identify areas they wanted to work on and small habits they could introduce.

I dedicated the last 10 minutes of a PT session for coaching, to review how they were doing outside of sessions, such as what habits were working for them, which were not, which ones we could adapt and progress and which ones we’d put on hold.

This habit coaching strategy helped me to get some great results with my clients, the problem was that it was all done verbally and on paper. This meant I couldn’t really track for sure if my clients were doing habits daily or see what we’d worked on in the past. It was back then in 2014 that I thought this would be a great app to have at the time. A digital place to do habit coaching and support my clients better when they weren’t at sessions.

A few years later for a multitude of different reasons, I changed career to become a software developer. Ever since becoming a software developer I’ve thought about this idea. I’ve sweated over the details. I’ve made hundreds of notes on my phone over the years. I bought the domain. But I’ve never really felt it was the right time or that I had developed enough of the right skills to build sticky coach…

Until now.