We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matt Dowd. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matt below.

Matt, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

In my opinion my parents got a lot of things right for me to personally thrive.

1st: My parents gave me a lot of autonomy to become who I needed to be. I was an athlete, then I was a musician, and finally I got into business within the fitness industry. As a parent myself now I can imagine it was hard to be ok with the idea of me playing in a rock back throughout my high school days. But because my parents didn’t judge or push against me I really thrived and learned a lot during that time. It also taught me how important it was to not judge and support and trust people to make their own choices.

2nd: I watched my parents model an ironclad work ethic. They worked 7 days a week waking up at 3:45am each day running a dairy farm. Virtually no complaining and modeling the consistency one needs for success. My mom would actually also work a 9-5 Monday-Friday as well. So as I got older I really had quite a perspective on what hard-work was and probably plays into why I have a hard time complaining about much. The bar was unintentional set very high.

3rd: Giving people the benefit of the doubt. People you come in contact with or even family majority of the time have good intentions. Maybe they don’t always come across that way, but very few have deep intentions to cause harm. Learning that early in life has helped me take risk, not create negative narratives that don’t exist or assuming the other person is out to get me. With my coaching I have noticed this to be a big differentiator. It’s helped me be more generous, which in turn has create more clients. Not the opposite. People can get nervous that doing genius things or giving information away for free is a trap. In reality I’d wager it’s the opposite. It’s something people really appreciate and it will come back to you in return. But I couldn’t do that if I was always sleeping with 1 eye open worrying about people taking advantage of me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I ended up getting into the fitness industry through a high school sports injury. With a dislocated shoulder, surgery and physical therapy I started to lift weights throughout the rehab process. With that I ended up lifting weights obsessively for the next 4 years. To the point that as I started college I worked at a Gold’s Gym learning to personal train and what that industry looked like. This was 2001, so 20+ years ago.

The industry has come such a long way since then. As I progressed and persevered through the industry I really started to find a love for mindset and behavior change. Once I started to really submerge myself in the literature I started to crack codes for clients who hadn’t lost weight for decades. This was rewarding and I haven’t looked back sense.

I help people with their behaviors so they can not only lose weight, become healthier, but so they can actually sustain it. That’s the dirty secret in the health and wellness industry. You always get the pictures and stories from the 4 week transformations. You almost never hear about the rest of the story. What happens to the person 2 years later? Did they keep the weight off or did it come back on? Did they keep the healthier lifestyle or has something happened?

It’s not entirely a coaches fault if a client does relapse or fall off, but our industry is addicted to quick fixes and it does nothing but harm to clients who don’t know the difference. I’m trying my best to fight the good fight and still get results within a realistic timeframe.

I’m most proud of my ability to stay the course with the safest and best practices for health and weight loss. I have stories of life changing weight loss transformations from 10LBS up to 120LBS. And the majority of them have kept that lifestyle up because we did the hard work together.

I have many more years of helping people with their relationship with food, exercise, and their health. I will not stop educating myself on the best practices and newest landmark studies to provide my clients with the best service out there.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Early in my career I exposed to a few charlatans like most are. I took it as gospel and started to apply the practices to my lifestyle and slowly to my clients. Fortunately I had a great support group of colleagues and educators that helped me realize the responsibility we have as front line health defenders.

I learned to start looking at the research, the sources, their backstories and quickly could sniff out the quacks. Now days it’s easier than ever for veterans to really expose those quacks, but it can be so confusing for my clients since they’re not as close to the flame with this information.

It was in my early 20’s I took the responsibility very serious and started to check my sources thoroughly, started hiring coaches and mentors to help educate me and just took it all by the reigns.

I think this played a big part in me having my own business now and being able to do my dream job. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of hard situations that hurt but taught me the most.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Human behavior/psychology.

You can know all of the perfect exercises for the perfect program, but if you can’t connect with your client then you are of no use to them.

You need to care, invest and get to know them. Once you do you build trust and rapport and can really get to know where their roadblocks are. Where they might trip up and how to best meet them where they are. If you can meet a client where they are and then lift them up slowly at the right pace you will be doing the equivalent of a magic trick for them. They won’t believe it. They may not have ever experienced it before and yet it’s so basic at the core.

This probably works for most industries. But don’t study it to learn people to manipulate them. Learn it to understand them so you can help solve a pain point and problem for them.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.reveal-weightloss.com
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