Client Goal Setting: Stay Curious for Longer

Behind the Design, Episode 36, with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher

What is your client actually asking for? Does the goal they walked in with match the life they described? And how far into the conversation do you get before you start writing the plan in your head?

Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher spent the last four episodes on the coach's side of the work: certified now what, owning a gym, employee or employer, and whether to specialize. This episode starts the client side, and it starts where every coaching relationship does. The goal. Both of them agree the plan is the easy part once you have enough experience. The hard part, and the part that decides whether the plan ever works, is the conversation before it.

Structure That Bends

Daniel opened with a small example from his own week that ended up framing the whole episode. He is a new dad, and his training has had to change around that. He still wants what he has always wanted from a session, which is to repeat it and outperform last week. What changed is how he builds it. He still goes to the gym, but he picks equipment he also has at home, so if the day falls apart he can finish the session there and keep his reference points. He used to alternate push and pull exercises. Now he groups all the pushing together and all the pulling together, so if he has to split a session in two, it splits cleanly into a pressing session and a pulling session.

He does well mentally with a structured plan. He also has a son. So the structure stays, and it gets built to bend. As Kandace put it, have the structure and the backup systems there, but be agile, because he needs you.

That is the same thing every coach is trying to do for a client, and it is the thread that runs through the rest of the conversation.

Why the Goal Conversation Matters More Now

Daniel made the case that goal setting is becoming a more valuable coaching skill, not a less valuable one. A client who wants to lose weight can type that into ChatGPT and be told they should be in a caloric deficit. That is true. It is also nowhere near the whole job.

For a long time a coach could stand out by being very good at design, at writing the roadmap, and that alone could beat a lot of other options. Design still matters and you still have to be good at it. But Daniel believes the value is shifting toward the coaching itself: the behavior, the implementation, and the ability to have the conversation about goals and stay in it. Is this your actual goal? Is it in line with your values and priorities? Can you get there, systematically, into what sits underneath it? That skill, and staying involved as the client works toward it, is what he expects to be most valued going forward.

Start With Five Priorities, Not One Goal

When Daniel starts with a new client, he does not start with the goal. He has them list their top five priorities, and training is only one of the options. I want to perform at work. I want to be a good friend. I want to take care of my kids, or my dogs. Whatever it is.

The list is tied to how time gets spent. The top priority goes into the calendar first. And it gives him a structure for the goal conversation, because he believes goals need to line up with priorities. Decisions and behaviors have to line up with values and priorities, or they do not hold.

He gave a real example. A client listed being a good mom as her top priority, then had a list of other priorities, and it was very important to her to learn double unders. So he asked her to help him out. How is this related to your priorities? She did not really know. The conversation that followed landed on something honest. She wanted to express her fitness, and she thought it would be cool. Daniel's response was not to talk her out of it. It was to ask whether that should be on the list. You expressing fitness, playing sports, doing something because you want to. That might be a good idea.

He sees it constantly. When people write their top five, they very rarely list themselves.

Whose Goal Is It

About two years ago Daniel started paying attention to whether a goal is tied to external expectations. There is a difference between I want to win the CrossFit Games and I want to get a pull-up. The first depends on other competitors and on who else shows up. The second does not depend on beating anyone.

A lot of goals do end up tied to something external, a leaderboard, a competitor, beating someone else. When that happens Daniel stays with it and makes sure it is really what the client wants. He is also explicit with them about why he is asking. I do not value this goal over that one. I just want to understand it so I can help you for real.

From there he sorts goals the way OPEX coaches will recognize, outcome goals and habit goals, and by category. Is this about owning your own fitness and your own progress, or is it tied to a sport-specific context?

Refine the Goal Before You Chase It

Brandon's first question in the same conversation is what the person is actually capable of, and he gets there by having them explain the goal in more detail than they expected to.

He sat down recently with a client who wanted to get to a specific weight, somewhere around 165 or 175, from roughly 190. One of the goals was to see his six pack. So Brandon asked where the number came from. Why that specific weight? The answer was that it was the weight he was at ten years ago, the last time he saw his six pack.

That changes the plan. If the goal is the weight, that is one approach. If the goal is the aesthetic, it might show up well before the number does, and it might not take a twenty-five or thirty pound drop to get there. The client agreed. The weight was just his guess at where it would happen. If it came sooner, he would be happy with that.

Brandon was clear that this is not about talking people out of goals. It is about getting to the sentence it sounds like what you are actually trying to achieve is this, and then building for that. Sometimes people come in with goals that do not match their priorities, and they just need to talk it through.

Ask Why Five Times

Daniel's most practical piece of advice for the whole episode is to stay curious for longer. Ask why five times. If you do it, you will get surprisingly deep, surprisingly fast.

A client told him he really wanted a bar muscle-up. He was not the obvious CrossFit competitor, so Daniel asked why it mattered, curious rather than judging. Would it not make me a better CrossFitter? Sure, probably. So why is that important to you? I want to be strong and healthy. And why is that important? Because I want to be there for my kids. I want to be a good dad.

Connecting the plan to helping someone be there for their kids longer, enhance their life, and say yes to more things is a very different job than getting someone a muscle-up. Daniel sees the trap most clearly in newer coaches. They already have the remedy and they cannot wait to hand it over. The moment they hear bar muscle-up, they have the progression ready, because they have gotten a client their first one before. Stay in the conversation instead. You will get the muscle-up eventually. The deeper goal is not going anywhere, it takes longer, and you are probably never done with it. Get that deep and, in Daniel's words, you will have a client for five plus years.

Play to Win, Not to Avoid Losing

A lot of Daniel's clients now are athletes who have lost the joy of training. They feel trapped. Sometimes it is injuries. Sometimes they performed well on the leaderboard and now have a target on their back, so they have ended up in a place where they cannot lose. Everything becomes playing not to lose.

His answer is to define success before the event, not after. What does success look like here, and what does it look like when we get it? Without that, it is easy to keep adjusting the goal, or to become completely dependent on competing. You can do everything you could possibly ask and still have someone else show up and be better. Winning, or at least trying to, is part of competing. But forget about your own progress and the passion of improving, and you lose the joy of doing it quickly.

He told the story that made this click for him. A client had a bar muscle-up event at a competition, a movement tied up with a lot of nerves for her, set under a big beam above the rig that made it genuinely intimidating. It did not go well. She came off the competition doubting everything, and when Daniel pointed out that the beam had probably been in her head, she called it an excuse.

A few months later, a bar muscle-up event came up in quarterfinals and it was one of her best events. She rushed through the analysis, and when Daniel stopped her to point out the bright spot, her answer was yes, but there was no beam.

So he asked her. The beam could not be a reason when it went badly, but it gets to be the reservation when it goes well. If every win comes with a reservation and every loss is judged in absolute terms, in what scenario do you win? She could not answer. And he asked whether she realized that was probably the reason she had lost the joy of competing. You cannot win.

Now they define it up front. What expectations do you have for yourself in this event? Is it rounds? Is it sticking to the game plan? That is what gets valued. The evaluation against the competition still happens. The joy of improving and moving toward your own goals has to be protected alongside it.

The Goal Is Fixed. The Path Is Not

Brandon picked up from there. Coaches can be very stubborn about the route. Muscle-up, this is the way, this is the progression. But the goal does not equal a specific plan. The more experience you get, the more you will hear the same goal a hundred different ways, and the more you will see a hundred different ways to reach it.

He is wary any time he hears a coach say they have a specific protocol, follow this for six weeks and you are there. Those things can work. They also do a disservice to the people who need to get there differently, at a different time, in a different way. A rigid plan sets up a foggy path where, if it does not work, someone has to be at fault. An adapting plan says out loud that as we get closer, things might change, and we might need to work on pieces we did not know about until we got there.

He also wants coaches to point out the wins along the way. Some clients brush off a real milestone because it is not the outcome. If nobody stops them and says, this is still the goal, and you just did something great, how are they ever going to enjoy it? He pointed at the athletes who win championships and immediately say on to the next. Maybe that is for the camera. Either way, it is not a relationship with training anyone should want.

Brandon spent years working with fighters where everything was the fight, the date, the event. After enough of that, training turns into a checklist. I did what I needed to do. You stop walking in thinking I get to learn, I get to play around, I get to test something and make a mistake without pressure. Recently he has enjoyed working with people who do not have strict outcome goals, people who want to feel better, or want to feel better before a pregnancy or before becoming a dad. That is a different game. You are setting someone up with habits that let them keep being successful inside it.

Decisions You Could Not Have Made at the Start

Daniel described it as the map and the surroundings. You have a plan or a progression, and you still have to keep looking up and navigating by what is around you.

His example came from the deadlift block Brandon programmed for him, working toward a three times body weight pull. Daniel has never had a problem with lockout. If anything, the floor was his issue. But when he pulled 240, he had good speed off the floor and the lockout got sticky. If they had laid out the plan at the start based on what he told them, floor is the problem, anything past the knees I can lock out, and never adjusted it, they would have ended up in the wrong place. Instead the plan shifted to a stronger mid-back and glutes. Those are decisions made during the journey that nobody could have made before it started.

Brandon added the part coaches forget. Getting to the edge of a goal can be easier than completing it. You get there and it is a different game. It is not about discipline or showing up anymore. It is about being mentally ready to finish, and plans rarely leave space for that.

Frameworks Help You Think, Not Decide

This is where Brandon thinks frameworks earn their place. For a lot of coaches, frameworks become the way they make decisions. With experience, they become a way to think better, and the plan gets better as a result.

His outline for a three times body weight deadlift shows how. First, build resilience. He may not know yet how, but he knows it has to happen. Build volume and proficiency in the movement, get good under fatigue, and build the nervous system up to handle the demand and recover. Then get stronger, with loads challenging enough to drive the adaptation that gets you to the next step. Then test, under heavy loads, which is its own goal entirely.

Inside that outline, he introduces stimulus rather than prescribing patterns. If he needs someone to move faster, the question is how to put them in a position to move faster. If they need to be stronger, how to put them in the best position possible to get strong. That looks different from person to person. The goal of getting stronger does not change.

With Daniel, they changed the structure of the days after the first month, then moved things again, with Daniel feeding back the whole way. It inched toward the goal without ever becoming this is the only way. Brandon thinks coaches get stuck when they do not actually understand what they are trying to achieve, and do not have the experience to ask how to get there without one specific thing.

Daniel named the risk underneath it. If you hold too clear a picture of the way forward, you are exposed to confirmation bias. You start looking for signs that confirm the plan. Training should be an ongoing assessment, and that only works if you are willing to see what it tells you.

Lifestyle Clients and Competitive Athletes Need Different Plans

Daniel drew a useful line between the two. Competitive athletes usually have training high on their priority list, and in his experience they tend to be more consistent outside of training too. The things around their training are more fixed, so the plan holds up longer.

Lifestyle clients live with more variation. I had to drive my wife to the hospital and we were there all night, what do I do with training? Daniel coaches high-performing CEOs, and work takes a big part of the schedule. I need to take this meeting. The circumstances change constantly and the plan has to change with them. The coach is responsible for making those changes while still guarding the path and keeping the goal in view.

The counterpoint is the calendar. A competitive athlete usually has a date they cannot negotiate with. Miss a week with a lifestyle client and you might push the plan back a week. Miss a week with a competitor and you have to decide how the plan changes to still arrive on that date. So there can be more change inside a competitive plan. But for the most part, Daniel finds lifestyle clients are more exposed to the variation happening outside the gym.

A Process You Can Use This Week

Brandon closed with a list coaches can take straight into their next consult.

Find out about the client. Make time in your consultation or assessment to sit down, listen, and ask questions. Learn their priorities, their desires, and their goals. Have them say the goal out loud and explain it to you. Get a sense of their schedule, and of whether what they are asking for is realistic as stated or needs to be broken into smaller pieces.

Find the why. Ask why five times. Keep chipping at it until you find what they are actually after. You can be honest about whether you think it is a good goal, and that is just your opinion. You do not have to talk anyone out of anything. You are trying to understand what might get in the way.

Pressure test it. Think about what usually gets in the way of this kind of goal, for a weight loss client, a deadlift client, a competitive athlete, and bring those roadblocks into the conversation to see what comes back. By the end of the first conversation you should have a clear picture of what this person cares about, what they are actually trying to achieve, and what you think they are capable of.

Build the plan. What we are trying to achieve, how many days per week. Brandon calls this the fun part, and the easiest part once you have everything above.

Build the habits.

Adapt and evolve. Run the plan as a constant feedback loop. In OPEX terms, the NEPA framework. Is this working? Am I seeing what I need to see? If not, talk to the person, make changes, and look again.

He added one instruction for coaches who already have clients with goals that are stalling, or who never had a real sit-down in the first place. Go back and have one. What has changed, if anything? Are we still on this path? Is this still what you want? What have you enjoyed, and what have you not? And on your side of it, what has been showing results, and what has not? The first part of this process is the most important, and once you have those details, everything else gets relatively simple.

Owning Your Own Fitness

Daniel's closing thought was about what he now considers one of the greatest gifts a coach can give a client. Owning their own fitness and their own success. He believes that comes through habit goals and outcome goals that are not tied to anyone else. It is popular right now to go straight to outcome goals like placing in a race or on a leaderboard, and that is not for everyone.

He told the story of a client who kept circling the same question across several consults. Should she go all in on CrossFit, or powerlifting, or weightlifting? She told him she had never found anything that worked. Daniel's honest response was that this was not surprising. You cannot really decide what your goals are, so how are you going to lay out the path when you do not know what you are aiming for?

Then she wondered if she had more potential in weightlifting and powerlifting than in CrossFit. Daniel pointed out that potential only matters if she wanted to compete at a high level. She did not. She just wanted to be stronger.

She is a musician, so he asked her this. If someone wants to learn the piano, and their hands are very small, and they will never have the highest potential to be great at it, would you tell them not to spend any time on it? No, she said. If they just want to learn the piano, that is great. And if you want to be stronger, Daniel told her, and spend your time doing that, that is fine too. It does not have to be measured against anyone else.

Figure out the goal. Tie it to priorities. Put it into habit goals. Define success. Then the client owns their fitness, independent of anyone else, and they keep it.

Brandon took the analogy one step further. If someone does not have big hands, you teach them differently. It does not mean they will not be good. It means you find the way that works for their style and their shape, and meet them where they are.

Start With Yourself

Brandon's last point was for coaches who do not yet have much experience building goals with clients. Work on yourself first. Train yourself. He has an episode coming this week on his own podcast about being your best client as a coach, because before anybody believes in you, you have to believe in yourself.

Kandace tied it back to what the July cohort had just spent two weeks on. Marketing is a transfer of belief. The most important thing a coach can do is believe in themselves and in what they deliver, and demonstrate it in everyday action.

Daniel, who sat in on that marketing block, said the moment that landed for the group was hearing that I suck at marketing and I do not want to do it is the exact thing clients say about training. The same coachability and action you ask of them applies to you.

Where to Go From Here

The process in this episode, finding out about the client, finding the why, pressure testing, building the plan and habits, and adapting as you go, is the consult and design work taught inside the OPEX Method Mentorship. Ten weeks of live lecture, lab with your own clients, and office hours, with a cohort of coaches who take this seriously. The October 13 cohort is capped at 40 coaches and enrollment closes October 9. Book a call with a coaching advisor, who is a graduate of the program rather than a sales rep.

Behind the Design releases weekly on the CoachRx Podcast Network. The month on the client side continues next week.

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For the full pathway into this kind of program design, look at the OPEX Method Mentorship.‍ ‍

Connect with the coaches

• Brandon Gallagher:Brandon’s Instagram (@bgperform_)

• Daniel Persson:Daniel’s Instagram (@danielcapersson)

Join us live on Tuesdays mornings 11:30am EST on the OPEX YouTube Channel

Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.