Breaking the Rules - An Extraordinary Interview with Jenny Roth

Listen on The Extraordinary Life Podcast

I recently had the opportunity to interview the personal trainer Jenny Roth of Coaching Character. She is full of life and has built her unconventional business by breaking the rules and on the radical belief that you’re the expert of your own body. 

The Real Expert

There are a lot of experts out there doing the things they are best at, helping others with their talent, and making a living at it. As a personal trainer, Jenny is an expert in strength training and movement, but she takes a different approach. Rather than showing up to each session and telling you what your body needs, she wants to listen to your body first. 

In the early years as a personal trainer, she saw a lot of people being dismissed by “the experts”. The younger, fitter trainers would dismiss the complaints, concerns, and experiences of their usually older clients when they shared how they felt. It really struck Jenny that anyone, even herself, would think that they knew more about somebody’s body than the person who lived within it. 

She started to look at the way she was trained to coach, to position herself as the all-knowing expert, and she learned instead to listen to the real expert about the body she was coaching: the client. It transformed the way she coached and connected with her clients, and it has created a business where she gives people a place to get stronger, meet their goals, and feel heard in the process. 

Breaking the Rules

In this fun interview with Jenny, she shares how she not only breaks the rules in the way she coaches, but also in life and how she runs her business. We talked about:

• Being dismissed by the experts
• How finally being heard in one area of your life spills positively over into others
• The answer for feeling like you aren’t enough (or are too much)
• The simple (but boring) way to reach your goals
• Age limits on achieving what you want in life
• Jenny’s path to being a coach and what building a business by not following the rules has taught her

We packed a lot of insight into a half-hour interview, and it’s a great listen for anyone who has felt overlooked, overwhelmed by big goals, or needs inspiration to keep going. 

Listen to the Episode here, and check Jenny out on Instagram on the Coaching Character website.