Client Spotlight: Lisa Tamati, Running Hot Coaching

It takes a good athlete to run a marathon. It takes an exceptional athlete to run an ultramarathon. And it takes a spectacularly unique individual like Lisa Tamati to not only run multiple ultramarathons, but coach others to completing them as well. Lisa is the author of the best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, the founder of multiple businesses including Running Hot Coaching, a producer, a content creator, and much more. We were lucky to grab a moment of Lisa’s time to chat in-between her adventuring.

What brought you to starting Running Hot Coaching?

I’ve been running ultramarathons for 23 years, all over the world. When you do that sort of thing, you learn a whole lot about yourself and the skills it takes to be successful. After I wrote my books, I had a constant stream of people asking me running questions so I decided to join forces with a friend, Neil Wagstaff who is an exercise scientist, and start a company to provide online coaching.

How do you approach coaching people online?

It definitely has its challenges: it’s not one-on-one, we can’t yell at you to keep going. The people that come to us have to have a level of self-motivation, and I think that’s the only way it can work. They’re busy people, but they’re very self-motivated wanting to learn everything about running ultramarathons.

So we coach people early on in their journey, beginner to intermediate. I do a lot of work in mindset, teaching them mental toughness and overcoming mental and emotional obstacles. And the beauty of this type of coaching is that these skills aren’t just for athletes, but for executives as well. This is a skillset for life, because we give a whole lot of input about goal setting, motivation, confidence, and self esteem. So I started a separate business for executive coaching also (https://www.lisatamati.co.nz/ecourse).

Ok, be honest. How many business do you have?

Well I joke that I do the work of ten people on a tiny budget. I’m a workaholic and I’m passionate about what I do. It’s all about motivation. For example, I’ve been helping my mum rehabilitate from an aneurysm for the past year and a half. She developed severe disabilities, but I was determined to find a way to get her back from the brink of disaster. After working with her daily, she’s now doing everything again: driving, walking, getting all her independence back.

It just reinforced everything I learned from ultramarathon running: the mind and body are capable of so much more than we think. By not accepting the situation, you have faith and keep fighting on. If you’re alive, you keep fighting. That’s my attitude.

How does Training Tilt help you in your coaching?

Neil and I started our website and business on another platform for a while and we just weren’t getting it. It was difficult to use and the support wasn’t there. When we began with Training Tilt, knowing that Cam is in the country and built it for endurance coaches, it was a perfect fit.

The great thing about Training Tilt is that it has so much functionality on the back-end. We’ve got our training programs on there. We can create digital packages and then sell them through the platform, which is really cool. We have training calendars online that people can write comments on, change dates around. We have articles and videos, and we’re able to cross-reference them. It’s all searchable and very user-friendly for our clients.

How has your experience been so far?

I’m a little technically challenged and Cam never gets annoyed! He is always willing to implement new stuff. If we ask for something, and he hears the same from others, he’ll do it. He’s so patient. We’ve been really, really lucky to have him there.

It’s just a better experience. You sign on to all these different online tools and if you don’t get the support, you don’t really use them. You just chuck your hands in the air. Cam and Training Tilt isn’t like that at all. In fact, I brought a second business onto the platform!

Thanks Lisa! For more on her coaching, visit Running Hot Coaching or her personal site.