This is meta mentors, strategies, tactics and skills to help other entrepreneurs in five minutes or so. Today I want to talk about evidence based decision making. This is a core value at to brain we make our decisions, and we build our curriculum based on evidence. And I'm going to talk about what evidence means the hierarchy of evidence. But first, I want to start off with skepticism, and cynicism. as mentors, we have to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism all the time, but we can't lapse into cynicism. So here's the difference. A skeptic is someone who wants to see evidence before they accept what you're telling them. A cynic is somebody who rejects everything you say, before they hear the evidence. And even after they see evidence, they still won't accept it. Both of these come from Greek philosophy, it's very hard to balance both with so much misinformation out there on the internet. And in the fitness space, as well as the business coaching space. There are people out there who are actually trying to fool us. So I think a lot about how to maintain a healthy sense of skepticism, wanting to see evidence before you make up your mind about something without lapsing into cynicism, where you just don't believe anything. Anybody says, in a lot of business coaching masterminds, you get a ton of people who exaggerate their experience or exaggerate their success, they want to be helpful, but they want to fit in, they want to sometimes even impress other people. Now in our Tinker program, it's a little bit different, you don't get a lot of this, because everybody going into Tinker has already shared their numbers with their mentor, and Jeff, and I filter people based on their mindset. But this is really rare. And in most business coaching programs, this doesn't happen. In most business coaching programs, you have a few people who are super legit, and they're worth sticking around for. But they're hard to identify. And you don't really know who's good, and who's telling the truth, even without digging and sticking around for a long time. So here are a couple of tools to identify first, who is actually legit in a mastermind, and then I'm going to share you how to make decisions based on evidence and the value of different types of evidence. So first, people who are trustworthy in a mastermind, generally are open about their mistakes. So often, they'll share their mistakes before they share anything else. If you are talking to somebody, and they're like, I'm doing great, and they never share a mistake, you should be skeptical of every single thing. They say. Second, the people who say I've made a mistake will usually be very specific about that mistake. And they've learned from it. So they can say like, here's what I would do differently. Now. Third, they knew how to correct the mistakes, and they had corrected it. So it's okay to be skeptical of somebody who says I screwed this up. And you know, my gym is bankrupt. I wish I'd known that five years ago, but they've never actually fixed the mistake. So they don't know if what they're telling you is actually the truth. Okay? So it's really important here that we maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism, meaning we want to see evidence before we teach something to our clients, or before we support it. So there are five basic levels of evidence. Now, skepticism is what really gave rise to the scientific model that we're all taught in like the third or the fifth grade, or whatever. And really, this scientific model should be applied to media should be applied to social media, it should be a tool to help you evaluate claims. Unfortunately, most of the time, it's just taught in kind of like this rigorous laboratory setting. And we don't think about it outside of science class, but our kids and us as mentors need to learn this more than anything else. So the bottom level of evidence is a media claim, you read something in a newspaper, you read something online, and it's like, is that actually true or not? Right? You really cannot accept anything that a media person is telling you without further evidence anymore. So if you know the journalists write something, and they point to three studies, okay, that's a little bit better than what we get in the news most of the time. The level up from that is personal experience. And we sometimes refer to this as n equals one n is just like the number of people in your evidentiary study, right? So when I was starting to brain, or even before that, when I was working for three to one go or writing, writing the first book, everything that I was talking about was N equals one it was, here's what I did. Now, I had no idea if that would work for anybody else. And so when the first client from New Jersey called me and she wanted to sign up, I was like, I don't know, I don't know if I want to take her money, because this is what worked for me. That's what I've been sharing on this blog, but I can't really say for sure if it's gonna work for you. She talked me into it and just said, like, you know, it's worth the investment of 1200 bucks or whatever it was to see if this does work. And it did. And then I took a few more clients and you know, out of 10, the things that worked for me worked for eight or nine of them. So, n equals one experience is more valuable than

Just a claim that you read in the media or a claim that somebody makes on Facebook. The next level above that is a quantitative survey. So basically, that's where you say, okay, here are 10 gyms, and all of them did go reviews, and eight out of those 10 saw an uptick in their retention or upsell, or whatever that is, okay, that's a quantitative study. So we're actually looking at numbers from a bigger sample size in to brain where you'll see this is when we want to test something. So we want to test doing done for you paid ads, or we want to test maybe like the NC fit coach, like a pro program. You know, we do this probably three or four times a year where I'll pick 10 mentor gyms, or offered to 10 mentor gyms. And then we'll say, Okay, here's what we're testing. Here's what we're measuring. And this is like what we want you to report on. And usually that cost something so for like Coach like a pro, it cost me five grand to find the answer. But that's still good, because I want at least quantitative data before we make a decision on whether we recommend it or not. The next level above that is a cohort study. So this is where now it's no longer self report. It's a quantitative survey is like when you give people a survey, and they just answer. So you know, when we asked you how much money did you make last year, you're probably not going to answer right down to the penny, right, you're gonna round up or round down or ballpark or approximate, we're still going to get a number is probably going to be close. But we don't know how close the next level above that as a cohort study. And this is where you take a pretty large sample size, and you measure the results. So you set up kind of a controlled experiment, and you track what happens. So they're not self reporting anymore. And this is what we do in state of the industry. So instead of the industry, we actually take data from WaterFire pushpress, team up kilo, we take the numbers that the gyms are putting into the system, instead of asking the gym owners, how are you doing? If you ask a gym owner? What's your retention? They'll overestimate if you ask a gym owner, how profitable are you, they'll often underestimate. We want to know the actual numbers. And so we do a cohort study by partnering with the software providers and getting the real numbers. So when we say the average gym owner makes $32,000 a year, like we know that to be almost entirely true. A meta analysis is when you take a bunch of cohort studies. And you dive into the data of all of them. And you see like what is common. Now you'll never see this in the fitness industry. Even just doing a cohort study in the fitness industry is brand new to brain is the first and probably the only people who would do this. But if somebody like IHRSA did it, you know, maybe they could do a CT study, CrossFit could do it. Both of these people sometimes do quantitative surveys where they'll send like a survey out to their affiliates or their gyms or whatever. But they never do a cohort study because they don't have the data.

The meta analysis is where you would take a cohort study from CrossFit and a cohort study from Ursa and a cohort study from maybe the NSCA. And a cohort study from all the 45 franchises. And you put all those together and you say, what is the average gym owner making? What is What are they making? If they are self employed? What are they making, if they're a franchise, and now it'd be a meta analysis, and that's the gold standard. Unfortunately, very few of those exist. Now, if we're talking about fitness and health care, of course, it's much, much easier to find a meta analysis. But what's really important here is that you understand,

like what makes good evidence, something that you read online, it's, you can just assume it's probably not true or not even pay attention to it. If somebody's sharing their personal experience that's more valid than somebody sharing an opinion. If somebody has a quantitative survey, hey, we surveyed 30 gyms and here's what we found. That's better than an N equals one experience. If somebody has a cohort study, like we actually took data that Jim's actually reported, instead of just asking Him to fill in the blanks, that's way better and that's, you know, the best we've seen in fitness, and then a meta analysis as the gold standard. The key here though, is to know the difference to have filters to be skeptical until you see evidence but also flexible enough to change your mind in the face of evidence instead of being a civic Hope that helps thank you for your service.