What the gym teaches us about running a business

I did not expect a conversation about training discipline to make me rethink the way I run my working week. But that is the thing about the Gibraltar Federation of Small Businesses’ Wellness event series: it has a habit of leading you somewhere you did not anticipate when you walked in.

It was at a recent event that I met fellow attendee, Max Bothén, a fitness and performance coach whose clients include entrepreneurs and business owners navigating demanding careers alongside the rest of life’s obligations. We talked for the better part of an hour. The thread running through it all was a distinction he makes early with anyone he works with. “Motivation is what gets you started,” he said, “but discipline is what keeps you going.”

Simple enough. But the more I turned it over, the more it seemed to describe not just the gym but the gap that opens up, in almost every small business, between intention and execution.

Why motivation lets you down

Bothén is not dismissive of motivation. He just does not trust it to show up reliably. “Motivation will naturally come and go,” he explains. “The key is learning how to keep showing up even when it isn’t there. Not every week is going to feel easy. Progress comes from continuing regardless. Discipline, structure, and consistency are what move the needle.”

Behavioural economists call the underlying problem ‘present bias’: our tendency to favour immediate comfort over future reward. It is why the inbox reliably beats the strategy document, and why the training session gets traded for the sofa after a long day. This is not a character flaw. It is just how the brain is wired. For a small business owner, the effect is particularly acute: when you are the person responsible for everything, every incoming demand feels genuinely urgent, and the work that shapes the future of the business quietly accumulates on a list that never quite gets reached. The client email that arrives at 8am is not more important than the growth plan. It just feels that way. Structure corrects for it because structure does not negotiate with feelings.

An unexpected transfer

What Bothén finds most interesting is not the fitness results his clients achieve, but what happens alongside them. “Once you start setting goals in your training and building structure around them, something shifts. When you begin achieving goals you once thought were impossible, your mindset expands. You realise you are capable of far more than you initially believed.”

The transfer to professional life, he argues, is not metaphorical. “When you learn to create structure in your day and set realistic targets, you start building discipline. And that discipline carries over into other areas of life.” Charles Duhigg identified the same mechanism in The Power of Habit, describing exercise as a classic ‘keystone habit’: one that creates a ripple of consistency across everything else. The reason is partly psychological and partly practical. A person who trains regularly before work has already made and kept a commitment before most people have opened their laptop. That early evidence of follow-through, repeated daily, begins to reshape their expectations of themselves. The business owner who trains before arriving at work is not just fitter. She is, in a quietly significant way, more likely to protect the strategic thinking time she promised herself, attend to the difficult conversation she has been deferring, and do the other hard things she has committed to.

Keep small promises

So how does discipline actually begin? Bothén’s answer is deliberately unimpressive. “If you promise yourself you are going to do something, do it. Start small and make it realistic. It could be a ten-minute walk. Schedule it, show up, tick it off. The important part is proving to yourself that you can follow through.”

Self-trust, in other words, is not a personality trait. It is a practice, and it starts embarrassingly small. Research by Dr Phillippa Lally and her team at University College London found that it takes an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic. Not willpower, not motivation — repetition, in a consistent context, until the action stops requiring a decision. That ten-minute walk Bothén recommends is not a warm-up for something more impressive. For many people, it is where the whole thing begins.

When a client loses momentum, Bothén’s instinct is diagnostic before it is prescriptive. “If the plan was too aggressive, it is better to scale back and rebuild consistency rather than force something that clearly is not working. Your quality of life should improve through this process, not get worse.” It is a principle that applies just as cleanly to a business strategy that is burning its owner out as to a training plan that has become unsustainable.

The GFSB Wellness Series

Driving back from the event, I found myself thinking about the gap between what I know and what I actually do. Most of us understand that consistent effort compounds, that structure outlasts enthusiasm, and that small commitments kept reliably are worth more than ambitious ones abandoned. We know this. We also know how rarely we act on it.

The GFSB Wellness series exists, in part, to close that gap, bringing Gibraltar’s small business community together around the things that shape performance in the fullest sense. Bothén’s parting thought was, like all his best lines, direct enough to stay with you. “Set something small. Schedule it. Do it. Keep the promise you made to yourself. That is how discipline starts.”

It turns out the gym and the boardroom have rather more in common than either likes to admit.

Max Bothén is a fitness and performance coach. Find him on Instagram at @max.bothen.coaching
The GFSB Wellness event series is open to members of the Gibraltar Federation of Small Businesses. For details of upcoming events visit gfsb.gi/events