Alexander Enhanced Teaching Skills

Innovative certificate programs hardly exist in our Alexander Technique education milieu, and there is currently a great opportunity for you to consider creating one. You need something as a back-end business, and this is the obvious candidate. To freshen up on "back-end businesses," start with this blog, then read the next three posts for an overview of why you would be smart to create an Alexander Technique back-end business. The obvious back-end business is a certification programme. People love certificates, regardless of how meaningful they are. When you can offer that, it adds spice for your student and naturally encourages them to consider committing to learn with you on a longer term, structured basis. Having course elements like these renders your business easier to manage by defining your goals, time-setting your promotional efforts and providing a secure income flow over a longer period. However, for some of you reading, there is a concern that if you set up certification programs like this, you are "selling out" the work based on the expediency of your own income needs. I understand this concern, as I have lived with it in my own mind in the past. As I roll out the BodyChance education eco-system in America, I have already heard complaints like these on the grape vine, mainly from senior teachers concerned that BodyChance will "dilute" and damage the future evolution of the work. In this blog, I am going to explain why I believe these concerns are unfounded. The anecdotal evidence I have points to the opposite conclusion – if more of you do this, it is a good thing for us all. Please – start considering what your students would like to learn with you in a more structured way? What can you offer them? Have you ever asked them: "If I could offer you a certificate course, would you be interested?" If they reply by saying: "What kind of course?" you know they are interested! Now the key is to find out what would interest them enough to buy? BodyChance is opening a 2 year certification program – BodyThinking - that offers practitioners in other fields "Alexander enhanced" skills in their area of chosen expertise. Interest groups are piano teachers, voice teachers, dance enthusiasts, chiropractors, masseurs – get the picture? So why do I think this is a good thing? In Japan, I can't count the number of people who joined BodyThinking or ThinkingBody telling us "I only want to do the 2 years program. I do not want to become a teacher." The result? They all continue to complete the program and get their BodyChance Alexander Technique Teaching Diploma. That's not hyperbole – they all end up continuing. That's the major reason why BodyChance now has 130 students in Teacher Education in Japan. When I go into a room to teach them, I know they all want to be teachers, I just realise that some of them haven't quite caught up with that yet. So lesson number one: feed your courses in sizes people can consume. When your service is great – and isn't yours? - students will be asking about the next course they can take. They don't want to stop. So keep offering them! I was discussing this topic with Eileen Troberman this morning, and she offered a second reason why this will benefit us, not harm us. Many of her students have been with her for years and years, they are teachers of various kinds, have many of their own students, and it never occurs to them to pass themselves off as Alexander Technique teachers. Of course they use the information they have learnt in their teaching, but they emphasise "… I am not an Alexander Technique teacher, I just learnt this in my lessons." Lesson number two: Given the opportunity to go deeper in a structured "certificate" course, students wake up to the extraordinary skill set of an Alexander Technique teacher. It humbles them to appreciate how much more they have to learn.  Most decent people respect that. Most. Of course there are a few that won't, and it's a shame they are able to pull our focus to them, the minority, when the greater majority are experiencing real benefits and pleasure attending your "certificate" course. The majority, far from pretending to be teachers, in fact become advocates for the work, letting people know that "oh, I am using what I learnt from Alexander Technique" and encouraging more people to learn with Alexander Technique teachers. That's a great world. I love that world. Go for it.