Be A Volunteer In Your Own Business

Money never motivates you.

Sure, we love to have it. We think about it a lot. But it’s not money we seek – it’s freedom.

It might be freedom from a past. It might be freedom from a situation. It might be freedom from an identity.

Many successful entrepreneurs – enough to establish a pattern – have an origin story of epic proportions. Often one of their parents died or disappeared on them at an early age. Another is abject poverty: the “rags to riches” story. Another is a clever, misunderstood kid out to prove something.

Whatever.

Underneath your urge to have (just a little) more money is a deeper reason, lurking in the dark, waiting to be found.

If you don’t know it, you don’t know what motivates you. Then, money is never enough. You want more and more and you are still unsatisfied because what you seek remains unrecognised and distant from your everyday actions.

You can ferret out your motivation by imagining your Self as a volunteer in your own practise.

What would satisfy you then?

In fact, there are many teachers of Alexander's discovery who do just that: think of themselves as doing a civic duty, or calling it their “hobby” or even a “vocation”. However, you need an already existing level of financial sustainability to achieve this.

What if you don’t have financial security?

What if you need to make money to pay the rent, to feel secure, to have a sense of accomplishment.
These are the three steps you need to follow:

1. You need training
2. You need clarity
3. You need results

1. You Need Training

Why invent the wheel all over again?

The concept of the modern business first began in the 19th century. There are volumes of incredibly insightful information readily available. Ironically, your current knowledge is enemy of new knowledge – the misconception that you already know.

Alexander teachers can readily understand this from their own learning experiences.

When we think we know, we do not seek the unknowable. There’s a simple way to demolish this active: if you really know how to build a fabulous Alexander practise, why haven’t you done so already?

Many teachers dodge this question by becoming a victim of circumstances: blaming their predicament on where they live, their lack of resources, or the subtlety of the work itself. I have indulged in all of the above. Except it’s a lie. I can be successful – anywhere – and I am responsible for that. There is no excuse.

Do what you have to do: listen, digest, reflect: put your Self back in training.

2. You Need Clarity

Training inevitably raises great questions.

One of my mentors in the Real Estate business lived by this rule: seek questions, not answers.

Your question flips you over into answer you need.

I had a vivid experience of this last week when a little girl I knew declared: “I don’t know how to make mashed potatoes”. I thought – she does know, she just needs to ask the right questions. Let me test this idea right now I thought.

This is how my experiment progressed… (the girl answers IN CAPS):

• - is mashed potato soft or hard? SOFT
• - is this potato soft or hard? HARD
• - Can you mash it like that? NO (silly!)
• - how can you make the potato soft? I DON’T KNOW
• - when Mum cooks carrots, what happens to them? THEY GET SOFT
• - how do you make a potato soft? COOK THEM LIKE CARROTS?

Clarity comes out of asking the right questions.

However, you need coaches or mentors to lead you to questions. Usually it doesn’t happen by itself. You need to put your Self into an enquiring environment. These days I read a lot of Peter Drucker’s work. I do so, because the questions he poses lead me to insights in how to lead BodyChance towards the future I imagine for it.

Are you in training yourself?

Are you asking questions? If not, how can you create that structure in your life so that it happens, even when you don’t feel like making it happen…

3. You Need Results

Results will motivate you to continue asking questions.

This is one of the biggest challenges I face in ATSuccess – the 12 step program I devised to help teachers build successful practices. I often tell new students: Alexander is industrial. By this I mean you need a lot of R&D to build a successful business. It is not quick.

One big reason for this is that you invite a person to change their behaviour.

This is an intimate and hugely demanding request. No-one is going to give you consent to mess around with their head until they know, like and trust you. Trusting is what makes Alexander industrial. To win trust you first need empathy. And that takes time to build.

Students ultimately don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.

Empathy grows out of knowing a particular community of people really well: their struggles, their challenges. You build a deep and detailed mastery of who they are, what they want and how to offer it to them. This takes time, and effort. You can’t grow a community like that in a month, or even a year. It takes several years to do.

Alexander is industrial.

Or at least, the ATSuccess version of Alexander's discovery is industrial. First you must recognise that YOU are the brand, not Alexander. Alexander's work is the tool you use, not the benefit. The benefit is specific to your community: only you know how to express this, and how to deliver it in a way that makes sense to them.

I encourage teachers to invent their own brand, and ditch Alexander Technique.

Of course, behind your brand is Alexander's discovery, yet that is a different thing from all the cultural baggage that is lugged around in the “Alexander Technique” community.

Results come in stages – and money is your final stage.

First, make your Self well known. Make your brand appealing to your community. That’s why you want to start out as a volunteer in your own business. And it’s also why you seek training and clarity – so you continue renewing your focus on the ultimate prize: a deeply satisfying business that sustains you financially and fulfils you emotionally.

Start your journey by asking: what motivates as a volunteer in your own business?

Obviously, it isn’t just money. This leads you to recognise those deeper motivations that must be satisfied if you will ever be able to sustain this effort over a longer term. As you recognise this, you seek the training that keeps you focused on the income side. When I first started out this journey, the very cost of my training was one of the key reasons I stayed focused and clear!

I figured out I was spending 12% of my income on training – when I had a family to support!

Now I have a measure of job security, and an even deeper sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It can be done. First you need training. This leads to clarity. Clarity is how you get results. Results motivate you to continue to train. As FM put it so well:

“The experience makes the meat it feeds upon.”