Day Nineteen - How To Teach People To See Invisible Things

Are Yoga, Pilates and other “fitness” schemes so different from Alexander Technique? Alexander Technique teachers suspect they are fundamentally different, but for the public it appears that all these methods, including ours, utilize the study of movements to improve posture, cure pain, and bring about well being with greater awareness. Our outcomes appear to match - even if our methods are different - so our claim that “we are not like them” falls on deaf ears. Many teachers feel frustrated by this, and keep wondering “How can I let people know that I am simply not like those other things?!” For you I’ve got bad news - it’s not going to happen. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. The ordinary public will always lop you in with all the others, and may even feel suspicious if you start getting too hysterical about how different you are. It’s one cause for the demise of Alexander’s work in recent times - our messaging is no different from other methodologies, and they do a better job of communicating it. One reason they do a better job, is because they have more money to do it with. Internationally, how many companies are there in the Yoga world with full-time staff, a brand, multiple studios, a marketing department, a budget? You couldn’t count them all. How many in the Alexander Technique world? Oh that’s embarrassing. Maybe two. Are you getting the picture now? How can you, a single operator, compete with that? You try to claim you are different. You try to differentiate your work. But how are you different? Go on - try it now in your own mind. Explain to me in one simple sentence what is so different about Alexander Technique and Yoga, or Alexander Technique and Pilates? If you can’t accomplish it in one simple sentence, you’ve already lost. Why? Most people will not read beyond your first sentence. Essays don’t cut it with busy people - they want it served up in a simple-to-understand sound byte, or not at all. Put your sentence in the comments box below - I’d love to read your attempt. Personally, I doubt many readers will even attempt it - those in my Facebook group are challenged by me to write this up there - but those who do will discover this: finding a sentence that a Yoga or Pilates person could not also claim as indicative of their work is harder than you first be imagine it. So - is all hope lost? Of course not, I wouldn’t be here writing this blog if I believed that. How Can People See What Is Invisible? What makes this difficult is that the thing that differentiates us is invisible to people. Hey - even when you study Alexander Technique, it’s remains invisible to you for a long time. It takes years of training and observation to be able to understand how the relationship of the head/spinal complex is so fundamentally important to every single thing we do. If it was really so clear and obvious, why didn’t someone discover it before Alexander? The is light years beyond the simple Pilates concept of “building your core” but try telling them that. It’s insulting, even if it’s true. Pilates can eradicate back pain, bring about well being and awareness - all things most Alexander Technique teachers also claim on their websites - but it is unlikely to transform your relationship with your mother, or open up your emotions to the sexual abuse you suffered as a child. Alexander’s work will do that. It will transform your life. (oops, so can Yoga.) It comes back to Alexander’s concept of “primary control” - you won’t find that anywhere else. However, this is invisible and even those who study for years easily ignore it, as I wrote about last week. I have renamed it our co-ordinating or organising movement (core) and have contrasted it to what I call the activity movements (things you do). People are forever attracted to activity movements, and Yoga and Pilates are rich in those. What distinguishes Alexander Technique is a lack of those, and that is hardly an appealing marketing message! (Unless you think HoBoC or Whispered AH are killer activities?) We deal with the invisible. Adventitious movement patterning is not easy to see, forget about selling it! As Alexander once eloquently put it: “The things that don’t exist are the most difficult to get rid of.” Which I would paraphrase to "The things that don't need to exist are the most difficult to explain." These are all related to how our activity movements are being informed by co-ordinating movements. Have I lost you? Imagine how it must be for the public! Who you are - who you imagine your Self to be - exist within the expression of your activity movements, which are profoundly influenced by, and influential towards, your co-ordinating movement. This is such an integrated thing that it is was not seen by anyone till Alexander spent 10 years looking for it.* We haven't got ten years. We haven't even got one year. We've got rent or a mortgage due this month, a car to run, mouths to feed - we have to find a way to sell this damm thing or go back to what we did before we trained. If you’ve got this far - congratulations. My explanation is based on leading you into a way to make your Alexander business work… If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them. My solution? Get into the activity movement business. You do that by becoming an expert in a collection of movements that people love to study. Yoga is a multiple collection of movements, each with it’s own unique viewpoint. So you become a Yoga person, within the Yoga niche, and you start talking to them about the problems they have, with the movements they do. This is how an Alexander Technique teacher can insert her Self into any market. Not by claiming to be different, but by claiming to be the same - but with a deeper and more expert knowledge, demonstrated by the explanations you can give and the results you can deliver. This is called niching Alexander to an activity, and it is a core value that drives the learning in my ATSuccess coaching group. Developing your business means developing your service - isn’t that obvious? Teaching skill development and biz development are intimately interconnected. That’s why this month and next we have been exploring how to teach in a group setting. All the information is now there to study, the only step is to join with us in the group. And continue to study with us. Those who are in my group realize the intimate connection between what you teach and how your business grows. Anyone is welcome to join - 47 of us now - and the monthly cost is less than a private lesson. You can join here: http://atsuccess.com/membership-plans And as for those already in ATSuccess group, your homework - in case you didn’t notice - is to write the one sentence that explains what makes your work so different in the world that you are niched to… https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/ *I believe this invisibility is reflected in how the senses are commonly perceived. It’s no coincidence that the mainstream perception of "five" senses leaves out the most fundamental and critical sense - the sense of Self, which arises from a matrix of proprioceptive information. The sense of Self is so there, so obvious, so everything, that it escapes our notice, reflecting the same invisibility of the head/spinal complex. Dr. Garlick’s nice little primer on Alexander physiology summed it up well: The Lost Sixth Sense.