M03.01 Places

Judy Champ was a cheeky middle aged woman from Australia who first asked me: "Jerry – how's the Mackenzie method going?" "The what?" Of course she meant Alexander Technique, and Judy ended up training at my school in Highgate, London. That school, influenced by Walter Carrington and the Dart Procedures, was big on crawling, so Judy and a few middle-aged ladies that had joined the school at the same time, loved to scurry about our rooms on their hands and knees, thinking primary control, primary control... Whenever an unsuspecting visitor came to check out the class, Judy made a point of crawling that day. She'd commandeer some of her older lady friends, hide at the back, and just as the visitor was about to walk to the kitchen for tea break, suddenly a group of middle-aged ladies would appear, crawling through the door… "Excuse me…" And then a procession of them passed under the nose of the startled guest. It was fun. But mostly my school was boring. Fun was what made it bearable for me. I loved my first year, then hated the last two. I would hide out in the kitchen, avoiding most of my teachers, as I preferred to avoid the manipulative authority I was subjected to under their hands. There was only one teacher I loved, and she touched like a feather, yet after her lesson, I felt transformed. (It was the primary reason I decided never to use force with my hands – and I almost never have.) The place you create for learning will decide if people continue or not. I was passionate about Alexander Technique, yet after two years I left for 6 months. This month I am going to explore "places" in all it's aspects:

1. Geographic places
2. Virtual places
3. Routine-related places
4. Skills-related places
5. Emotional-related places

  One of the primal instincts of humans – indeed all mammals – is a sense of belonging. One of the biggest fears we have is being outcast – this is what generates our strong need to be a part of a something bigger than our Self. Almost every successful business you could name utilizes this strategy to gather and keep people within the fold. It's called "brand loyalty" and it is the holy grail of any marketing strategy. Your customers buy because they trust you, because they believe – realistically or not – that you are the best. One-to-one Alexander Technique lessons do not build a functional community. When you are exclusively bound to the form of one-to-one lessons, you will face constant efforts to retain your pupils longer than 3 months. Of course some will stay, and stay for years, but the majority will run out of steam, wonder why they are still going, and use a vacation, an illness or some interruption to regular lessons to stop coming. You just never hear from them again or, if you lucky, you get an apologetic "I want to continue but…" message of some kind. Ever had any of those? Here's the problem: you are the only person they connect with in your business, so if they don't "click" with you, they don't have a strong emotional bond that pulls them back. There's a lot to explore about this: welcome to Step Three: "Places"