TTT01 - The Day I Decided to Give Up

This last year - 2022 - was a difficult one.

I started out in confusion. I was getting older, the pandemic exhausted me, and I knew that my BodyChance school would die if I didn't do something about it…

Trouble was, I no longer had any enthusiasm or drive.

I remember the moment I finally gave up - it was in 2021. I had gathered together a team to revitalise the marketing. My specific job was to re-launch a campaign that had been successful many times in the past. It was almost ready to go. The email sign-up was done, the invitation page, the nurturing email series - everything was written. All I had to do was change the details of when the course would run. I was at my dining room table - which mostly serves as a desk in my tiny Tokyo apartment - and I had spent an hour just looking for the places I had to change. Then I realised - in the past, it would have taken no more than 15 minutes to do what had now taken me an hour…

What was wrong?

"I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE !"

I shouted it out loud to my empty room, and it felt momentous. 

That was the end of BodyChance as I had known it for 21 years. From that point on, I completely stopped marketing, stopped writing - I stopped trying. And, of course, the school slowly collapsed.

But Alexander is industrial. 

I often tell that to my ATSuccess members. Everything is slow, it takes a long time to build anything strong, and a lot can go wrong. In terms of tricky business models, it aligns with airline companies. Yes, it is THAT hard, albeit in a different way. The positive part is that it also takes a long time for a successful school to die - several years in fact. From our early successes, BodyChance had built up a good cash reserve, so we lived off that. For the last year, I stopped taking out my salary - which assuaged my guilt a little - but I could still see from the financial reports that my cash reserve was dwindling and D-day was coming.

What would I do?

This is the first in a series of daily emails exploring the challenges of communicating Alexander's Discovery.