Victoria (Guest blog)

Victoria Stanham is an Alexander Technique teacher working Montevideo, Uruguay. She volunteered to be a case study in my free three month online course "12 Steps to Financial Success as an Alexander Technique Teacher" earlier this year. I guess I was wrong that Montevideo would be ripe for an Alexander revolution, but experiencing Victoria's insight, determination and intelligence from reading her story, I am confident she will prevail in her market. Alexander is industrial, but with a clear long-term plan, you will succeed. However, Victoria's is a story of the fortitude and courage that preceded her business building - many of you will identify with this, and be inspired by the way Victoria faced her deep, personal crisis… *** The Story of Me & the AT Abstract In 2005, I returned from the USA with a B.A. in theatre arts, 28lbs extra body weight, and a raging depression. I was 24 years old and had no idea what to do with my life. Thankfully I had left the USA with one other precious thing: knowledge and experience in the Alexander Technique and some vague idea of a method called Pilates. Floundering between psychotherapy and dieting, and holding a boring job that paid the rent, I started taking lessons again in the Alexander Technique and enrolled at a Pilates studio. Movement changed my life. As I opened up and released in my body, the extra weight melted off without any further dieting, I reconnected body, mind and soul, until I finally realized they were and had always been just ONE thing. Today I feel a confidence in my SELF that I had never dreamed of possible before. Better still, I have acquired the skill to look at movement and understand it, and have the tools to unravel its workings. Today no movement challenge (be it of body, mind or soul) scares me long enough that I cannot stop, inhibit my habitual reaction to it, and work my way through to a different approach. 1. The panic attack that set my life on course How far do you need to go to finally scream out “Enough!” What has to happen for you to decide to put an end to your suffering? And in that dark night of the soul, when you face again the dreaded “to be or not to be” question and “to be” wins by a meagre margin; what tools do you have to ensure that this time it will be different? I cannot remember how many times I found myself at that crossroads, how many times I picked myself up only to trip over the same old rock again and again. I do remember however the last time I found myself there… because it was the last. I had recently accepted a new job at a school, teaching drama to kids. True it is that when I was offered the post something in my body had tensed up, something had already gone into alert-mode; but I decided to ignore the warning and “be an adult”, after all this was a great offer, I needed the money, and I’d done this sort of job before with great success (albeit great stress). What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Not two days into my new post I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by a deep fear of facing each lesson. I would hyper-ventilate, go into emotional flooding, feel my temples throbbing, my thoughts go out of control, my heart racing. As the days approaching each set of lessons (I was teaching twice a week) approached I would go into full-flung fight-flight-freeze mode: I couldn’t prepare for lessons without breaking down into anguish. The worse thing was knowing that my fear was completely irrational and uncalled-for. The stimulus was infinitesimal compared to the magnitude of my reaction. And yet there it was, despite all my years of therapy, of Alexander Technique, of work on my Self. The situation became so unbearable that I found a replacement teacher and turned in my resignation. With the disappearance of the stimulus, peace returned, but guilt came with it. Looking back on my life I saw how this pattern of emotional overwhelm had been repeated ad-infinitum in every area of my life, and how I had always dealt with it: running away or squashing the fear beneath a thick layer of cynicism and disconnection, until I became jaded enough to survive (no pain, but no passion either). Seeing how ubiquitous this pattern was I decided it was time for some REAL change. I wanted to be free, to dream again, to really feel. It was at that point that I finally took up the reins of my life. I was in my third year of Alexander Technique teacher training. Alexander Technique was supposed to work on our basic reaction to stimuli… so either I wasn’t being taught the real stuff, or I was not listening close enough to understand the true import of this Work. That’s when my search for the true essence of the Work started. It took me a couple more years to understand why this technique had been my go-to place for so many years. But I’m running ahead of myself. This trip from emotional disconnection to self-empathic connection, from psychic disintegration to psychophysical integration, from physical discoordination to mindbody coordination, and from mental disorganization to peace, starts many years before the panic-attack episode. 2. Out of Touch It’s painful to be out of touch. I was an alien to myself, cut off from my body and my emotions, these foreign, scary, pain-filled experiences. I was a zombie; a very socially and politically correct zombie. How long I’d been out of touch with myself I cannot say, perhaps forever, perhaps I’d never fully come into my body in the first place. Who knows. It’s scary to be out of touch. There are no inner references so all references are copied from outside. Through external validation of my thoughts, feelings and actions I learned to function normally in society. I learned fast, I was a good student, top of my class from nursery through college. But people… people were a different matter. School subjects were “logical”, people on the other hand were everything but. All alarm bells would go up as soon as rules were changed, and they kept being changed. What people says is good today, is not so tomorrow; what people says is what should be done, is not what they really do; what people say they want is not what they really want because I could see they weren’t truly satisfied when I give it to them; nothing made sense. I blundered and hurt through my relationships, always feeling disconnected. People started scaring me, although I never said this out loud, even to myself. I lived in a hostile universe, a frightened child in the dark. Little by little the hole in my soul started screaming. Problems with friends at school, with weight, with body image, depression, anxiety, pain. I did the rounds of therapy, diets, doctors. My body was always an issue… I started dieting and fearing being fat at age 10. I was almost anorexic between ages 11 and 13. I suddenly ballooned up (despite rabid dieting and exercising) at age 16 when I got my period. I hated my body. Then theatre appeared. Acting served as a crutch that I clung onto for ten years. Acting became my outlet. Through each character I portrayed I would let slip those emotions I would be too scared to experience in real life. I could be whoever I wanted without being judged, for Vicky wasn’t the one doing those naughty naughty things, it was the character and she was fully justified. Living in the “emotional moment” of a play allowed me to connect to those raw emotions that a scene partner was portraying. I lived for those moments when everything would dissolve and the play became “real”. Improvisation work killed that. It suddenly got too real, no masks behind which to hide, no set dialogue, I found it far too exposing. With my crutch pulled from under me, I withdrew from the theatre never to act again. 3. Re-establishing contact Around that time I took up Alexander Technique lessons once again. I’d come into contact with it in my college time in the U.S.A. and had taken lessons for three years. At the time I’d thought I kept taking lessons because of my voice. That was my excuse to myself and the world. Now I realize why I kept returning even though I never became a great singer, nor meant to become one. My teacher and her husband made contact with me. They cared, they listened, they were there for me. And the touch! Barbara had angel hands, and I had never been touched or allowed myself to be touched with so much presence and love. Taking lessons from Barbara was a soul nurturing experience, and my starved soul loved every second of it. And I had started learning to see my body as a wonderful, intriguing work of art, something to be investigated. Back in Montevideo, I took up Alexander Technique lessons again. Having no prospects or dreams left (theatre and acting fell through the cracks three years after returning to Uruguay) I was thrilled when my then Alexander Technique teacher announced she was opening a School in Montevideo. The three years of training were excruciatingly difficult for me. I was confused and scared through all of it. I had no idea what made me return day in and day out for this ordeal of breaking through my bodily, thought and emotional defences. But then there was the school director and her husband. They saw me as I was, they saw through me to what I had the potential to become, and they held that vision for me when I was lost. They cared and they made contact. And as they made contact with that hidden and lost part of me and coaxed it gradually and lovingly into the light, I could start making contact with it too. And it blew my mind! After the panic attack episode I mentioned earlier (it was at the beginning my third year of training), I found a superb psychologist who works through mind-body integration techniques and started making sense of the profound changes that the Alexander Technique was working on me. Finally I was comprehending, apprehending and integrating the full meaning of this thing called the Psychophysical Unity that Alexander talks about. And it’s that knowledge that I wish to share with the people who come to me for lessons. And as regards my weight and my self-image... That third year of training my body started shape-shifting dramatically. I had already lost quite a bit of weight during the first two years of training, but that last year it completely mutated into something wonderful… and with no dieting or strenuous exercising, I was just peeling off psychophysical layers and revealing the true me underneath. Today I am more fit and healthy and agile than ever before in my life. 4. AT as a business Sometime halfway through my training at EUTA (Escuela Uruguaya de Técnica Alexander), my school director’s husband (a Craniosacral therapist) gave me a copy of an article that linked the Alexander Technique to the enneagram. I was blown away by it! Suddenly I had found an Alexander Technique teacher who was clearly stating things I had long intuited. I quickly goggled this chap’s name and found that “Jeremy Chance” was (or had been) the director of DIRECTION (a journal I had always found fascinating) and had a school somewhere in Japan with (lo and behold!) a clearly tiered pyramid learning system. I decided then and there that I loved this teacher and subscribed to his blog feed (or page, or whatever it was at the time). I heard nothing more from him until September 2012 when suddenly he started feverishly blogging about (yes!!!) how to market an Alexander Technique career. I graduated from Alexander Technique training in December 2011 and started working with one or two pupils that my school director had kindly referred on to me. All through 2012 I had a minute trickle of pupils, never surpassing 6 (which is still my number) a week. They arrived mainly through referrals from friends and family. I tried flyers and business cards and helped out at introductory workshops run at the training school, but no new pupils appeared. All through that year I kept feeling something was completely off in my attempts at marketing and selling my services. I looked around at my fellow teachers and realized that those who had the healthier practices were the ones who were already established within a community that dovetailed nicely with Alexander work: singers who turned their voice pupils into Alexander pupils, physiotherapists who turned their PT patients into Alexander pupils. I was an English language teacher, my language pupils were NOT interested in Alexander work, they were mainly adolescents, intent on passing their ESL and IB exams. I was lost. I started despairing. Why would anyone ever take Alexander Technique lessons from me if I couldn’t even clearly explain what it was that I did or how it was different from Pilates or other “postural” techniques? And then Jeremy started blogging. At first I read his posts on and off. Soon he had me hooked. Here was somebody speaking right to the heart of my problem. When in December he mentioned about his three month Alexander Technique marketing crash course I dived in head-first. Ever since then my attitude and approach towards my “business” has completely changed. I started analysing the way I was running things and the way other Alexander Technique teachers and other similar businesses market their services. “Niche” has become my favourite (though sometimes most hated) word. Blogging has also become a pleasurable outlet for my thoughts. It’s not yet “niched” but it has allowed me to clarify my teaching philosophy. A niched blog and a webpage are my next steps to take. I cannot say that I have any more pupils today than I had last year. The number is still 6 pupils a week. But I have realized that those 6 share some basic characteristics, and 4 of them have been coming for over a year for weekly lessons. Now I am working on a sales funnel that makes sense to me. It is all still very scary and the phone is not ringing for any bookings. But I’m more confident in my skills, I’m clearer in what it is that I offer, and I have faith that sooner or later things will start coming together. Jeremy's comments

Wow. What a story - such courage and determination; your intelligence and heart both shine through your ordeal. As I wrote after Annie's story, I think your insight into behavioural change is a back-end treat for people, even the Psychologists if you are still pursuing that niche. (?) I spent a year trying to work up a nice on life coaching around deep, personal issues but found it tough going. What I have read from others confirms my experience - selling to fix broken people is a tough market. Which is why these days I think that depth of experience is part of the retention plan, rather than the marketing plan. Victoria - you are clearly good at retention! You mention in passing how some of you 6 pupils have been there from the start, so I hope you both rejoice and take in that salient information. If you did it with four out of six, that's 66% which is past extraordinary. Clearly the depth of your experience, which shows through your ordeal, is a real sticking point once you get into a relationship with a student. Keep pursuing that and get your numbers up, one pupil at a time. In terms of the story, it works well in this forum, and I've previously written about ways to re-engineer it for your niche. What is clear is that you have a gift for writing, and now need to hone that towards your market. https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/