How to inspire your Pilates or yoga students with new knowledge…

Who doesn’t have a pile of manuals, notes, notebooks, handouts, and other training materials lying around? I do! So much actually that it all has to have its own bookshelf in my garage.

But…

How often do I look at it?

How much of it have I been able to successfully integrate and inspire my students with?

Five percent, maybe 15?

Attending trainings, learning new information, being mentored and staying in the role of student is awesome, necessary, even crucial, but my question is:

• How effective (or rather how much MORE effective) could we be in integrating our new knowledge into our teaching?
• How could be more smoothly and with greater ease use new material and insights to inspire our students?

My guess is that we could all be a whole lot better at it and I want to explore just how to do that!

Dosing: For ourselves and our students

In large part what I think happens is that we get a new nugget (or a bag full as the case usually is) and we don’t even know ourselves how to connect the dots. We run home to our studios and eagerly awaiting students and we throw new verbal cues at them, new hands on assisting and adjusting and we try to squeeze it into the framework we’ve been working in — the framework they’ve grown accustomed to responding to and IT DOESN’T WORK.

It doesn’t work because:

First of all, we can’t see the big picture.

• The problem is that we let our excitement, and in truth our ego, get the best of us and we begin to disseminate information before it’s had a chance to fully incubate.
• We are stuck in the micro view of the new information. Like looking at cell structure through a microscope, we’ve got our eyes focused too myopically to see how the information relates to our current or previous knowledge and how it will reinforce, support, enhance and infuse what we are already teaching.
• We don’t ask ourselves the question: How is this going to make sense to my student? Or how will I best introduce this material in a way that relates to the path we’ve been on.

Case in point:

I attended a wonderful workshop with Dr. Eric Cobb, founder of Z-health, last November at the PMA. He introduced some truly amazing information, much of it over my head, having to do with the benefits of vision training on the body’s pain patterns. Needless to say it was WAY cool and I wanted to start adding it in right away!

As most of us do, we come up with a list of students whom “this would be great for!” and then we imagine spending the first 15 minutes of a session doing the appropriate testing, explaining etc.

But wait a minute, is that really going to work? To our students it may seem like wasted time.

You are now cutting into a high-priced service where they are used to getting x from you. You try to explain the benefits of the new “method” and how it all fits together, but you’re not really doing a good job because you’ve had exactly NO experience using the material outside of the 15 minutes in your workshop. Not to mention they are confused and likely getting frustrated.

Myself and another teacher I know both attended this workshop. She reported back to me that she had a difficult time integrating this material, not knowing exactly how to connect it or when to introduce it, or even how much time to take with it in a session.

I felt nervous about these same things, but here’s what I did that provided me with a slightly different outcome:

• I kept practicing on myself and shared the knowledge with other teachers in my studio first because reiterating it and verbalizing it is a GREAT WAY TO stand back and see it more from a “macro” view.
• When I was ready, I also chose my students carefully.
• I chose people who were dealing with chronic pain
• Who were curious and easily excited about new discoveries and information
• Who were patient and didn’t mind taking time out of their “regular” routine
• I had to really “know” my clientele and know the material well enough to see who it might fit and who it definitely would not fit.

Be Realistic and Patient

Secondly:

• I had to stand back and ask myself what pieces of this new information were relevant to my current teaching mode, style, and knowledge base?
• What was so far over my head that I wouldn’t be able to articulate it without falling on my face? (Because it is a mistake to try to take EVERYTHING even that which we don’t understand and share it with our students!)

We can learn lots of really cool stuff, but we are not always ready to pass it on. The second mistake we make is believing that ALL information is USEFUL information.

Get Organized With a Long Term Plan

Thirdly — and I know this might seem ambitious but it works:

• We need to steady ourselves and focus on one method, idea, perspective at a time and see how much mileage we can get out of it.
  • This is difficult for most of us because we are distracted by SHINY OBJECTS. We want all the knowledge NOW! and we don’t want to take the time to really see the potential of the information we already have.

Information is just the first step. As Einstein said “The only source of knowledge is experience.” If we don’t apply information, it never becomes knowledge, it get’s lost in a stack of papers, that we never return to.

Sooo…Here are a few ideas of how to get organized with a long term plan:

• Give yourself TIME to review, integrate, and assess new material.
• ASSESSing is key:
  • Take specific parts of new information (see above) and begin to integrate it over the course of 2-4 weeks.
  • Work with it in your own body and on students who will be most receptive or other teachers.
• REASSESSing is the second key:
  • What are you doing that is working? What is not working?
• GO BACK TO THE SOURCE:
  • Ask questions directly of the presenter or other master teachers who are well-versed in the method you are trying to integrate.
• KEEP ONLY WHAT ENHANCES YOUR STRENGTHS AND YOUR TEACHING!
  • You may not be able to successfully integrate ALL of the method or material now. Keep only what is providing greater success for you and your students!
  • One big mistake we all make is working to turn our WEAKNESSES into STRENGTHS. Don’t do that! Spend your time making what you do well even better!

This last one is truly worth remembering. Our students are attracted to us for our strengths. If we keep enhancing our strengths more of the right students will keep coming our way, we have better student retention and we feel more fulfilled as teachers! If we try to be something we are not, specifically trying to define ourselves by how much we can improve our inherent weaknesses (and I just mean what we are not naturally talented at) then we are creating inauthentic teaching paths. Our students see and sense this and will eventually migrate away.

OR…Need A Short Cut?

Okay, I realize that all of this may seem like just another something to do…and before I go on I should say that the options mentioned above REALLY ARE WORTH IT as a part of continuing to cultivate a STRONG, AUTHENTIC, and LASTING teaching career.

However, sometimes we do need a short cut.

Well, here are suggestions about making this process a little simpler and still successful:

• Only take ONE thing and play with it for a week or so and see how your students respond:
  • If they love it, keep it.
  • If they don’t (or your not getting the effect you’re looking for), drop it — for now or maybe forever.
  • Repeat.
• Set it ALL aside (don’t study, to re-read or re-visit) and just see what comes out of you naturally.
  • Keep your material out somewhere you will see it, but don’t pick it up until you have the inspiration or motivation to do so.
    • **This tact is based on the premise that you can LET YOURSELF OFF THE HOOK and just let the process be more organic. It also only works if you are willing to spend lots of time and money learning something new and feel confident that the material will trickle in in just the right way in the right time. Not everyone will feel satisfied with this approach, but it is a way of honoring what you can do RIGHT NOW.
  • Make a plan to re-visit the material during a time when you can really dive in:
    • When you want to offer a workshop
    • Create a new program
    • In preparation for another training or specific time of year.
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These last few suggestions are not what I would call optimal, but I want you to know that there are lots of approaches. Sometimes we just need to see them all laid out in order to decide what fits us best.

As always I feel like the process of bringing awareness to different aspects of our teaching is really the KEY and that’s what we’ve done here.

With gratitude,

Chantill