Your marketing should reflect who you really are — the person you clients are going to work with. If you try to market as if you were the person you think is a marketer, your prospective clients will get a distorted image of you!
Does your advertising — for your practice, your workshops… yourself… reflect YOU, or the person you think you should be, or have to be in order to be successful at advertising?
I can understand if the question itself is confusing — it comes from looking at a lot of online advertisements for Feldenkrais® work, and wondering what it would be like to go to a workshop taught by the person who advertised it!
The thing is that most times, your relationship with your students or clients begins long before they show up in your practice. What they expect from you is consistency. Whoever you’ve let them see before they come is who they will expect to learn from once they make the decision to work with you. That means that you can’t leave your body when you advertise — you need to find out how to make it comfortable to stay inside your skin, and advertise as yourself!
If you are conflicted about who you need to be in order to ‘sell’ your work, it will make problems for you once your clients arrive in your practice. It’s possible to create a persona and ‘be’ someone else for brief periods of time, but it’s really hard to keep that up in every interaction for an indefinite period of time.
The thing is — not everyone is your client. You are not everyone’s Feldenkrais® practitioner. To get more clients, and to make a practice that makes your heart sing, what you want is to find the people who are a great fit with you… then things make sense. Life is easy. Work is fun. You make a bigger impact. People refer more people just like themselves.
The key lies in finding your own natural ‘selling’ style — the one that goes hand in hand with you natural teaching style. That way, when you let people know what you do to help them, you’ll be attracting the people who want what you offer once they commit to working with you.
I’d love to know what you think about this approach to getting more clients. Leave me a comment — and if you want some information on how this could look in your own practice, let me know you’d like to talk about it!
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“People often fail to derive all the benefits of any method of readjustment, because they want to both change themselves and at the same time remain as they are. This is not only the result of believing that they can keep their habitual personality and change only those features of their behavior that they do not like… but it is also the result of habitual inertia.” — Moshe Feldenkrais, in The Potent Self, p. 185
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