Feldenkrais Practictioners have a lot of work to do!
If I asked you to list the things you learned in your Feldenkrais training, I’d guess you might not include “how to fill my practice with wonderful clients.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that most practitioners don’t realize they learned nearly everything they need to do to get clients and keep their schedules full, while they were in their training. Why do I say that? Because Feldenkrais practitioners all around the world write to me, call me, send me Facebook and other social media messages asking me how to get more clients.
So chances are, you teach classes, you give private lessons… you know you learned how to do that. But you may not know that you received the keys to your own success during the time you were lying on the floor, practicing with partners, watching FI demonstrations, listening to lectures, absorbing the Feldenkrais® Method into your very being.
It’s not your fault if you ‘didn’t get that part.’ It’s not your trainers’ fault, either. Having been a trainer for more than 20 years now, I can honestly say that there’s hardly enough time in the training to communicate working-with-people skills, let alone figure out how they translate to getting-people-to-become-clients skills.
To be honest, for most of the 35+ years since the San Francisco training where I first met Moshe Feldenkrais, I didn’t understand it, myself. I didn’t get it until I’d invested years of effort (and an amount of money that makes me glad I’m not running for for public office because I’d have to disclose it) in learning how to generalize what we teach in the training so that it becomes the basis of filling your practice.
But the thing is, that while it might be nobody’s fault that you may not have all the clients you want, it IS your problem, and it affects the people who would be working with you right now, if only they knew how to find you and understood enough to commit to it. More than that, you’re the only one who can take the actions that will make a difference.[Tweet “It’s not your fault that you don’t have enough clients, but it IS your problem.”]
Which brings me to this series of blog posts. For the next few weeks, I’m going to focus on uncovering ways in which your training gave you exactly the tools you need not only to work with people, but to help them commit to wanting the work. I’m going to show you several skills I know you have and several ideas I know are familiar to you, and help you see how they can be used to help people understand the value you offer and why they should commit to working with you.
In today’s post, I want to do just one thing — help you see that people really need the gift you bring, no matter how much experience you have, no matter how afraid you are to begin, and no matter how difficult you think it will be to face your demons.
I created the infographic below because I want you to see the urgency of the situation — and that if you don’t have enough clients, it’s really important that you do something about it as soon as you can, because too many people are hurting. And keep in mind that this is about one, very small subset of the people you were ready to work with as soon as you graduated from your Feldenkrais® Professional Training Program.
Not having enough clients is a problem you can solve. Take the first step: click through to the next post at the top of the page!
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