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Tutorial #3881

Business, Yikes!

25 min - Tutorial
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Welcome to Lesson 5! Learning how to run a business is not usually covered in a teacher training program. Today, Niedra asks you to come face-to-face with the reality that you are in business and need to make money as a Pilates teacher. She encourages you to think of ways that you can increase your income so that you can thrive as a teacher.
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Sep 04, 2019
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Welcome back. Do you realize that you are unique, you are special. There's nobody like you in the whole wide world and I really want to congratulate you on all the work you've done so far. Spending this amount of time on delving in and discovering and uncovering what you believe, what motivating you, what kind of person you want to be as a teacher, what kind of person do you want to work with? Your ideal client. Few teachers ever spent this much time in self reflection and understanding who they are so they can get into alignment with what they believe in, what they want. Now, this great love you have in motivation that's brought you to reflect on becoming a teacher or perhaps you're a seasoned teacher.

You've been doing this for a long time or short time. I know that the initial motivation was love, passion, and interest and fascination in the subject and then you found yourself in the subject of business and we all go, yeah, oh my God, I want to run away from it because it creates this conflict. You really love something and now you're asking for money and you need money and it can create this dirty water situation where you may be finding yourself floundering or maybe sad to say drowning and we don't want that. We really want you to thrive. So there is something to learn here, something to look at and something to come up face to face with the reality that yes, you are in business. Yes it's done so you can make money and yes, this is a very honorable place for you to be because can you imagine how wonderful life is if you're actually doing something you love is sparking your stimulation, creating all this massive personal growth and you're doing it to help others and do the same for them and you're actually making an income from it.

To me that's an ideal life, so let's just untangle this and put the right parts in the right place and get ourselves in order on this so you can become a thriving teacher. The business side of teaching is hardly ever covered in teacher trainings. To be honest, almost any profession is the business side is not covered in it. In fact, in my opinion, the whole school system is insane because we send our kids to school, we spend all this time teaching them Geo geography, history, grammar, mathematics, computer war stuff, whatever. They learn all this stuff, uh, but they never actually cover making a living and having a job. Then you finish school or college and then you spend the rest of your life being stressed out over the fact that you need a job. Where is the job?

How to make enough money? And this pink elephant of our existence is kind of under the carpet and there's a lot of suffering, unnecessary suffering around it. Let's backtrack just a little bit and have a look at the types of people that attend teacher training. Really I like to see them as four separate group groups. Perhaps there are more.

Sometimes there will be fitness trainers, dancers, people already have some kind of job and they're looking to enhance their work or expand it. If there's somebody who's working in a gym, they want to bring the uh, the craft of [inaudible] and enrich what their service is with the clients that they already have as a client base. It can even be people like actors who re would prefer to be teaching and doing something that they respect and like and align with instead of waiting tables as a secondary job between the major, you know, performance jobs that they have. Dancers can often fit into this. Then you have professional people, people with a career and an income who are now deciding to jump ship and they want a new career, something more meaningful for them. This can also include a mom who's brought up a family and she's at home and now she wants to move on and start a career because the family's grown up. It's no longer there and she wants a full income, perhaps somebody going through a divorce and they're separating out the financial side of their life and they need to actually be making a living for themselves.

So this is the base specific category of people as well come through. Teacher trainings. There are those who already have a steady job and they want a secondary job or perhaps they're just doing it as a job, as a second job because they love it, but their majority of what makes them survive in life and pay their bills is coming from another source. And then they're those people that attend teacher training because they are very interested in the subject. They have no desire to be a teacher. They are actually just looking to enhance their education and learn more.

And sometimes they by accident become teachers because they realize they really like it. But their intent when they signed up was not that. Have a look and see which group you belong in. For example, with myself, I was a dancer, my, my direct line was to be a performer but I needed subsidiary income and it was a movement and was alignment and I was really into working with people. So I fit into that first group of part-time kind of full time. That later became full time. But I started out with a secondary motivation that was driving me.

You fit into one of these groups. So this is very important to know where you are and what is your needs as far as what this career is supposed to provide for you. So pause the video right now. Take a moment and write down what group you are part of [inaudible] depending upon which group you are in, each group will have their own unique design stressors and elements that need to be addressed. You must know where you want to go with this before you can design anything practical for yourself and actually put into motion something that will support and enhance the direction you want to go in.

Anything is possible when you know the direction of where you're going. And by the way, don't forget that gap here. You're standing right now and maybe you're realizing there is something you want and aspire to and you're not totally easy about it, but have a look and see. By the way, do you notice that the direction you want and you're going for has an alignment with your beliefs and your vision and your inner truth. This is really, really valuable. An example for me is I believe humans are supposed to move.

We are designed to be in motion. Movement heals movement makes us more healthy, more happy, so having a day that includes inspiring others to move and encouraging them to move and demonstrating how to move is really a win win situation for me to be honest, not just for them and if I'm getting money for that, all of us win even more so there is a relationship. Bring it to the forefront, have a look at it. If anything is being stirred up for you right now, pause the video, take notes. This is important. Now you are in business to make a profit.

In fact, if you go and look up the definition of business, it's a service or exchange of wants, some kind or another in exchange for money. Money is a neutral element that actually creates our whole economy on a worldwide basis. Think of it like a barter system. I'm going to do something for you and you are going to give me something back. I'll give you something that's valuable. You give me something that's valuable. That is a very, very origins of what money was based on.

And then eventually got tangled up with all sorts of other stuff. We will delve into it. But right now let's stay nice and simple. You're in business in order to get something back called money. And this is supposed to help you thrive. Now the next question is what does that mean for you?

What do you need in order to thrive on a minimal basis? What are the bills that you need to cover every month in order to have your baseline comfortable? So two questions I want you to look at right now. What is the minimum basics that you need? Let's say $500 a month, probably more depending upon where you live. But whatever. I just want, you want to know these numbers? And if you don't fake it, just do an approximation cause you gotta start somewhere and start learning to develop this muscle of knowing about finances. So what your basics.

And the second question is, what would success mean financially to you? How much would you want to be making that you would go, wow, I'm prosperous. I'm doing really well. You deserve to think about this because remember that ram, that reticular activation system in your brain, it's only going to look for things that will serve that vision. If you have it out there, if you're like me the way I used to be, I used to go, oh my God, I don't want to think about it. I don't want to look at it. I'm running away.

I hit my head in the sand and I prayed for miracles to save me and believe me, I know what that's like. It's not very comfortable and you can have anxiety hit you from the back and the side and then you write post positive statements on Facebook about how good the world is. But in truth, you're not dealing with the problem. So right now it's like let's get down to planet earth and kind of have a good, honest look at what we really, really need in order to be happy, be responsible, thrive and deal with our life ourselves. No one's out there to save us. We are saving ourselves now. And believe me, the power you get when you do this, you will never ever look back. Do that now and [inaudible].

Okay, so do you know where you stand right now, what your basic requirements are and a potentiation of what you would really, really like to make you feel abundant. And remember the gap. I mentioned this, I bring it up. You may feel quite uncomfortable right now. Do it anyway. And remember killing ants, if there's anything coming up, any negative self talk, doubts, criticism, resentment, anxiety, acknowledging it, breathe in all the possibilities that are there, what you believe, what you want, the kind of person you are as a teacher. Breathing all the goodness you know about and then release the negative thoughts we met and then realign there is more to learn and you don't have all the skills yet. So just keep walking forward.

Practicing the ability to move forward in spite of the confusion. Create progress and the progress is forever in your life. So how can we raise the bar on our own incomes? Unless you are in some kind of location where you're an employee, which is very unlikely if you're a [inaudible] teacher and you have a regular income that you know exactly what's coming in at the end of the month, you're probably an independent contractor in some manner, so you are being paid per client and or your studio manager or owners. So there is a up and down and an ebb and flow on the income, which I hope if you're a studio owner you're keeping an eye on, but how do we raise the bar on our income?

How do we make more, how do we provide more services that will allow us to teach and bring money back? Let's do a brain dump, a creative brain dump on all the different ways that you can make more from what you do and I will step to the side and go, very few teachers do that. They don't actually get creative about business if you are autistic, if you're a dancer, if you're an artsy fartsy type. And to be honest, I think most [inaudible] teachers are your creative and start using this creativity to actually design a life that's going to serve. So let's practice dumping every good and bad and trashy idea that we've got down because this is the process genius uses. It doesn't block flow, it starts flow. So bad ideas are as important as good ideas.

Here are some examples of ideas. Tell your family and friends that you teach [inaudible] and give classes. Do you know how many teachers I know are like anonymous? Nobody knows they do this. Go knock on your neighbor's doors, tell them what you're doing. They may be interested in coming to your classes. Very simple. Maybe make a few flyers.

Remember when we started to talk about your brand and what is special and what you like. Put a working with who you like to work with. See if you can design some kind of simple flyer around that. Put it around the local coffee shops, put it in stores. Oh yeah. You can also walk around if you're in the city or in a town and introduced yourself to your fellow community. And tell them about what you're doing.

They may be very interested in knowing more about your services. Listen to the problems of what people are talking about and perhaps design a little course, a little workshop around it. My stomach is not being activated in stomach massage or I ma, I am so exhausted because I sit in a chair all day in an office. You could have a whole workshop about how to deal with thriving as an office worker with eight hours a day in a chair using PyLadies. Do you think businesses wouldn't like to welcome you in and teach a workshop like that?

You could become the expert and how to be a [inaudible] teacher for office workers. I'm bringing this up just to kind of stir your imagination. Listen to your clients and your students. They are always talking about their problems. Those problems are material for workshops that can be very exciting for them to pay you good money and you to creatively have a think about what's going on in what we can do. What can I do to provide skills and tools for them to do, to feel better about this workshops?

To be honest, if you're like a freelance teacher, you can go to other studios and also find out if they need more teachers or you can, if you're a mom with kids, you could start some classes at home. You know a lot of moms who do classes right in their home for the local community. You could go to the community center, you could give talks in the library about health and fitness and having good posture and how [inaudible] can help all of this. Oh, what else can you do? Retreats Get people for long weekend, I made a whole life out of doing retreat lifestyle by the weight. Super, super, super fun and a ton of work and you get really good money for it. So lots of ways. A little bit less, not just, here I am, I finished teacher training and my studio isn't giving me enough clients and I'm so stressed out. Get a little bit like, let's see. What ideas do you have of unusual, fun ways that you can start? Oh yeah.

Pilati is on the beach Sunday morning. I've heard of a yoga teacher who has a booming business with her open classes on the beach. And believe it or not, she gives everybody a headset. So only the people who paid her money can actually hear what she says. And she gets some live musicians and now she has a completely booming business. And you know what? She doesn't even pay rent. Very creative, very unusual, highly abundant and thriving.

And was it unusual ideas thinking outside the box. By the way, I highly recommend that because that will make you have so much fun doing things that nobody else are doing. So pause the video now. Dump. Take everything I said. If you like any of them and add to them and please do not censor your ideas. Let them flow standing with a plaque at the side of the door of the street going Pilati is teacher available. Want me? That's my sense of humor. Okay, pause the video now and please mind dump [inaudible] [inaudible] do you see how many ways there are to make more income?

Possibly make you very special and unique in your industry. The Sky is the limit. The horizon is always abundant. It's up to you to do just the same as you did with yourself as dig a little inside, get a little creative, and then take one or two of these things or three and start taking action on them and it will escalate and grow and you will grow enormously as a result of this. So now that you have your list, I'd like you to close your eyes and just span all these different opportunities and ideas that you just wrote down. Just feel into them. See if any of them resonated, made you feel kind of like, wow, that that's, I never thought of that. That would be fun.

And then take yourself into the future. What would it be like if you were doing one or two or three of these things? You were teaching classes that were abundant. Maybe you were running some workshops, maybe you were being invited into some businesses to give talks and ideas to the employees of things that they can do that would help their productivity and feeling good and healthy. Um, in this computer dominated world where we're all at desks, crunching our necks and shoulders and heads and really collapsing a whole structure, there is so much demand. So imagine what it would be like for you in six months.

You're making more money, you're more comfortable in your shoes. What would it be like even in a year or year and a half? I mean, just do this, play around. Imagine these things, make it good, make yourself happy with the Eh, this playful way of making money inside yourself. It all begins right there. Okay? Take a deep breath in. Take all of this fun, creative vision, place it in your heart center and then breathe out and open your eyes.

Well done. You've just created the first draft of a vision for your own business and I hope you feel a little bit more expanded. And as an aside, I also want to bring in a note about these visualizations and these little closing your eyes and imagining drills that we're doing. It is an important skill. Remember, practice makes progress. It stimulates your brain to start to have more ideas. It makes it kinesthetic in your body.

It is actually a skill that's being used by coaches, with athletes and champions. Now on a worldwide scale. Just to let you know that I've spoken to a man who was a diver who won the gold in the Olympics and he said that he spent as much time visualizing coming to the Olympics, getting out, walking to the diving board. All the people were, you know, talking and cheering and there were cameras and newscasters and so forth, climbing up, going to the diving board, diving down perfectly, coming out, getting out of the pool, going back to the waiting room, waiting for the next time. He's called calming out up until he ran through this whole visualization of what he aspired to, which included by the way, getting up on the stage or at the, on the stand at the end and receiving the goal. He visualized all of it and he got the gold and he said, what was amazing is, you know, life throws you curve balls and when you're there there is so much distraction and so much adrenaline and so much noise and so much stuff going on.

You can lose your direction and your focus, but he practice visualizing this so much that it was real easy for him and he never for a moment doubted what he needed to do next. This is the direction. This is the direction. So these little visualizations, very useful, very important. Don't ridicule yourself for them. Have Fun with them. They're free. And to end we have some fun practice. Practice makes progress. Please do this before your next.

You come to the next lesson. Look over your vision, look over your ideas, add to them, beef them out and decide on one thing you want to take action on. One action step you can take. Maybe it's telling your friends that you teach, walking over to your neighbor, knocking on their door and saying, I could see you Olympic today. I'm teaching some classes in my home, whatever. It could be big it pretty calling up in a business and offering something. I don't care what, but find one thing you can take action on and do it and then share with the community, right? What your visions are, what your ideas are, what you are excited about doing to raise the bar and make more money. Remember, you're doing this for money and you want to be paid for it and you're learning how to do it better and so share.

Look at what other people are posting. You may get a lot of interesting ideas that you didn't have, but when we share together, everyone achieves more and we can applaud each other and cheer each other on so valuable. We all in this together. We're all discovering how to thrive and we all want to give gift, the uniqueness of who we are as a teacher to the world. Next lesson. We're going to cover money management, so do your homework today. I'll see you in the next lesson.

The Teacher's Corner: The Secrets to Thriving as a Teacher

Comments

I love you!
Niedra Gabriel
Hani Maizlik Hunch   You make me smile.
Mj
2 people like this.
Thank you for your uplifting and very practical suggestions. You are a treasure!
So great!
Lina S
2 people like this.
It's so true we rarely learn about business. Thank you for making it fun. An inspiring tutorial!
2 people like this.
I really enjoy the business side of things, it makes me feel confident and secure when I have planned out and taken care of the scheduling,  policies, terms and fees etc....  When its clear for me, its clear for clients and that makes everything work better.   

Thanks for motivating me to get clear on my financials and my goals. 
Nannette B
2 people like this.
I want to share my most favorite vision with you. I'm dreaming of giving pilates or yoga sessions in the waiting room. For example at the doctor's. People spend so much time there and they could use it, doing breathing exercises or exercises on the chair :)
Thank you, Niedra, for encouraging us!!
Niedra Gabriel
I love your idea Nannette , what a cool vision - that is a business waiting to be created. Go for it!
Really great idea Nannette! Keep us posted! 
Robyn W
Wonderful lady. This has been so helpful to me. ‘I was swimming around not knowing where to start in starting as a small business Thank you so much. Such a wonderful talk, keeping your passion and seeing worth as a teacher. 
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