[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Join the conversation and the Pilates community on Instagram @pilatesteachersmanual and visit buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts to support the show. Today's chapter starts now.
Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to [00:01:00] season three of Pilates Teachers' Manual. Wahoo! Over 30 episodes of the podcast and 6,000 listens and I've got some fun stuff happening on Instagram, too. I'm calling them a Pilates PSA series. So if you don't follow Pilates Teachers' Manual on Instagram, you should.
I'm kicking off season three today with a brand new episode on finding your voice as a teacher. And I mean that in a literal and in a figurative sense. I'll share some of my story of how I've come to find my teaching persona, my teaching personality, and share some tips to help you feel maybe more confident while you're teaching and just be able to share more of your fabulous self with your students.
Some ideas for literally finding your voice because it's really important when you're teaching, when you're leading a class, that you're speaking both loudly and clearly. It doesn't matter if you have the best personality in the world if [00:02:00] people can't understand you. Especially while wearing a mask, if you're teaching while wearing a mask, it is doubly important to speak very loud and very clear so that everyone in the class can understand you and get the most out of what you're saying.
I have a background in theater and I think of a lot of theatrical warmups in terms of just warming your voice up so that you can speak really well while you're teaching. Tongue twisters are fun, or just practicing speaking loudly. It's always better to speak louder than not. I've never had anyone ask me to speak quieter. And obviously you're not putting people on full blast while you're talking to them just one-on-one. But when you're leading a class, you want to be heard.
Other things to kind of keep in mind, especially if you're teaching large blocks of classes where you're teaching for two, three, four, or five hours at a time. You should drink some hydrating beverages. It's good for your vocal chords. It's good for your throat. That's tea with honey and lemon or warm water is really [00:03:00] nice. Cold water doesn't I feel as good in my throat when I'm teaching.
And avoiding drinks that are really high in caffeine, dairy, and alcohol, which, I mean, obviously you shouldn't be drinking while you're teaching, I hope. Specifically caffeine and alcohol are dehydrating your throat. So if you have a big teaching day, don't drink a ton the day before cause it can dehydrate your throat.
Dairy causes your throat to produce more mucus, which I don't know if I'm lactose sensitive and I notice that a lot, but if I drink like a milkshake and then teach, I just have a lot of phlegm and that's not ideal.
When the seasons change- so for me, going into spring, going into fall- my throat feels dry. I do have some seasonal allergies, so I keep cough drops and not even like medicated ones, just like honey, like the Ricola cough drops I really like, and those just keep my throat soothed so that I can keep talking constantly for several hours at a time.
Figuratively finding your voice is also important because when you have a [00:04:00] personality that you can share with students, that's how you get a following in your classes. That's how students know that they like your classes because they like how you make them feel while you're teaching. And a lot of that stems from your teaching persona.
These people are coming to your class because you are an expert in Pilates. That's why they're there. They want to learn from you. But in addition to having the knowledge that you have because you've gone through your comprehensive teacher training program, they also are really drawn to you. You, the human being, you know. You have so much information about the Pilates method and the way you share it, the way you teach, is as important as what you're teaching.
You have the opportunity to help people heal from injuries, to help people get stronger and more flexible, to remedy past negative experiences with exercise. You have to share that. Like you are in an [00:05:00] ideal position to help make people's lives better. And instead of that idea making you feel more pressure, I hope that helps you feel joy and excitement that you're like, yes, I can help. You just have to share what you know.
I see finding your voice as a teacher as related to your confidence in teaching. Because when you're really confident in your ability to teach, then you can play and explore and really let your personality shine through.
So when you're just getting started teaching, I could tell you from my personal experience, that there's a lot of nervousness around speaking publicly, about forgetting things or what the spring settings are. You have all the information you need, but you're not really sure of yourself just yet. The remedy to that in my experience, what I've seen other teachers doing, is that you really over-prepare for your classes. But at that time, it feels like just the right amount of preparing, you know. Like looking back I'm like that was a lot, but while you're doing [00:06:00] it, it's the complete appropriate amount of preparation to feel comfortable when you're teaching.
I consider this to be the notecard/notebook phase, where you are really planning your classes down to a T. You're planning your exercise transitions, your equipment transitions, you're writing everything out and your class plan is really rigid. You kind of cling to that plan, like a safety blanket, and you don't really veer off of that path because you aren't comfortable enough yet to do that.
This is also a common kind of stage in your growth as a teacher where over-cuing is really prevalent, because you think that you have to say everything to get your point across. What you find, like while you're in this stage and then as you continue to grow in your confidence and be more comfortable, you'll realize that you actually only need to share like 10% of what you know, and just sprinkle it in so that clients and students don't get overwhelmed.
This is [00:07:00] the part of your teaching where you're practicing until it becomes automatic. So you're writing out those notecards, which is so important because writing out those notecards helps you then not need to write those notecards. The sad thing about this stage, and I know it's just a stage, it's just something that you're working through, you're passing through is that you don't share as much of your personality because you aren't confident without following this really rigid plan.
When I started teaching at Club Pilates a few years ago, I was teaching about 20 hours a week and I was writing 20 notecards a week for all of the classes that I was teaching. Completely writing out exercise transitions, equipment transitions. It was a lot of work. It was exhausting. It's not sustainable. I did that for a couple months and then I started to like write less. And now I'm at the point where I don't write out notecards at all.
Things that really helped me gain confidence in my teaching [00:08:00] was practicing stream of consciousness narration while I was working out. So if I was doing some exercise on the reformer, I would talk to myself, out loud, what I was doing, how I would tell someone else to do it. And then also practicing mirroring right and left. That's really important as well, especially if you're teaching virtually.
The more you practice teaching, the more you talk through what you're doing, the more it kind of becomes something that plays in the background. You don't have to think as much about what you're saying, so that you can start to pay attention to what's happening in the room around you, and then start to make adjustments.
From that stage, you get a little bit more comfortable. You can become a little bit more laid back, sometimes through necessity. You might still be planning your class, but looking at the notecard less. And if you forget what's on the notecard and you can't like casually peek at it, you have to start to think on your toes. You have to start making adjustments on the fly. [00:09:00] And that is the most important thing that you can do as a teacher. Then you really have to look at what's happening in the room and then teach to the bodies in front of you.
You cue less because you start to see when cues are landing and then you don't need to keep talking about the same thing if people have already understood it after the first or second thing that you said, right. You just move on to the next thing. Or, even better, you start to speak a little bit less and let people feel it for themselves a little bit more.
After a few months of writing those notecards, when I stopped writing those notecards, I still write down what I want to teach or what I'm thinking about teaching. But it's just like a note in my phone that I think about before my classes, but I'm not checking while teaching. Again, because you've taught so much, because you've made those notecards or written out those class plans so obsessively.
Now you have this in the background. Okay. I need to do arms. I need to do legs. I need to do abs. I need to do side body, front [00:10:00] body, back body, full body. And you just kind of have that checklist running, and you don't need to maybe even adhere to the order as much, because you just know what you need to do in class. You get to engage with the people in your class a little bit more, and this is where your personality starts to come out because you're with the people who are in class with you.
Even beyond that, where you really start to find your voice as a teacher is when you let yourself relax. When you can just teach the bodies in front of you and maybe you planned a class and that's not the class that happened because the person that came into your class today has a herniated disc and all of those cool flexion exercises you were going to do are no longer going to happen, you know, or you're going to need to have something else for that person.
You get to engage with the people in your class. You get to watch them and watch the way they move and then teach things that are actually beneficial to them. You're in the room, you're reading the room, and [00:11:00] your plans get a little bit more general.
Here, your personality really gets to shine because as much as what we're teaching is Pilates, we're just people, and we're people with other people, and yes, we're teaching them about movement, but they're also bigger than just things that move, right.
You now begin to control the tempo of class. You're almost like a conductor that you can play with the class structure, play with the class speed, change the exercises up. You start to play more.
Coming up after the break, I'm going to tell you more about how this play and how this ability to change on the fly is really going to help you in terms of finding your voice.
Hi there. I hope you're enjoying today's chapter so far. There's great stuff coming up after the break, too. Be sure to subscribe [00:12:00] wherever you're listening and visit buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts to support the show.
There, you can make a one time donation or become a member for as little as $5 a month. Membership comes up some awesome perks, including a shout out in the next episode, a monthly newsletter, a monthly zoom call with me and more. You can also visit links.oliviabioni.com/affiliates to check out some sweet deals on products I use and love. Now back to the show.
When I think about my teaching voice, I think about amplifying the best bits of myself. I think about almost like acting and playing a character that's me, but like [00:13:00] me 2.0. Olivia the teacher turns on when I say, "Okay, party people. Let's get started. It's Pilates time, have a lie down on the reformer. Get ready for footwork."
You can definitely fake it till you make it. You don't have to necessarily be that person. You can pretend, for lack of better word. Things that help are wearing clothes that you feel good in and teaching things in class that you feel comfortable with.
Just through this practicing, through continuing to teach, through teaching lots of different types of bodies, you begin to feel out your personality. And it should be a personality that you don't feel exhausted by playing. It should be something that you feel good playing. You can be calm. You can be serious. You can be a no nonsense teacher that just gets down to brass tacks. That's fine if that's what works for you.
My teaching style is I'm a little louder. I'm a little bit bigger. I don't [00:14:00] go to a place where I feel tired or it feels like a drain, but I do stand up a little bit taller and I do get a little bit more excited about the things that we're doing than maybe I would if I was just talking to someone one on one. You find what works for you in terms of being the teacher.
I love having a playlist that has all of my favorite music on it, and I like sharing facts about the music with students when I'm in a place, when they're in a place that we can actually be people. I will share with them that, you know, this is Blackpink's latest collaboration with Lady Gaga and maybe your pelvis wants to dance to this song because it's an absolute bop, but what could you do to stabilize your pelvis instead? Can you decrease the range of movement in the exercise? I let what I'm passionate about, what I like, be something that helps people get into their body.
I use jokes. I use silly analogies. [00:15:00] I sing, actually, a little bit and I dance a little bit. Because that feels good and effortless for me. And that's how I engage with students. That may not be your style and that's fine. As you teach more, as you figure out what personality feels good for you, that isn't tiring, that is actually energizing for you.
You get to go beyond the exercises. Like something I've been playing with is downstretch. I work on a Balanced Body Studio Reformer. It's taught traditionally on a red and a blue. Fun. Okay. But could I take downstretch and do it on a red, or do it on a blue? Or do it facing the other direction? Oh my gosh. That's prep for control front. Right?
You can begin to play with the exercises, and the things that interest you about the exercises you can really go to town on. If you're a classical teacher, the way you teach is going to come through. [00:16:00] As a contemporary teacher, I can really go all over the place and just play. As a classical teacher, what you choose to emphasize the way you choose to cue the exercise, what you want students to pay attention to, that's all going to contribute to your interpretation of Pilates. And every teacher has their own interpretation and no interpretation is better than another, unless safety's involved, like safer is always better.
So your teaching style, your voice as a teacher may not resonate with everyone and that's okay. You don't have to be everyone's cup of tea. I joke when I teach intro classes, you know, I think that I'm amazing, but if you don't like my style, every teacher has their own style. Like I really encourage you to come back and try class with another teacher.
Your spin, or the way that you to communicate the exercises and the movements to your students is really your legacy as a teacher. And I'm not saying go out and change [00:17:00] everything or that the traditional Pilates exercises aren't valuable. But I think that there is some value to sharing your take on the exercise. That's what students are really going to connect with. And when they like you as a teacher, they like the way that you experiment with things and play with things, that's how you grow a following. That's how you really become a teacher that students want to take classes with because they resonate with you. You're as important because you're the transmitter. You're sharing the Pilates with them.
The more you teach, the more you'll find out for yourself what works for you. It is something that I encourage you to be curious about, whether you, if you take notes about your teaching, I always like to write down when something like really worked so that I can do it again and do more of it. Just love where you are. If you're still figuring things out for yourself, or if you're just trying to find something new, like love that place that you're in [00:18:00] and learn what you can from where you are.
Those hundreds of notecards that I wrote, I still have and I look back at occasionally when I'm looking for inspiration, because I did meticulously write down what I was going to do with the springboard when I was doing arms. And that's so important. You can then learn from yourself.
I encourage you as you're teaching to try new things in your body first, and then if it felt good, if it felt interesting, if this made you think about the exercise in a different way, share that with your students. It doesn't always need to be the traditional exercise, in my opinion. I think part of what keeps it so fresh is the fact that you're engaging with it. Because you have your own practice and you're learning things for yourself in your body and you're growing. You then share that with your students and the way you share that is your voice.
If that seems like a lot, or you feel like you're not there yet, don't worry. You will [00:19:00] get there. The more you teach, the more you practice, you will continue to grow and change as an instructor. Even if you love where you are as an instructor, you'll continue to grow and change as an instructor. And that's fantastic.
I believe in you, I believe in your ability to communicate the exercises. And I think you're doing a great job. Have an excellent week and I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for listening to this week's chapter of Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. Check out the podcast Instagram @pilatesteachersmanual, and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen.
For more Pilates goodness, check out my other podcast, Pilates Students' Manual, available everywhere you listen to podcasts. The adventure continues. Until next time.