Maintaining your joy in teaching Pilates
Do you still feel joy in your Pilates teaching? Can you find those moments of happiness each day in your Pilates teaching? What brings you joy in your Pilates teaching? The longer you teach Pilates does it seem harder to maintain and keep that joy each day?
In our podcast “Finding our Joy in Teaching Pilates” we wanted to end the year by reflecting on those moments in our Pilates teaching that bring us joy in the Pilates studio during sessions and beyond the studio after our sessions as well.
Finding joy in what we do every day can be a challenge. Even when we enjoy our careers and our daily routine, our jobs are still work so it's important to find the things that we appreciate, the things that inspire us to keep going, to keep moving forward even when it's tough.
Pilates teachers choose this career not to be rich or famous or to get kudos from our Pilates clients every session, but to help people, to connect with others, and to share our love for movement and health. Our passion for the work is in helping people with pain understand and manage pain, for clients to gain more mobility and freedom in their movement, and to build stability and confidence as they get stronger in their practice. Our main goal in teaching Pilates is for our clients to feel better when leaving our studio than when they came in.
After decades of working as Pilates teachers, we know how challenging our jobs can sometimes be as we stack session after session, new client intakes, scheduling each week, billing late cancels, and explaining the same thing again and again.
Around the holidays we can take a breath and a pause, to tap back into our passion for teaching and inspiration since at this time of year it is easier to share gratitude and joy and to reflect. Teaching Pilates every day especially when we are teaching full-time and feel like we have been on that “hamster wheel” can start to feel like a grind. These are the times when it's especially impactful when a client brings joy into our day, reminding us that what we do makes a difference.
While we have control over how we react to situations and can try to remind ourselves of what we enjoy in teaching Pilates, it's always so invigorating when our clients share their appreciation as well. The little things clients do to show us they appreciate our work, expertise and time generally show up around the holidays with little gifts and cards. It's a time of year when people share more and feel more reflective as the new year approaches.
But, at other times of the year when we occasionally get that random text from a client that says how much better they feel after their Pilates session that day, it is so rewarding and so energizing. Sometimes a client will share how they can now walk farther without pain, or they realized they can now do a movement they never thought they would be able to do before. Maybe their golf swing improved, or their low back pain diminished. It's those little moments of gratitude and relief that clients experience and share with us that keeps us doing what we're doing. These messages convey the purpose of our teaching in their words to us, reminding us of the deeper reasons why we teach Pilates, the joy we bring to our clients, and the purpose our clients give to us.
Think about that the client took the time to a. think about you and what you have done for them and also b. to sit and text or email or call you.
We all have certain clients who we really connect with and have the privilege of teaching. When we teach these clients we feel joy and gratitude for being able to teach them and remember what we love about Pilates. With these clients either our personalities really click and there's an ease and flow in the sessions when we teach them, or they're deeply interested in learning and are always engaged and dedicated to their practice, or we enjoy teaching them because they are dealing with a certain injury or issue that we are fascinated by and enjoy working through with them. Maybe we even learn from teaching the client!
We can think about the client who came to us due to an injury or physical trauma. They are dealing with things in their lives that are challenging and difficult, and yet, each week they show up for their sessions, they show up for our expertise and their practice. They are focused, appreciative, and ready to do the work they need to do. This client never complains and has a positive outlook on everything as they work in the studio. We can take this with us and realize no matter how bad things can be there is always something to be appreciative of in life.
As teachers, we know that even in our own Pilates practice how important the studio time is for our own mental and physical health. To have that time to focus, breathe and connect to our mind and body, and forget things going on outside the studio for an hour during our session that may be challenging.
It is the same for our clients. Remember that through our sessions we are bringing them space away from their struggles, time to connect for themselves, and joy.
So how can we maintain joy in our careers and reconnect to our passion for what we do in the difficult or less rewarding times throughout the year?
First, we must always remind ourselves why we chose this profession. We want to help people as much as possible, help people in pain or discomfort make sense of what they're dealing with to be able to move forward into a more self-sufficient and capable life.
Recognize how everyone will react differently to situations, so we can't take anything clients say too personally. When people are in physical discomfort or in new situations they tend to be afraid and angry and may react strongly to seemingly benign situations, so we can't take their emotions personally even when it seems directed at us. For this same reason, we can't ruminate on failures or overly celebrate the successes of clients.
There are so many factors outside of our control that impact our clients, so it is beneficial for us to maintain a healthy boundary with clients and our work. We should also be gentle with ourselves, remembering our client's journey is not a reflection on our own skill as teachers. We don't have to know everything all the time, and it's healthy to embrace and acknowledge uncertainty. We can't judge our skills as practitioners on how quickly clients master the method or improve from injury. Instead, let's focus on how we improve clients' understanding of movement, strength in their bodies, and how to manage discomfort.
To maintain joy in our work it is important to take care of ourselves and take at least one, ideally two, days off each week to make time to do things outside of Pilates, anatomy, and kinesiology research. By taking some regular time off completely from our work we become better teachers and practitioners. Having outside interests is refreshing and restorative so when we get back to the studio we can reconnect more fully without any resentment or burnout holding us back.
We can then become more resilient, adaptable, genuine, and authentic in our practice. After a break, we can reconnect and be more focused and able to adjust to any client in front of us. Being able to fully focus allows us to adapt our practice and our thinking as our clients change, as we learn more, and as evidence advances, we then adapt our practice to the client in front of us.
The most important element of maintaining joy in our practice is being ourselves. We must do what makes sense for us, adapting our teaching to not only the client in front of us but allow our practice to reflect our own genuine and authentic approach. While we always focus on being kind and caring to our clients, we must also be able to care for ourselves as well to reduce the likelihood of burnout. Similarly, we must create our own path in our teaching. We can have mentors and other teachers we look up to but we don't need to be exactly like them, so we can appreciate and embrace our own styles and connect to our own inspirations.
When we need those moments of joy throughout the year during the grind, we can reach out to a client after their session in a little text or email to check on them as well. Not only do clients appreciate our taking the time to reach out to check on them, but it also gives them the opportunity to share something they may have been thinking about.
Since we're in our studios working with many people every day it's easy to forget how important the hour is for each individual client. We can let them know that teaching them brings us joy as well. Keep that conversation going and growing as you work with your clients. Enjoy those small moments when a client brings us joy, inspires us, and invigorates our teaching. Let them know it makes you happy to be there for them.
Keep that conversation going and growing as you work with your clients. Enjoy those small moments and when that client brings you joy, thank them. Let them know it makes you happy to be there for them.
