W05.07 Guest Post From Eleni Vosniadou in Reply to My Case Study...

On Sundays, as I continue my free online course for Alexander Technique teachers on my 12 Point plan to build a financially successful practise I am offering each teacher who submitted their situation for a case study a chance to reply to my comments. Last week I wrote a case study of Eleni Vosniadou. This is her reply…

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from Eleni Vosniadou

From the very beginning of my ‘Alexander journey’ a series of extraordinary coincidences has taken place, bringing me to a place of happiness way beyond my expectation. One of them was Jeremy’s decision to start blogging systematically at exactly the time when I finished my training and moved to a completely foreign country with the wish to start making a living from the Alexander Technique. What more could one ask for? Out of the blue appeared a guide, a teacher and a companion in this difficult and completely unknown process.

It has been three months now that I have a teaching room. It is all very new and the possibilities just vast. There are 10 Alexander teachers working in the world’s eighth largest city in population. So, there I was looking for my niche, looking for the people I will address, as it took less than three months to understand that addressing everyone just doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work easily...Reading through Jeremy’s suggestion on a possible niche of ‘Musicians In Pain’ I was struck by how my business-ignorant mind would never have narrowed it down so much, thinking ‘but I won’t be inviting the rest of Sao Paulo and that’s a lot of people!’. But that was exactly it! It has been too many people I have been trying to invite! And it has been exhausting...As Jeremy addressed my own case, my mind opened up to the possibility of seeing a bit further in the process, and really start getting what he has been saying about niching all along: ‘you are not trying to get all the people all of the time, just one kind of people all of the time’.

But what struck me the most in Jeremy’s niche suggestion was actually ‘undoing the story that binds me’. ‘Musicians In Pain’ is a niche I am very much looking forward to dive into right now. It just feels right. In reading Jeremy’s simple question ‘don’t musicians suffer from pain?’ an unexpected truth was revealed to me: my story of a past traumatized relationship with music-playing had been keeping me from connecting or even remembering that musicians can be in pain. In my mind up until now, musicians had been a completely separate category from the ‘people in pain or discomfort’ that I really have an empathetic connection with. Then and there it became clear that my process of personal development (which is the only thing I mentioned to Jeremy in my ‘Success Drivers’) is not separate to the process of building my small business. It is one unique process. And this realization gives me huge joy and provides an unbeatable motivation to keep seeking financial success, as in my case, finding ways to build my small Alexander business successfully is now one with a happy life in a completely unmaterialistic way.

At this point, it seems like a whole new more ‘directed’ direction is available and I am very eager to start experimenting with it. As Jennifer Mackerras put it last week, I feel like ‘I have been given permission to think the unthinkable’. Thinking of my future niche these past few days, I already connect to them in a way that I haven’t for the ‘rest of Sao Paulo’! All the familiar teaching procedures that I have been reproducing this last few months suddenly don’t seem enough or appropriate for the combination of my niche and me. I am ready to start creating my own methods and forms, an idea which - even though familiar – hadn’t really crossed my conscious or unconscious mind up to this point.

But before going there I will take on Jeremy’s next suggestion, to take a good, detailed look at my story. It has only been ‘looking ahead’ for some time now, and it seems necessary to integrate future and past at this point, so the present can be somewhat lighter. 

TOMORROW: How Tom Made $1 Billion From A USP 

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