If there was an easy way to empower & inspire your students so much that they stuck around long enough to experience the full value of what the alexander technique has to offer, would you be willing to…
Dreams…When you first realized the power of AT
and you thought of sharing it
Justify failures…Selling anything is hard but try to
sell something about process to endgainers is impossible. Even Alexander had trouble.
Allay…WE have something that is so valuable to everyone that it’s just a matter of figuring out how to frame it.
Confirm suspicions…That Alexander wasn’t clear and went off the deep end and our teachers followed suit
Throw rocks…Yoga, Felden, Mindfulness, Meditation
A super simple activity that teaches inhibition
SEAN VOSLER
“Common sense” you might call it. It’s our built-in ability to
feel someone's pain, even if we’ve never experienced it, it’s our desire to feel connected to others; our
natural distrust of the unknown, among thousands of other intuitive connections.
The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.
― William Arthur Ward
They need to be our hero.
The person we’re rooting for to succeed.
Who’s trials and pitfalls hurt us when we see them stumble.
Indeed they must become our greatest hope, and we - their greatest ally.
To give our hero
what they desire… even (and especially) if they don’t know what that is yet.
The skills will help shine a light on what
makes the human mind tick.
We as writers are the guides who help lead the audience
to the promised land… to reach their end goal.
Is your Alexander practice more like a hobby than a business?
s your Alexander practice more hobby-like than a business-like?
it’s about unlocking our ability
to help our audience - to bring them out of the darkness and into the light.
To fight
for them, to push them, to pull them, to help them become the best version they can
be; all in relation to the product or service we’re persuading them to purchase.
and a business without customers isn’t a business it’s a hobby.
It’s about building a connection between your reader, your brand, and what you're selling. One
that is built on trust; trust that is developed by posing an (1.) argument, (2.) proving it correct,
and then (3.) delivering on the promised result your product or service was designed to fulfill.
METHOD
PLAN
MECHANISM
RECIPE
FORMULA
ROUTINE
RITUAL
TACTIC
The process is straight forward: 1. Follow a set of step by step
instructions, 2. Create something, 3. Review what you’ve
created by referencing it against examples and ideally get
feedback on what you’ve created*.
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs
and developing our wings on the way down.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
The Headline & Sub-Headline
1.
HEADLINECapture Attention
Frame the Problem
SUBHEADLINE
Hint at Solution
Address Main Objectionis email is for the reader to be inspired
to register for a webinar that’s selling my course on XYZ, I want
them to see the pitfalls that befall those who don’t take XYZ actio
Research
Write A Brief
Take out a piece of paper, at the top write a brief description of
what you want your reader to gain from reading your piece, and
what they should be inspired to do by the end.“Example: My objective for this email is for the reader to be inspired
to register for a webinar that’s selling my course on XYZ, I want
them to see the pitfalls that befall those who don’t take XYZ action.
Visit popular aggregation websites like digg.com, reddit.com,
news.google.com, medium.com, buzzfeed.com, cracked.com
If you’re new to this it can be helpful to spend a few moments analyzing
“why” the headline works. Is it stoking curiosity? Is it confirming a
belief? Is it opening a loop in our readers mind?
What is it that captured our attention in the first place?My
“I help_______ achieve/do________ ,so they can__________
without_________
Wharobjective for this email is for the reader to be them to see the pitfalls that befall those who don’t take XYZ action.
1. ThreeEasyQuestions™
3EasyQuestions™ is my approach to teaching constructive conscious control. It’s based on the simple discovery that when a person directs their attention to places of relative ease in their body, the head/neck reflex is facilitated.
Here’s how it works:
When exploring the possibility of easier movement, after inhibiting, in the gap between stimulus and response, instead of traditional orders or directing, you quickly assess these three things about yourself in sequence:
This gentle, but focused curiosity about the ease you’re currently experiencing shifts your attention in a way that circumvents your usual habit patterns.
It facilitates the Primary Control which reorganizes your movement on the fly, allowing you to perform the activity with increased ease.
As a form of Constructive Thinking, 3EasyQuestions™ allows the actual direction to come from the natural adaptive response of your nervous system.
You make a conscious choice to direct your attention to ease and then stand back and notice what happens. This prevents you from imposing a habitual feeling-based concept of forward, up, head, neck or body upon the process.
3EasyQuestions™ is a new take on constructive conscious control that is so easy to implement it can be taught to a brand new student in a first lesson.
In the hands of a teacher, it also becomes a potent self-healing tool that reveals and erodes deep habitual patterns that tend to be imperceptible & therefore impenetrable.
TheÉtudes™ are the “lightweight” home study activities that students do for a few minutes every day. They form the practice material they use to actualize what they are learning in the group class.
Like the Études in classical music pedagogy, these are studies; opportunities for students to learn specific skills in a simplified, focused setting. When done regularly the Études…
The Primary Concern is the foundational concept that underlies all of PrimalAlexander. It is the root formulation of the self-experimental process that Alexander pioneered. The Primary Concern takes the form of the question:
What’s happening to my Use as I _____?
(with any activity occupying the blank)
When you can ask and answer that question a few times during an activity, you’ve begun to “think in activity” and it’s the key to understanding how the “end” you’re trying to gain is affecting the “means whereby” you’re using yourself. Namely, how the manner in which you are doing things NOW is affecting your present and future ability to function efficiently.
Asking that question brings the “end” and the “means whereby” into the same frame so that you’re able view the changes in each simultaneously.
That way, when the way you’re doing something begins to interfere with your coordination, you become aware of it and have a chance to make a change.
That’s the bigger picture of how the Études function in Primal Alexander. Through consistent daily practice, they quickly teach a student the value of “thinking in activity” and a simple way to do it.
The quote above is from the beginning of the use of the self; it’s it’s Alexander’s summation of his work. In my opinion, The key to getting the most out of Alexander’s discoveries is to follow him (as best we can) down the road of self experimentation.
As a step by step, systematic learning and teaching process, first and foremost, Primal Alexander™ is designed to improve your Use by teaching you, how to EXPERIMENT!
That is, how to use movement, experimentation, observation and desire for change as the means whereby one can systematically improve the quality of one’s own Use of themselves.
By applying a unique kind of directing and a graduated series of self-study “études”, Primal Alexander™ provides students and teachers with a straight forward, easy to follow blueprint for continual improvement.
It’s a self-healing process that uses Inhibition & self-observation to create a gap between stimulus and response that allows our native movement intelligence to preempt our habits of movement while reinforcing the neural pathways that lead to better Use right now and in the future
In that gap, our native movement intelligence can offer up an alternative to our habitual way of moving while it reinforces the neural pathways that lead to better Use now and in the future.
In this course you will learn how to become aware of (and then subsequently untie) the psycho-physical knots that limit your effectiveness as practitioner and teacher of the Alexander Technique.
With an assortment of new tools and objective feedback from me and the other members of this course you’ll be able to enhance and refine your teaching much more quickly, assuredly and easily than you can on your own.
Here are some of the training assets:
The HandsFree Teaching skills you will acquire in this course will enable you to teach authentic and powerful Alexander Technique lessons in situations where hands-on guidance is either not optimal or, in some cases, not even possible.
The bottom line is that you’ll discover an elegantly simpler way to “stick to principle” and “Think in Activity”. And you’ll do both more fully and more often in your teaching and in your daily life so that you can more deeply enjoy and share Alexander’s wonderful work with the world.
If you’ve managed to get this far, the odds are that you probably have a pretty good idea of what’s on offer here.
In early March, when the Corona virus crisis became inescapable, so did the need for Alexander teachers to at least take a look at teaching online.
More than 700 Alexander teachers showed up for the workshops I taught with the help of Jennifer Roig-Francoli those three weekends and it was wonderful to able to share some of the things I’ve been exploring.
Now, just a few months later, lots more people are both teaching online and training teachers to teach online which is great thing for our community, for the world and for the work itself.
While it’s certainly true that after taking this 12 Week introductory course you’ll be better able to adapt what you already know about teaching Alexander’s work to possibilities and limitations of this new medium, the real value of what you’ll be learning, I think, goes way deeper than that.
On the personal side, you will have in your possession a brand new set of tools that you can use to literally follow in Alexander’s footsteps.
Your increasingly acute self-observational ability when combined with a deepening commitment to change through experimentation will greatly speed the improvement of your own Use of yourself.
On the teaching side, all the wonderful work you’ll be doing on yourself will infuse your lessons with new insights and a new spooky sensitivity.
You’ll be able to use your deepening empathy and clarity to help your students to first uncover and then untie their habitual psycho-physical knots on their own.
Primal Alexander, Level 1 is more than just a few activity tricks that you can do with your students online until this Corona virus cloud lifts.
It’s a first look at a rich, robust and nuanced new angle on the groundbreaking science that Alexander invented more than a century ago in order to save the career he loved so deeply.
It’s also an invitation to become part of a lively international community of like-minded learners that continues to expand…
It’s an additional means whereby your personal growth can instantly become the gift of transformation for your students and anyone you come in contact with…
Finally, for anyone who loves this work, it’s another way to utilize and share the many amazing treasures that that constitute The Alexander Technique at a time when the World just might need them more than ever.
Thank you for your attention. I hope you decide to join us in class!
Cheers,
Mio