Working with the Bored Client
The practice of teaching is a practice of vulnerability. We are opening ourselves up to a student or client, sharing our experience, expertise, and practice with another person. For a teacher, it can feel intimidating to be vulnerable with another person, but we must be open and present in order to more deeply connect and share with our students. When we're teaching a movement practice, such as Pilates, we're opening up to an exchange with our client on both an emotional and physical level. Moving the body can be scary to some people, and because of this, we can encounter resistance, irritation, and harshness from a client that we otherwise wouldn't expect. Everyone has their own baggage from previous experiences, fears, expectations, and worries that we carry, and oftentimes we aren't even aware of how this baggage is impacting us in all the interactions throughout the day. As a teacher, we carry our bags, and our students and clients carry their own. We may never know how all of this will interact within a session until we are experiencing it in the moment. This is why there is always a teacher for every client, but not every client is right for us.
When sharing our practice with our client it can be quite upsetting for a client to criticize a session or give negative feedback. It is, however, important to be able to handle constructive criticism and to be able to take feedback, and then move forward to continue developing our practice. As we adapt along with our client's needs and expectations, we will continue to grow as teachers while our clients develop their practices, and we can then maintain clients for many years.
This continues as a conversation on the psychology of clients and working with different personalities. In every business, it is challenging to work with different personalities, needs, and expectations, especially in teaching where we are working intensively one on one for long periods of time. Here we discuss the bored client for a Pilates teacher, figuring out why they might say they're bored, how to give them deeper work without constantly throwing new exercises at them, and how we can stay calm in the moment of being told they're bored.
So, how do we handle a situation when a client claims that they are bored in their session, or that their Pilates session is boring to them? As we mentioned, this type of critical statement feels very harsh and can feel like a personal attack. In the moment we can feel like we were punched in the gut and our internal dialogue starts telling us we're bad teachers, we're going to lose a client, we're awful at this career… etc. Just like in any situation, it's important to take a moment to breathe. There is always space between a stimulus and our response, and the trick is to be able to find that moment to slow down and recenter ourselves instead of quickly reacting.
Even though hearing a statement like this from a client can feel hurtful, if we are able to give ourselves a moment of pause we can try to understand why the client might be saying this. At this moment we need to remember it's likely not about us. The client has their own baggage that they're carrying, so when they're in the studio with us, we must consider what we can do to help them connect to the work, leave their bags at the door and be present with us in the practice.
Sometimes a client will blatantly say they're bored, while at other times they just have a blank look and appear so, and sometimes we're simply mirroring our own fear that our client is bored or will become bored with us and their sessions. Whatever the situation is, we must remember Pilates isn't just about what we're doing, but how we're doing it. It's always about the specific body in front of us in that particular session.
We can check in both with ourselves and our client to make sure we're doing everything we can for this individual's needs. We can look at what the client is coming to us with, pain, fear of movement, expectations, or perfectionism, to try to understand from the client's perspective why they might feel or say that they're bored. Maybe they're not connecting 100%, not focused in the room with us. Often, they're thinking about other things even though they think they're in it, just going through the motions. Sometimes they do need to just move without too much thought and we can allow them to move through many repetitions of an exercise that day. But, if they are always just bouncing around on the reformer, not putting effort in, how do we as the teachers get the client more engaged? The more we focus in Pilates, the more challenging it becomes.
Are we teaching to this person's level, and are we connecting to their interests/goals/unique learning needs? There are many variables we can change in order to give more variety to the client's sessions without carelessly picking many different exercises to try to keep them entertained. We're not teaching them to keep them entertained, but we do want to help them engage with the work as best they can. Some of these variables include pace, duration, flow, variations of movement, transitions, and tempo. Repetition is an important aspect of the learning process, so there is nothing wrong with repetition. But we can use these tools to vary up the repetition as the client embodies the practice. We can cue them up to the moment in an exercise where they tend to get lost and then ask them to hold there instead of powering through, bumping them up to their edge of control. There are many options to change exercises instead of just always floundering around for new exercises to stay interesting. Instead, give the client consistency and then change the flow/pace, getting them deeper into the movement. They'll be more challenged in the long run, rather than constantly throwing something new at them, which will then eventually become routine where we end up back to them feeling bored.
Another factor to consider is that maybe the client simply doesn't want to put the effort in even though they say they want to be more challenged. Some people hate to exercise and don’t want to be in the studio with us. At some point, the client needs to meet us at the work. We can't pull clients along if they're not trying or if they don't want to be there. Occasionally, there is the client who thinks they're bored simply because they don't want to put in the work, and don't want to try. Bored clients often are the ones who really don’t want to put the effort in. They want us to do the work for them by asking us to give exercises that look hard, but we might not be able to if the client hasn't connected in their body in the proper way to setting up for that specific exercise, or achieved the prerequisite strength and endurance necessary since they aren’t putting in the required effort. The client may also have an old injury or pathology that prevents them from doing a fancy-looking exercise that they think seems fun but would be inappropriate for their unique needs. It's not on the teacher if we're trying to meet them halfway. We cannot do the work for them.
There's also the issue of the teacher putting their own fear of a bored client on themselves. In this instance we put our own fear of the clients getting bored on ourselves, creating more anxiety and pressure to be entertaining, creative, and novel as we teach. Many teachers deal with imposter syndrome, the fear that we don't know enough and worry that clients will figure out we're imposters and then get bored and leave. When we allow ourselves to believe that, we might give the client exercises that they're not ready for, throwing anything and everything at them to keep them interested. It's important to remember that while we're in the studio anywhere from 10-40 hours each week, our clients are only there 1, 2, or maybe 3 hours a week. We might feel like we're repeating ourselves and are boring because we're there all day, every day, but for the clients, this hour or two each week in the studio is new for them. It's their time to focus on themselves, chat with us, learn more about Pilates, be challenged physically, and have some time for their own wellness journey.
Occasionally, we all get into a bit of a rut in our careers and feel like we're just dialing it in, going through the motions without trying or putting in any deeper level of thought. Everyone goes through days like that, but if it's constant we might be hitting some burnout and need a break to refresh and reinvigorate our own practice. If we're bored teaching, likely our client is bored too. But if we're asking the client to really focus on something in particular then we're also more focused on specifics in guiding them, and it's more interesting for everyone.
It definitely feels awful when a client tells us they're bored or don't like something we are providing, but we can try to take a moment to breathe, staying centered and calm in the moment they tell us this, trying not to take it personally, and then find the variations that we might be able to utilize to add a new dynamic to this client's sessions.
For the bored client, the most important thing we can do is try to give them focus, presenting them with something to really dive into so they don't feel lost or disconnected. We can also ask the client, what it is that they feel like they're missing in order to hear from them what they might be expecting or assuming they should do. In this way we can begin to figure out what we may need to change in some variables to get them to reconnect with their practice, using the tools we know to help them find their engagement and focus.
For the teacher with a bored client, we can ask ourselves if are we teaching to their level, do we need to pick the pace up, include more coordination, create less support to make it more challenging, change the weight, slow things down to make them hold positions longer, or maybe add in more transitions to reduce pauses between the exercises. We can use all these ideas to be more creative instead of always throwing in new routines.
Overall, as with any new situation, our goal is to stay centered and calm in the moment, not taking clients' statements personally, and thinking about the things we can change for the client as needed. Sometimes, however, it's just who that person is, and there's nothing we need to fix or change for them. And in that case, we can just learn to let go as best we can.
Associated Podcast: