Interviewing

Time For Your Interview! Plus an address change.

As of this month, I’m working out of a new place at The Oleon House (theoleonhouse.com), located at 161 W 22nd Street, just east of 7th Avenue on the third floor. The Oleon House is an elite center for wellness, fitness and self-care that includes a private gym as well as a treatment and yoga room. It’s a gorgeous, spacious, and peaceful environment and I’m privileged to be able to be a part of what they’re doing. I’ll be teaching my classes and practicing there. To schedule an appointment Click Here.

Learning To Talk About Your Work: Interviewing And Being Interviewed

How much do you talk about your work?

Giving bodywork is substantially a kinesthetic experience. It’s a simultaneous experience of:

The client’s body, as perceived through your touch.
Your own self, physical and otherwise, which is where your actions and perceptions occur.
The two-way experience of yourself and another person, where the back-and-forth of both parties receiving and giving information happens faster than can be perceived in real-time.
Epiphanies and breakthroughs for both you and your client that emerge specifically from physical experience, yet go beyond what either party had in mind when the person scheduled their appointment.

If you’re still reading this, chances are that the kinesthetic approach characterizes not just in your sessions, but also into your way of knowing and interacting with the world around you.

That’s a wonderful thing. And however you experience the world, you’ve created a life and practice that allows you to use your resources to excel and achieve your mission.

But of course, all bodyworkers have at least two jobs.

1. Helping people feel better (in spirit, body, and mind?) through touch.
2. Running a business, which includes talking to people about your work.

It’s relatively easy to explain the procedures that the client might expect to occur in the treatment. What’s harder is to describe what their actual experience might be like, and how that might impact every aspect of their life. It’s also important to remember that you aren’t just selling a service; you’re selling a relationship. So it’s helpful to articulate who you are as a practitioner, what matters to you, and why you are a bodyworker. (If you’re in it specifically for the money, we need to talk. 🙂)

A beautiful way to develop skills for talking to clients and potential clients is to be interviewed. If you’re shy about such things, start with a colleague, and interview each other. Record sound and/or video so you can watch yourself and hear what you said and how you said it.

It’s helpful to interview each other so you get a sense of both sides of the equation. In helping to draw out your partner, you develop a sense for yourself about how important these sorts of questions and answers are.

You could decide to use the end product for marketing purposes (video is very effective!), but the main purpose here is to get you talking about what matters to you in your work: for example, your reasons for working, how you want to create change in yourself, the client and the world, your personal relationship to your work, what you see as the challenges people face in our culture now, and how those could be addressed by the touch and movement modalities you offer.

If you hit “continue reading,” you’ll receive guidelines for the interviewing process and a list of questions to get you started. Let me know how it goes!

Guidelines for Interviewing and Being Interviewed

If You’re Interviewing:
Your goal is to put your subject at ease, encourage and interest them in their own work, and make them feel heard, clear, and interesting.

Approach To Questioning:
Ask open-ended questions and be positive. Try to say “yes, and” so that the flow of the conversation takes you forward. Try to be curious, and compassionate, and give the interview a sense of humor. Encourage detail, specific examples, and stories. Convey interest when you have it. “The way you used the word “deep” just now sounded important. What do you mean by deep? How do you go deeper with a client or help them go deep?”

Focus on oblique things—clients, inspirations, things they study—so it’s not “tell me about yourself” but instead “tell me a story about…”

If You’re Being Interviewed

This is not a performance. Nobody ever has to see or hear this interview. So let yourself go. Let yourself make mistakes and then take them back. Be bold. Pick a safe person (this is a reason why you might want to interview them also; it makes you both more compassionate and enlists you in their success). You can do the interview by phone if that’s less stressful, but it is helpful to see yourself on video because communication isn’t just words. You could meet in a relatively quiet coffee shop or a park if that makes you comfortable. Say more rather than less because 1) you can always re­-interview and 2) you can cut anything you don’t like out if you decide to post the interview. If a question bores you or makes you anxious it’s ok to say “next question”. But it’s also ok to bust through your resistance and just try to answer. Remember: anything worth doing is worth doing in a half-assed and mediocre way. It’s about progress, not perfection.

Potential Questions For The Interviewer:

You don’t have to ask all of them, or any of them, but I’ve found them an these questions to be an excellent starting place for getting a person to express themself.

How You Started

What made you enter this profession? Did you always know you would do this? Did you have questions, doubts, or hopes? Have they been fulfilled?

Who taught you to do this? Who inspired you? What did that person care about? Are there famous people who do something like what you do or who inspire you? What is it about them that you want to embody in your own work?

What Kind Of Treatment(s) You Like

When you get a treatment, what are you looking for? How fast can you tell if the treatment is going to be good for you, and how do you know?

How You Work

What do you do to prepare yourself right before you put your hands on the client?

Is your work very different from client to client, or do you use a standard sequence of moves?

The Two-Person Process

What kind of clients find their way to you? When you meet someone, do you have a sense right away about what it will be like to work with them? How do you know?

Are there characteristics in a client that can help them get more or less out of your work? Are there any clients that stand out for you because the process was unexpectedly or unusually good? Can you tell the story?

People often say they learn from their clients as much as from teachers. What kind of things do you learn from your clients? Do you remember any specific clients that you learned from? Can you tell the story?

Mission, Goals, Objectives

• Goals are targets for a given session; you can usually tell whether you’ve achieved your goals by the end of the session, but even if you can’t tell until later, there usually comes a time when you can answer yes or no to the question of whether you’ve met your goals for a session. A goal could be “to release the client’s psoas and calves.”
• Objectives have less to do with what you’re planning to accomplish and more with what you want generally for the client at the end of a session or series of sessions. An objective could be “to help the client feel more grounded” or, even more simply, “to relieve pain.”
• Mission describes the change you wish to make in the world. For example, a mission could be “to help people connect with their physical selves so they can respond resiliently to their challenges.”What are some of your more common goals and objectives for your treatments? Are you aware of a mission that goes beyond goals and objectives? Did you know your mission before you started practicing? How has it evolved over time?

Interests

When you get the chance to read or study, what kind of subjects or techniques interest you? Do you have professional goals beyond what you’re doing now? Is there another field you thought of going into? Why is that? What about that field excites you?

You’ll come up with more questions as you draw the interviewee out, trying to bring out the color and depth of their responses.