Hi, everyone. It's Jessica Spillane, your host of Chat EYT, the podcast. Today's episode is gonna be a fun one. We're gonna talk a little bit about the common personalities that we see come through our studio. I feel like this is a bonding episode in a way, where you, as the listener, wherever you are on the globe, you're going to listen to this and probably say, "Oh my goodness. We all have the same experiences." I have a fabulous partner studio in Bali, and she's literally on the other side of the globe, and she was listening to me talk about all the different sort of personality types that I go through with my apprentices, and she was dying laughing, she said, because here she is on the other side of the world and experiencing the exact same thing that I'm experiencing here in the Northeast. We all have this common thread, and I think sometimes it's fun and funny to, bond over them and dissect them a little bit. I go through this with my apprentices. I do a workshop on, how to keep your battery charged, and it's important because, our industry has high burnout. You all know it. If you've been in this industry for a while, you know that it gets tiring. You know that it can be an energy suck. It's a lot about knowing what your limitations are on how many sessions you can take. What are your day parts where you feel the strongest? How to organize the different personalities of your clients so that they plug you in and charge you up as opposed to draining your battery. But with that workshop, I also dissect and give suggestions on how to handle some common disruptive personalities that can show up to your class or schedule sessions with you. And for apprentices, they don't always have the toolkit on how to handle some of these things. They're thinking and working very hard at being a good teacher and making sure that they are checking the body and they're not giving any exercises that are contraindicated for what that person's injury profile might be. They are making sure the person is happy. They're making sure they're delivering what the person wants. So when a strong and challenging personality type comes in, sometimes this can be a mental overload for a newer teacher because they just don't have the tools on how to handle it. So part of this workshop is to be fun, part of it is to be funny and make everybody laugh, but part of it is also to give real-life strategies on how to handle some of these personality types So I'm gonna do some of them here and share a little bit about what I've named some of these personality types, these characters that we encounter, and what my strategies are for handling them. Now, I've named all of them just for alliteration. So if any of my clients or my teachers or people that have crossed paths with me listen to this, none of this is about you. If it happens to be your name, it's just because there was the alliteration factor. So don't anyone read anything into it. And I also encourage you maybe to do some self-reflection, everybody studio owners, teachers, enthusiasts, whoever might be listening to this, do some self-reflection and say, oh, am I a little bit like that? If I am, I, didn't realize that maybe that was disruptive to a group dynamic or possibly drawing on my teacher's energy." Maybe there could be some good learning and self-reflection for you. All right, we'll dive into it. So the first one is the most obvious one, the one that we all encounter on a regular basis, and that is our Chatty Cathy. Chatty Cathy is a delightful human being. We love her. We love her. We love the energy she brings. We love that she has a warm heart. We love that she is just a big personality who wants to give and wants to share and wants to connect. However, we need to go out for coffee to do that, or maybe we need to go out for drinks or dinner one night, because in a class dynamic, that's not necessarily what the rest of the class has paid for, right? So we have to be respectful of the full group. Now, if Chatty Cathy wants to talk her way through a private session, you can always try to redirect her, but at the end of the day, it's her time, and if she really just doesn't stop, then it's her time, okay? But if she's in a group, we really have to rein that in, and we wanna rein it in respectfully because we want her to keep coming. We don't wanna insult her. We don't wanna embarrass her, but we also don't wanna take away from everybody else's session. Teachers, I would say I'm making a mass generalization here, but I have a feeling that most of us are uncomfortable with confrontation. I think it's because the type of personality that goes into this field, we tend to be more nurturing, we tend to be more empathetic, and that's what attracts us to this business. Confrontation is a little bit of a contraindication with that personality type. We want to approach Chatty Cathy, but do it in a way that's comfortable. And first thing is you can always make a general cue to the full class, and I'm sure many of you have done this. You can say something lighthearted like, "Hey, if you're talking, you can't really be breathing properly." And everyone will smile, and Chatty Cathy will know that you're talking to her, and she'll smile, right? So that's the first thing. You could also say something like, "If you're talking, you're not getting the most out of this movement." But try to be lighthearted and cutesy about it, for lack of a better term. You could also be a little bit more direct with Chatty Cathy and just say, "Cathy, hold on a second. Can you just wait? Hold that story for a moment. Now everybody, let's exhale. All right, let's breathe, and you can talk about this after class. Does that sound good?" And then everybody in the class is very relieved that you helped step in on their behalf. She won't be offended. The class will feel like you stood up for them, and Chatty Cathy can absolutely finish her story, and you're gonna give her the space to do that after the class You could also handle it the way your elementary school teacher probably handled you when you were a kid, they definitely handled me, which was go stand near the desk and just hover, hover over Chatty Cathy, right? Go over to that reformer and you're gonna teach that class staying within Chatty Cathy's little zone. And everyone instinctually is on their best behavior when teacher is standing near. It brings us back to elementary school, to kindergarten, and we buck up and put on our best face and we behave. If you go and stand near her reformer, near her foot bar, you don't necessarily have to stare at her, you just hover in her space, she will get the message and she will behave and she will stop chatting a little bit more. Then, if you need to be a little bit more aggressive, you can put your finger to your lips and just say, "Shh," and she'll get the message. That might be a little bit more closer to confrontational because it's more serious, but it still will be effective if she hasn't gotten the cue from the first option or the second option. That's Chatty Cathy, and I think we all have a lot of them. We all probably have different strategies for how we handle our Chatty Cathys. The next is Teacher Tracy is the person who loves Pilates, right? She absolutely loves your studio. She loves Pilates. It's changed her life. She wants to share it, so she brings a friend, or she brings her daughter, or she brings her husband, whoever it might be, and she wants to share this experience with them. And you, of course, are so grateful that she wants to share you with someone who's important in their life. But that enthusiasm can really become disruptive and suppress your leadership. Teacher Tracy is the person who brings the friend and then spends much of the session trying to correct the friend, and now the friend is not sure who she's supposed to listen to. Is she supposed to listen to Teacher Tracy, or is she supposed to listen to you? How is this supposed to work out? And it can be frustrating for the friend, and the friend is like, "Wait a second, like I don't I'm trying to, I'm trying to get something out of this here. Can you please shut up?" But she doesn't wanna be mean because her friend brought her, but she's also trying to process, right? She's on this foreign piece of equipment. She's being told how to breathe. She's being told how to move, and she's got two people in her ear, and it can be a little bit of a sensory overload. It can be a little bit confusing, and that's a challenge. Teacher Tracy is not trying to be a pain in the ass, but she is being a pain in the ass, and she's actually making it very difficult for you and for the person who she so badly wants to impress. If that's the case, we need to put a stop to it. You also wanna make the friend who's coming have a positive experience. So this is a tough one, 'cause you don't want to insult her, but you can start by saying "Hey, Tracy, this is amazing. When did you get certified?" And say it in a very lighthearted way. Or "Clearly, Tracy, you have an amazing teacher. Why don't we let your friend Jane experience the same thing?" And she'll be like, "You're right. You're right. You're right. I'm sorry." That might help in a lighthearted way turn Tracy back to being a student and allow you to keep your authority. I very often have used the phrase, "All right, everybody, let's keep our eyes on our own reformer." And I say it like that in school when you say, "Keep your eyes on your own paper. Keep your eyes on your own desk," I use that, and that helps them refocus and possibly allows Teacher Tracy to go back to her own practice as opposed to paying so much attention to her friend. If that's not working, you can always say, "You know what, Tracy? Can you just let me explain this to Newbie Nancy? Because it's much easier for her to just hear her direction from one teacher as opposed to two. I so appreciate your enthusiasm, but let me just break this down for her the same way I did for you in your first session." That might be a little bit more serious, but it is still very kind and very gentle. You can say to the friend, "Just look at me. Don't worry about what Tracy's doing. She's been coming for a long time, and she's really good at this," or, "She's really strong. She didn't start out that way, so let me-- pay attention to me, and I'll help put you on that path." Really break down your cues one step at a time, speaking slowly so that the new client can zero in on you and tune out the noise that might be coming from Teacher Tracy. Those are some strategies for handling that, and we know, it's coming from a place of love. We know it's coming from a pa-place of enthusiasm and something that Teacher Tracy wants to share with someone who's special to her. We don't wanna squash that, but we do need to make it a positive experience for Newbie Nancy. All right. This is Easy Evelyn. She probably drives me the most insane out of anybody, to be honest. This is the person who every single thing you do, they say, "I can take more weight," or, "This is easy. What else you got for me?" Or, "We're only doing three reps? Why are we stopping here? Why are we doing the other side of... now?" Everything that comes out of their mouth is negative and somehow about how this is easy or she does something that's much harder than this, be it CrossFit or she runs marathons. This is Easy Evelyn, is someone who at the end of the day, they lack, fundamentally lack any kind of abdominal or breath connection. They are the person who is accustomed to using momentum for everything. They're very likely a gym rat or a runner. These are the two categories of people, no offense to any runners and no offense to any gym rats. You can be a runner who has a connection and gets the difference. You can be a gym rat who comes to Pilates and understands the difference. It's the people who don't understand, and they come in as This is Easy Evelyn, right? So the reason why runners and gym rats have a tendency to fall into this category is because they're very accustomed to using power, strength, momentum to generate their movements. Whereas in Pilates, as you all know, the goal is stability and control. So when someone says, "This is easy, I can take more weight-" You have to remind them that this isn't necessarily about weight. In Pilates, we are working stability, not necessarily strength. Yes, you will get stronger. I don't wanna start getting into that debate as to whether Pilates is strength building or not, because we all know it is. But this isn't a power move. This is a move that is all about control and stability, and This Is Easy Evelyn is very accustomed to the opposite. So we have to reteach Evelyn, and oftentimes she doesn't have the patience to be taught. She doesn't have the attention span to be taught. She just wants to get on with it, and she just wants to lift, and she just wants to burn, and she just wants to sweat so this is a difficult one, and probably one that, if you have the right personality, you can get through to them, but you might not see them after a couple of sessions. We need to explain the difference between strength and stability and that in the gym we're working power and here we're working control. They're two very different things. Both are necessary, and you're not saying that one is more important than the other, and one's not better than the other, our bodies need both, but this requires a mindset shift, and it requires them to listen. So when Evelyn asks you to add a spring, 'cause that's what they're gonna say, that's gym code, right? The first thing that you can say is, "We're actually gonna take a spring off, and we're gonna do the opposite," because the purpose of Pilates is actually to start taking away assistance and relying more on your own body's control and stability. So I'm not suggesting that you do anything unsafe, obviously, so please, understand that. But you know what? There's never been a knees off knee stretch on a single spring that didn't humble somebody, right? There's never been a long stretch on one spring that didn't humble somebody. Figure out what tool you have in your toolbox to get through to them in a safe way, and they're gonna notice the difference immediately We're then going be able to reinforce that in Pilates, less is more. So now can we go back to the beginning and can I teach you how to breathe and how to work your stability and how to work your control? Because you'll realize very quickly that you don't need any more than the three to five reps I'm giving you, and you don't need any more weight, any more spring. And that's the difference between the gym, running, and Pilates. And hopefully that gets through to them. And you also can focus a lot on breath, right? Their breathing is gonna be new for them, but that might take a couple of sessions to get their attention span to focus on that. But that's, one of the more challenging personas All right, Mental Health Mary. Mental Health Mary is a little bit more serious and something that you have to take seriously. Mental Health Mary is the person who uses Pilates more for the mental piece of it and the emotional piece of it, rather than the physical. And that is absolutely fine, as long as boundaries aren't crossed and as long as you know when it's out of your purview, right? It's one thing for you to be a good listener and someone who can be a trusted ear, right? Maybe Mental Health Mary doesn't wanna talk to her friends because perhaps she's going through a divorce and her friends are friends with her spouse as well, or maybe Mental Health Mary herself is having an affair and she doesn't want anybody to know about it. Maybe she's having trouble with one of her kids and she wants to protect her kids' privacy. Sometimes we become safe to hear a lot of these things because we're outside the scope of their social circle. That puts us in a trusted position to hear a lot of things, and trust me, I've heard a lot of things over the years. But you have to know where the line is for two reasons. One, you have to make sure that you're not taking on any of their problems, where it's going to start actually draining your battery and your empathy isn't abused, you have to stay fortified for yourself, for your family, for your other clients, and the only way to do that is to not take it on too much. You can empathize, and be compassionate and be a friendly trusted ear, but you have to not take on their problem, okay? So that's the first thing. The second thing is you also have to know to look if you feel that there's any drifting towards danger, you have to know that it is your job to pass this along to someone else, whether you call the spouse and say, "I'm very worried about Mary," whether you have to call the police, whether you have to call a school, whether you have to call someone who's got authority and the capabilities of taking care of something. You can't take that on. You don't have the training for it. It's outside of your purview. And God forbid something happens, you don't want to live with that. Trust me, you don't wanna live with that. And unless you're a trained professional, which maybe you are it's just something that you have to know where the line is. People have crossed that line with me in my time as a teacher, and I have made the appropriate phone calls to have it addressed outside of me. And I basically said, "Okay, I was happy to be a trusted ear for this person, but now I know something or I know too much, and it's time for someone else to get involved in a realistic way." And I have made those phone calls. That has happened and I was very grateful to get it off of my shoulders. Not because I didn't wanna be a friend, but because it was outside of my purview and I didn't know what to do. And it's very rare I don't know what to do. Just kidding. All right, so that's mental health Mary, a little bit more serious. Now we have disrespectful Denise. This is someone who does not respect your time or your business. They cancel all the time. They show up super late. There's always something coming up in disrespectful Denise's life. She forgot she made the dentist appointment. She's gotta get somebody to school. She woke up with a migraine. Ugh, it's raining out. You name it. And that's basically just saying that this Pilates or you is not a priority for her. Everything else seems to be a priority Maybe Denise is doing Pilates because she feels like she should be doing Pilates. Maybe Denise wants to just be able to go to lunch and say, "I had Pilates this morning," 'cause it makes her feel like she's doing something. You have to draw that line quick because it's only gonna get worse. This is a person who's going to see your line, see your boundary, and keep trying to push it and keep trying to push it, and if you don't hold that boundary strong, you're gonna keep letting it get pushed. And before you know it, y- you've lost a ton of revenue because they keep canceling and maybe they're canceling within enough time, and that's not fair, right? Because you might not be able to fill that. Even if it's 24 hours, you might not be able to fill it that easily. So you have to really make sure you identify this person quick when you meet them, and you'll know the personality. Identify them quick, set your boundaries, get their signatures on documents saying, whatever your late cancellation policy might be, and stick to it. I've had a couple of these in my time, and in every case, I got to the point where I just simply said, "This relationship has come to its natural conclusion." Sometimes they're shocked. They beg to be let back in. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I promise I won't do it again." And you have to say, "No, I'm sorry. This just happened too many times. It's too much of a loss of revenue for me. It's not fair. I have a business to run." Perhaps they just say "Screw you. I didn't like this anyway," 'cause, they didn't care and that shows you who they really were. But either way, you gotta hold that boundary. Don't let them back. All right? Don't let them back. They showed you who they are. Believe them. All right, so this is Complaining Carol. Complaining Carol does not want to be there. She lacks the effort, but she does not lack in opinions. She has strong feelings about that freaking box, right? She has strong opinions about the ab series. You name it, she's got an opinion, a suggestion, and it is just going to drive you mad. She doesn't wanna be there. You can handle Complaining Carol in a few different ways. You can just give her a big smile, and when she says "Do we have to do the box? I hate the box," you say, "Get on the box. Keep going." And you just don't even give it any energy, right? And you go right into, hands behind the head, knee, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is that you're teaching. The second is you can acknowledge and validate. Say, "I know you don't like the box, Carol, but this is really good for you. You have to do it. The more you do it, the easier it's gonna get. Nobody said Pilates was easy. Nobody said anything worth doing was easy, so just hang in there with me, please." The third suggestion would be to give them a carrot, like you do with your children. You can say, "You know what, Carol? If you hang there with me for 10 more minutes, then I'm gonna stretch you at the end of the session, or we'll make sure that we do some extra leg springs today." Whatever it is that you know that they like, you figure out what their currency is and what they wanna trade in, and then you give them that carrot, and that might help push them through. It's like a negotiation, it's silly, but it is. That's just the way it works So that's Complaining Carol. All right, now we have Attention-Seeking Sally. And when I first did this original workshop and I named all these people, Attention-Seeking Sally, was a little bit of an outlier. Now, I feel like everybody's a fricking Attention-Seeking Sally when everybody's coming in with their phones and wanting to set up tripods and wanting to do certain things that gets recorded. It's crazy. But Attention-Seeking Sally is usually someone who's fun, and they bring a lot of good energy to the room, and they're not necessarily a bad person, not necessarily Chatty Cathys this is the person who likes the attention on them. They like the eyeballs on them. But sometimes that can come across as inappropriate or disruptive to a class. So what they do or say, if it's inappropriate, you really have to shut that down, and there are some people who like to get a little bit of shock value out of the people around them, so they say something that's inappropriate. And if it's the wrong audience, it's actually gonna reflect badly on you they're gonna want you to say something. If somebody says something inappropriate, maybe about a position that we're all going into on the reformer, and then something comes out that they say that some of the people in the room might be very, I don't wanna use the word offended, but made uncomfortable by that. You might have someone who comes in and is dressed a little inappropriately. Maybe you have a young girl who's dressed in a certain way, and you have some, middle-aged guys in the class also, and it's makes everybody a little uncomfortable. I don't mean to just be sexist, but it just makes people uncomfortable, and you have to be cognizant of everybody. Maybe the girl is uncomfortable being with the guys, or maybe the guys are like, "Oh my God, I can't look, I can't look. So I gotta turn away," right? 'Cause I don't wanna be seen as a creepy old dude who's looking at her, so I'm gonna keep turning my head to the right the entire session because I'm uncomfortable. There's also, guys who maybe wear their shorts and don't wear underwear underneath. We've all had that happen. That can be uncomfortable also. They are definitely trying to seek attention, but the attention they're trying to seek is from you 'cause you're the one who will be walking past and you're the one who sees them. These all can be uncomfortable situations. If someone wants to practice in an unsafe way 'cause they wanna try and show off in front of everybody things that they can do, you can say, "Listen, at the end of class, show me what you wanna do and we'll take 15 minutes," you're obviously gonna charge them for this, "We'll take 15 minutes and we will do something that you've been working on or you wanna record or something like that." If their attention-seeking is coming more in the form of inappropriateness, you do need to have some sort of a conversation or your owner has to have a conversation. And you can say simply if there's any way that we can keep the sexual jokes out of the studio, I love your sense of humor but not everybody in the room is comfortable with that and I just don't wanna make this an uncomfortable place for anybody. Or an email can go out about dress code. that is a good way to handle that. I've had certain people in the past who breathe a certain way and everybody kinda turns around and looks at each other. And then thankfully you'll get the one person who says, "I'll have what she's having." And it breaks the discomfort. And even then the person who's breathing that way then realizes that maybe their breathing is an inappropriate sound to some people. So I even had an a difficult time even talking about that person because I was like, feeling inappropriate even talking about the inappropriateness or the attention-seeking Sally. You can see what kind of person I am I guess by that. Okay this last one is also frustrating. Not a bad person at all, just a frustrating affect that they might have and that's Interrupter Iris. Interrupter Iris is someone who interrupts your flow, your session, your groove with questions, comments like, "How far should my legs be? How far should I go? Am I lifted high enough? Should I press out all the way? Am I doing this right?" You might have 10 people in the class and they are in the zone and you are fluid with your cues and everything's working great and then she lifts up her head and she's like, "Am I doing this right? Wait, can you come over here? Am I doing this right? Should my toes be pointed or flexed?" It just becomes disruptive to everybody. You are in your groove, you're giving your cues, everyone's following along. What I generally say to Interrupter Iris is "Shh, I got you. "If you're doing anything incorrectly, I will tell you. I will cue you to correct what might be incorrect." If you're like me, I generally layer on one or two cues per repetition. I don't say every single cue at one time, and Interrupter Iris might be looking for every single cue at one time, and that's not how I teach. I get them moving, and then I layer in my cues with each repetition. So we correct the shoulders, then we correct the ribs, then we correct the pelvis, then we correct the knees, then we correct the ankles, and move from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top. I might be giving a shoulder cue, and Interrupter Iris is screaming about her toes. "I will get there, okay? Then you've lost count, then you've lost rhythm, then you've lost flow. Then you have people looking around the room trying to figure out what everybody else is doing, now everybody's attention is on their toes and you wanted their attention on their shoulders. So Interrupter Iris is challenging. All right. That's all I got for today. And I'm gonna sign off with my new goodbye. And that is, when in doubt, just exhale. How's that, my friends? When in doubt, just exhale. Love you all. I'll be in your AirPods again next week. Have a good one thank you for listening to Chat EYT, the podcast. And a special thanks to Christy Carrubba at Next Chapter Exchange for producing and editing. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, leave us a rating and a review if you like what you heard. We'll see you next time