What the heck does Donkey Kong have to do with the practice habits of tai chi students? It turns out the ladders and platforms in the video game are a perfect model for understanding the ecosystem of students practice habits. Let me explain the survey design and then I’ll share some really fascinating results about how people engage Brookline Tai Chi to develop their tai chi practice. Survey Design Last week we conducted a small practice survey to try to get a more accurate picture of what students do outside of class.
I’m not talking about a polygon with triangular faces or a marketing scam to rope your friends in. I’m talking about The Pyramid Method, laid out by Cal Newport on his blog, Study Hacks. Newport tells the story of a friend of a friend’s journey to becoming a professional hip-hop artist. The key, he claims, was that the friend, Chris, followed the Pyramid Method – named for the hip-hop club, The Pyramid, where he honed his craft.
It’s been on my mind a lot in the past month that Brookline Tai Chi is approaching its 20th anniversary. With a rough calculation, that also means that we are approaching having taught 10,000 students in that time span. I can’t decide which one of those milestones is going to look better on the big banner out front. How about “10,000 People Relaxed”? In light of reaching these major institutional marks, I’ve also been wondering about the underlying mechanisms that have given the school such an amazing run so far.
So far in this series we’ve been talking about adapting your teaching style and the structure of your teaching business to fit the needs of your students. Now I want to look at a trait that all of the best teachers I’ve studied with share, which is a work capacity they can turn on like a fire hose. If your work capacity only comes out like water from a dripping faucet, you won’t be able to be “
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the social nature of wanting to belong to something bigger than yourself as one possible drive for learning tai chi. The social drive is a major aid teachers can rely on to build their base of students. Another one, that we’ll discuss here is our habitual drive, i.e. we are creatures of habit. That can be a good thing when it comes to maintaining a student base, but it is also the first major hurdle you have to clear as a teacher when it comes to getting new students.
Over the weekend, Energy Arts Instructor Jess O’Brien was in town, teaching at BTC. We got to spend some time together and talk about teaching, studying with different teachers, and trying to run a teaching business. One thing that we came back to again and again was how difficult it is to build up a student base. I think I know why. People are Lazy, Social, and Creatures of Habit
