Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to becoming a great Pilates teacher. I'm Olivia. You get the latest updates when you join my community at BuyMeACoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts or follow along on Instagram at @PilatesTeachersManual.

The Book is now available for purchase as both an EPUB and PDF format from me at shop.OliviaBioni.com, as well as on Amazon as a Kindle file. You can convert that EPUB or PDF version of my book into a Kindle friendly file for free by visiting amazon.com/sendtoKindle. Just a reminder that that EPUB format is the most like an e-reader, if that's what you're looking for. Today's episode is all about making every word you say count by eliminating filler words from your teaching. Filler words are anything that we say on repeat to the point that it loses its meaning. It can become distracting to someone who's taking your class. And it just doesn't add anything to what we're teaching. What I'm sharing here is stuff that I've observed from watching lots of teachers teach and giving lots of feedback to teachers so that they can become better. Teaching Pilates is just like public speaking, and the strategies I'm sharing are to help you sound your best and be even more professional. Eliminating filler words and speaking directly and clearly make you seem more polished, more confident, and generally a more experienced instructor. The first step to reducing the number of filler words that you say and making sure that everything that comes out of your mouth when you teach is the most important thing is we first have to identify what we're doing. My recommendation is always to record yourself teaching a snippet of class, maybe a 15 minute section, and then listen back to that recording. Listening to yourself teach is a really valuable exercise.

how quickly you're speaking, how well you enunciate the amount of dead time during setup cues, the number of repetitions you're cueing for each exercise. Taking your own class, if you actually do what you were teaching, is another way that you can really learn a lot and get an almost outside perspective on the way you teach. When you record yourself, what did you notice? Is there anything that you said multiple times? If you found a word or phrase that you repeat constantly, tally how many times you said it in that 15 minutes. Beyond ums and uhs, there are several different kinds of filler words and phrases that serve different purposes. If we wanna reduce our filler words so that each word we say matters, we have to figure out what fillers we're using and why, so we can solve and address that root cause. There's three different types of fillers, or at least I'm totally making this up, I've categorized three different categories of filler phrases that I'm gonna address today, and those are empty words, generic words, and then a hybrid of those two. If you listened to yourself teach and saw that you said empty words like, "now we're going to," or "when you're ready," or "take a little break," or "take a quick reset," over and over again. Those are phrases that we say that are empty. They're not adding anything to our class, and they're really just used to buy ourselves time to think about what's coming next. They don't have any inherent meaning. They're not making the class better or clearer. They're just an empty phrase. Some of those phrases I recommend eliminating from your vocabulary completely, as in don't say them at all, just say what comes after them. If you heard yourself say something like, "now we're going to grab the short straps for supine arms." You can simply say, "grab the short straps for supine arms." Just cut out " now we're going to." If you say "when you're ready, curl up into your chest lift," you can just say, "curl up into your chest lift." "When you're ready" and "now we're going to" do not add anything except time for your brain. How can we get out of that habit? To stop yourself saying those filler phrases, which if you get in the habit, you're in the habit, and you will see that you say them a lot if you say them at all. You can practice taking a breath before saying the actual action part of the cue. You might take a little pause, take a little breath, and then say, "curl up into your chest lift." You might practice your cues, and I would even go so far as to challenge yourself to reteach that 15 minutes again without saying those phrases, just taking a quick breath or taking a pause. You've created a habit that you say, "now we're going to," or "when we're ready," so now we're building that new habit. It's not easy, but it will serve you in the long run. Other empty phrases that we use to buy ourselves time to help us think, we can get rid of them by programming in an intentional way and by giving clients the permission to take breaks when they need them at any time in your class. If you find yourself saying,"take a little break," or"take a quick reset after every exercise," this is what I'm talking about. I find for myself that I don't cue very many breaks when I teach, because the next exercise series is a break from the previous exercise series. If I was teaching a bridging series and really working the posterior chain of the body, we're working our glutes, we're working our hamstrings. I don't need to cue a break before I go into hands and straps or supine arms for two reasons. One, setting up for the next exercise, that transition is a break, and two, supine arms is working different muscles than bridging. We're working the front of our body, so the muscles they were working in bridging are getting a break. Those two reasons plus the fact that you let everyone know at the start of class that they can take breaks when they need, means you don't need to stop the class to give people a break. They will take a break when they need. Fun fact, they will take a break when they need, even if you don't tell them they can take a break when they need. Literally no one is working to failure in an exercise. They will stop and reset, circle their wrists, take a breath, get some water if they need to. If you organize your program in a way that the transition, like setting up the long box, changing your springs, changing body positions, or that the next exercise without a body position change, like the next exercise series - we were planking, but now we're doing a lunge - that is also a break. You're using different muscles. The muscles that were starting to feel a little bit tired, a little bit fatigued, are getting a break. Another filler phrase that you may catch yourself saying are really vague, generic phrases like positive feedback filler cues. You might say something like,"good," "awesome," "that's it," "you got it," "great job," after every direction you give. You might hear yourself say,"lie down on the reformer. Good. Feet on the foot bar. Great." Like, is it really great? If everything that you say is good, then nothing is good, and your clients are just going to tune you out. So how did we get here in the first place? Pilates teachers are genuinely really encouraging and positive people, and we wanna make sure that the people in our class know that they're doing well. You may find that your desire to encourage and cheer for your clients has you giving a blanket compliment to the room every sentence. Wanting to be positive and encourage your clients is great, but we can refine our execution here. To minimize that same general positive feedback that you know your clients are gonna tune out. You may even be tuning out. You may not even be noticing that you're saying it until you recorded yourself. What we're gonna do is give specific positive feedback to a specific person. If you said, "sit up nice and tall with your crown reaching towards the ceiling. Tom, you just grew an inch taller. That looks great." The specific compliment that you gave Tom is a hundred times more meaningful than just saying"that looks great" to the room. It also provides an opportunity to connect with the people in your class on an individual level, to really look at what they're doing, and give a shout out to someone who's doing an excellent job. If you listen to that 15 minutes of teaching and heard yourself giving that repetitive positive feedback that's really general and vague. Listen to it again and practice what you could say instead. You'll likely find that if you said "great" 10 times during footwork, you could replace those 10 grates with three really thoughtful compliments to three different people in the room. It doesn't have to be a one-to-one replacement, but those three compliments have a bigger impact than those 10 "greats". Another really vague cue that you hear a lot or I've heard a lot is "engage your core." It sounds like a cue, and you may have even heard other teachers say this, but it's very generic and it doesn't help the people in the class execute an action. If you heard yourself say, engage your core in every exercise, I want you to get specific. Oftentimes, our core is engaged because of the position of our body. We don't need to engage our core to hold our legs in tabletop. Holding our legs in tabletop engages our core. If there's something specific that you want them to do, cue that instead. Round through the spine. Exhale as you roll down slowly. Draw the navel in. Maintain a neutral spine. Whatever the correct specific thing you want is in the context of that specific exercise. Specificity always helps clients understand and do what we ask. Any cue, whether it's "engage your core" or even "draw your navel to spine," if you say the same thing over and over again, it will lose its meaning. So as much as possible, be specific and intentional about your cues so that each cue matters. Lastly, we have a hybrid of the empty phrase and the generic phrase. And the cue that I was thinking of specifically is "inhale to prepare." If you say inhale to prepare before every exercise, it loses its meaning and it can become something that you just say to say, and it buys your brain time. If that's why you say "inhale to prepare" is because you just say that before every exercise and maybe it gives you a little extra second to think, you can skip it, just like "when you're ready," just like "now we're going to," and just cue the action on their exhale. If it's "inhale to prepare, exhale into your chest lift." Just say "exhale into your chest lift." I guarantee you they're inhaling. But if cuing "inhale to prepare" is really important to you, then I would tell you it's really vague, so I'd give you the same advice to get more specific about the action of what you want your clients to do on that inhale. Do you want them to sit tall? Do you want them to press their arms into the carriage or pull their hips towards their heels? Whatever you want them to do in the context of the exercise, say inhale to do that. As I mentioned, we don't always notice the things that we say on repeat. Even though I teach so many classes and I've taught for so long, I can't always remember what I said in a class. So I think recording yourself is a really valuable tool, and I think you should record yourself multiple times. If there's something specific you're working on, changing in the way that you teach, record yourself and check your progress. Whatever you're looking at, minimizing or reducing or eliminating, check in on your progress by recording yourself again and seeing what changes. My suggestions are always to help you to continue to improve and evolve as an instructor. We all have habits and becoming aware of them is the first step towards addressing them and creating better habits. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. I hope you have a great couple weeks. The adventure continues. Until next time.