Yes You Can

How to master taking hard feedback and being called the 'easy' instructor

• Hannah Pratt

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Ever felt the sting of being called 'the easy instructor'? Or, on the other hand, "the hard" instructor?

Whatever the label, taking feedback from someone who doesn't exactly vibe with your class format can feel hard, and it's come up multiple times in my Instructor Magic community.

In this episode, we talk about what to do when this happens, what it means, how to adjust (and if you should), and another perspective that might be just what you need. 

Key Takeaways:

  • Navigating Feedback: Insights into handling feedback, especially when it challenges our perceptions of our teaching style.
  • The Art of Accessibility: Strategies for making group fitness classes accessible and aspirational for a diverse range of abilities. *Note, we talk about this on a scale of beginner to veteran, not necessarily to adjust to disabilities or other considerations when talking about accessibility. 
  • Beyond the Trends: A critical look at how fitness trends can shape our teaching but might not always align with what participants need or want.
  • Community Building: The importance of creating an inclusive environment where everyone, from first-timers to seasoned enthusiasts, feels welcome and valued.
  • Personal Reflections: A candid discussion on personal growth, dealing with conflicting feedback, and finding one's unique voice in the fitness industry.
  • Instructor Magic Community: An invitation to join a supportive community dedicated to empowering fitness instructors through connection, mentorship, and shared experiences.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the yes, you Can podcast.

Speaker 2:

A soft place to land for fit pros and aspiring entrepreneurs looking for a motivational cheerleader who's been through it all and believes your best life is about being brave and tapping into your magic.

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Hannah Pratt, an online coach and vulnerability queen. I'm here ready to share my experiences through grief life and finding my place on the podium to help you level up.

Speaker 1:

So, grab a latte and a notebook and get ready to be inspired through the yes you Can podcast. Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the yes you Can podcast. Today we are talking about being the easy instructor, and I say easy in quotation, so for those listeners who are writers, I would love to hear your feedback on this episode and topic, and, instructors, I would love to hear what you have to say about this topic. So, after you listen, your first action item is to shoot me a DM and, if you love this episode and this topic, share it to your social media pages. That is a request with love, to help others hear this podcast that I put so much effort into. Okay, so this question has been one that I've been thinking about because it came up in our instructor magic cohort. Now we have an online community. There's more than 349. I really want to get 350. So if anybody wants to just join so I can be at 350, that would be so great. But we have over 349 instructors approximately who are inside this community, and somebody asked about the feedback they had received about being the easy instructor and having writers say that their classes were easy. Now this instructor is also like expecting. She is pregnant right now, and so I think the feedback might have hit harder than normally, perhaps because of just insecurities or feeling like you're not doing enough in the class. And here's the thing Group fitness is a challenge to deliver in a way that is accessible for everyone, because there's going to be a variety of abilities, there's going to be people in the room who have done every single one of my rides, and then there's going to be new writers, and it's my job to offer options. You can call them modifications if you'd like, but that's a whole other topic To offer options to people to allow it to be an accessible yet aspirational workout. Now, if we were doing personal training, of course you can tailor every exercise to that person in an individual, one-on-one setting, but group fitness inherently gives us permission to choose exercises that not everybody is going to be able to do and also exercises that others are going to have mastered at that time.

Speaker 1:

It is just the reality where I see a lot of instructors perhaps spending too much time is trying to make it the perfect workout for every single person in that room. The only way we can do that is by being a really effective coach and showing people how they can make that exercise, that piece of choreography, that sequence, be challenging to themselves. Easy ways to do this is if the rhythm is not fast, so if it's a slower climb or tempo that would maybe lend itself well to a more accessible quote-unquote movement. Then people can really charge up the resistance style. It would be the same with a Pilates workout where you're on a reformer. You can add those coils to make it more challenging, depending on the movement, or less challenging if you're taking off coils and you require more stability. Now listen, I'm not a Pilates instructor. I would love to be one day, but that's what I know. Right, you can be in charge of your workout. So when we are an effective coach, we can change and offer options and not worry about hard equating or equalling. We don't have to worry about hard equalling choreography, because choreography and longer sequences do require it to be a bit more of somebody who's been to many classes before and then when we do that, then we can alienate those first-time riders. Now we just had this beautiful call with our Q&A with their instructor, magic Community. It was a Q&A call last week and somebody asked about this and saying you know, they feel pressure within their instructor group and their staff, because every instructor feels like they need to be harder.

Speaker 1:

And I gave this example of the 13 Going on 30 movie. When Jennifer Garner wakes up from being 30 and is her 13-year-old self again and she's working in a magazine and coming up with a concept that's supposed to wow everybody and, instead of going in this really cool, dark, edgy route, she brings back fun and life and laughter and color in the design concept and the commercial whatever that she was doing. Can't remember all the details, but it stuck with me because it was more successful, it was more full of life, it was more what people wanted. And I think because of Instagram and the inter-cycling sort of trends that we see which I have nothing against, but I definitely can recognize that they are a trend and for instructors, not for first-time riders. We see choreography getting more and more challenging, the sequences getting longer, the rhythms getting faster, the abilities of everybody on the bikes and in the room getting to be more like a veteran or look like a room full of instructors who can hit the beat. I mean being for real. There's videos. I see where I'm like. I don't know that I could personally do that in my 36-year-old body, with the injuries and stuff I have, it wouldn't be effective. It would not be an effective workout for me whatsoever. So when we see that on Instagram, we then have this skewed perception that that's what people want.

Speaker 1:

When, in fact, I fill my classes, I often I would say, you know, 85% of the time, 90% of the time, my classes are waitlisted, and I have I have a variety of class times. I have a weekend class, I have an evening class, I have a daytime class. People come to my rides because they know that they have some of them have done 1,500 rides and I have first time riders who want to come back because they still felt a part of the group. So somebody had asked this and I was like, and we had an amazing one of our members from this round is a master coach and she used to manage a soul cycle out in California and we both piped in on this question.

Speaker 1:

It was like what's wrong with being the quote unquote easy instructor? Like easy is a relative term, right, what's easy for me is not going to be easy for somebody else. What's hard for me is not going to be hard for somebody else. So what they're really saying is. You are an instructor that offers accessible options to a wider group of people. Now some people are going to prefer the instructor that makes them feel like everything is challenging and has perhaps more inherently challenging sequences. Right, they're just gonna. That's what they're going to gravitate towards. I've also had riders who stuck with me for a year and then moved on to another instructor they loved. But if I were to try to get those riders back, instead of focusing on the new folks coming into my community and like giving them so much love, I would be basically trying to shape shift my way into being everybody's favorite instructor, which is not possible. So there's a few things here. Number one it's okay to be the easy instructor, and when I was going to say about that other master level instructor who used to run a SoulCycle, she gave an example of at the studio at one of the SoulCycles that she managed, she talked about a specific instructor who was known as the instructor that they would direct beginners to. Now we have motivators like that.

Speaker 1:

I used to get questions when I ran the Wheelhouse Instagram account of like I'm brand new, whose class would it make sense to go to? My answer was always like you know, when you're new. We know and we're told and we absolutely wanna make sure that it is an accessible ride and we'll give you an intro beforehand and we'll, whatever. But there's gonna be instructors that I would recommend, just sort of based on their energy, based on the riders they attract, based on the class time. Maybe that I would have recommended over others, depending on what that rider was looking for, because a first time rider could also be a brand new beginner to group fitness or somebody who's tried other modalities and could probably do the workouts at a more veteran quote unquote level. So it's not like every beginner has never tried to work out before right. We have to remember that.

Speaker 1:

So I would recommend that person and what Priscilla had said the person I'm referring to was that they would recommend this particular instructor to all new beginners like brands making new beginners, and that was her niche, and she carved out this niche within her group, within her studio, to be that person to hold space for those types of riders. That is amazing and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that's absolutely brilliant because it is differentiating yourself between the other instructors who might be vying for the quote unquote hardest instructor title. Now I've been told that I'm a very hard instructor. I've also been told that my class doesn't make people feel safe. So again, you're gonna have feedback that changes depending on who is in the room and what their preferences are. I had feedback for the first time that in a long time that was hard for me to hear. That was unrelated to spin and it was related to the course evaluations for the college courses I teach.

Speaker 1:

So this is my first year of being an instructor. I started in the fall. This is a program I went through that I credit a lot of my success to in my career. It's very well known and being an instructor has always been a dream of mine in this program and it came way sooner than I expected. So I read my course evaluations not really knowing that they were even in my portal, and I was like what are these? Oh my God, these are anonymous course evaluations. So imagine for those of you who teach on a class pass or whatever, and you're all of a sudden expected to like, you all of a sudden read like 30 of them. That's basically what it felt like and I took a lot of the feet. I would say 85, 90% of it was really, really great. I think I got like a 4.5 out of five in terms of how people enjoyed my class and thought it was useful.

Speaker 1:

And then there was a few that were like really specific comments about liking aspects of the class and not liking other aspects of the class. And it was some of it was fair comments about me being a new instructor and figuring it all out and marking and when I can get grades back and all that sort of stuff. And others were like we want more group projects, we want less group projects. And I was so overwhelmed by the conflicting feedback that it really paralyzed me for like a week in January where it was like I don't know what people want and I was so sensitive to this, partly cause I have ADHD and rejection sensitivity dysphoria is a big thing for some people with ADHD me specifically is one of my biggest symptoms and I was like what the like? What do they want? You know the Ryan Gosling scene and the notebook. What is it that she want? Like that's how I felt. And then I had a great conversation with a colleague and a friend and it was like. It was like all of a sudden I realized that I was.

Speaker 1:

I was in the mindset of a new instructor, like a spin instructor, and all I had to do was coach myself in the ways of take the feedback that is useful and leave what is not. And people's preferences are always going to be different and I can't. There's only so much I can do to serve every single person, just like there's only so much you can do to give somebody a one-on-one personal training quote, unquote experience and a group fitness class. Like I can't change the curriculum or the learning outcomes of this course, even though I think some people might prefer to be a different way. Like it's not my thing, right, I can't change, just like I can't change what the offerings are at my studio, necessarily, and the expectation that we have as a part of our ride template.

Speaker 1:

So when you get feedback like they're too easy of an instructor, take maybe nuggets of that in the way that you can improve your coaching to offer more options to talk about resistance, progression and regression. To offer choreography sequence options, to coach to every single person in the room. Things we teach inside Instructor Magic and we have amazing resources inside there of like how to do this. But take that feedback and say, okay, well, I'm going to make it a focus to like, offer those veteran riders who might be feeling this way Different options so that they can level up, and I'm going to hold them accountable to making their ride harder because, unlike other group fitness modalities, you can change the resistance of your dial right. You can make it like. There's very few people I know who can hold a five minute jog with their math resistance and not feel like they're pushing themselves Like. So there's that. But also realize that that feedback is going to be similar to anything else, where there's people who hate Beyonce and people who love Taylor Swift. There's people who love Beyonce and hate Taylor Swift, and do you see either of them trying to change themselves for the people who don't like them? No, they do what they do best and they play to their fans and they are creative and brilliant and unique and they embrace the things that make them different.

Speaker 1:

So, whether that you're an instructor, whether you're not an instructor, whether you're a rider, realize that not all feedback is created equal. Not all feedback is coming from a source that you need to assign a huge amount of value to. One of my previous coaches talked about eating the fish and spitting out the bone. So basically taking what is helpful and leaving the rest. And I think that when we hear feedback like they're too easy, they're too hard, they're whatever, realizing that subjective, that is somebody's opinion, it is not necessarily a rub like feedback that's assigned to a rubric that gives you really helpful information. Sometimes that's a flippant comment somebody made after a bad day. They had right. So we need to just understand the context around it and then also be okay with being the quote unquote easy instructor, because that means people recognize that your classes are accessible and if you lean into that, if you really like welcome those beginner riders and be their soft place to land, you will have a thriving community of people who come to your class, find their confidence and learn how to fly on that bike. And that is one of the biggest honors I think you can have as a group. Fitness instructor is helping people fall in love with movement. There's such a huge opportunity there to build your community.

Speaker 1:

So don't, you know, don't follow the lead of other instructors who might be trying to take the top, hardest instructor spot. Like, let that be their thing, because somebody's giving you the feedback that you're easy quote, unquote then that might be where you naturally sit in terms of your how you welcome people in your leadership style, your choreography, and that's okay. I recently had a motivator come to one of my rides and like I have motivators all the time, so that's what we call instructors at wheelhouse and she was like that was so good and I loved how the choreography wasn't absolutely like wild and she wasn't saying this in like a backhanded compliment way, like she's one of the most genuine people I know. She was like I just love how it was. Like it was, the choreography was straightforward and everybody could get it. Like everybody in that room was in sync and I reflected on it for a second after my ego was like wait, what? Wait a second? Should I be doing way harder shit? And I was like no, I have a full room of people who can get the choreography. And there were new riders in there and there was veteran riders in there and you bet your bottom dollar that people are leaving that room drenched and sweat, having one of the best experiences, because I know that my rides, with the energy, with the coaching, with enthusiasm, with the celebration, is a top experience for people and I make sure that I play music that people know and can sing along to and I do have that Jennifer, jennifer Garner, I don't know 13 going on 30 vibe of my classes, and so just I hope that this is helpful. I hope that this is a bit of like a breath of fresh air.

Speaker 1:

I'm not seeing a lot of other people talk about this on social media and I really appreciated the question that was coming up. In our community we have these really transparent, vulnerable live talks together on Zoom with people from around the world who are experiencing things like this and wanting to find a coach or a mentor and a community that can relate to what they're asking. So, if you are interested in joining Instructor Magic, there's a link in the show notes here that will give you the waitlist form to sign up. I'm probably going to open up enrollments again because there's been an influx of people joining the waitlist and we were still like halfway through this cohort, so we might start to go into rolling enrollment, which means you can join anytime. I just don't want to block anybody from accessing connection, community support, coaching, all the things that are inside this beautiful, this beautiful community. So, if that's, you join the waitlist and then send me a DM on Instagram, for sure.

Speaker 1:

If this resonated with you and you want me to talk more about these things, like a sort of unpopular opinions, my stance as a coach, as a mentor, the trends in group fitness more. If you want more mindset stuff, more life updates, more general life stuff and more guests who are outside of the indoor cycling space, let me know too. I do have an Instagram account started for the yes you Can podcast, which is at yes you Can Club, and I have big plans for this podcast, but I want to make sure that it is resonating and you know I'm a multi-passionate girlie. I love talking about ADHD, I love talking about marketing, I love talking about business growth and if you want things like behind the scenes of a launch from Instructor Magic and how I started this online course and the growth of it, I would love to share that. I just don't know if people want to hear it, so please let me know what you'd like more of. That's the bottom line and as a final call to action, I know I said this at the very beginning, but if you wouldn't mind sharing this, I would be so grateful.

Speaker 1:

This isn't a monetized podcast, meaning I put out this content just like put content out on my Instagram profile or my email list for free. Of course, people join Instructor Magic as a result, but it just helps. It helps me feel validated in spending the time and editing and all the stuff that I do, because I do this alone as a business person while doing all the other things. So I would really really appreciate it and, of course, there's going to be a call to action to leave me a rating or review if you really really loved it. Thanks, friends. Have an amazing rest of your week. Whenever you're listening to this, whenever you're listening to this, remember yes, you can.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening all the way to the end of the yes, you can podcast If you love this one. I would so appreciate a rating and a review on Apple podcasts that lets others know that, hey, this is a good podcast and it's worthwhile to listen to. If you really loved it. Make sure to share with somebody you love who could benefit from a little magic and motivation in their lives. Thanks so much, friends, and have a great day.