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Daily

Farming EXP points in teaching Pilates

I clocked 4 straight hours of teaching today!

I was worried the entire week that I wouldn’t be able to last the marathon teaching, but I managed to clock in these hours teaching four different types of classes today. These included classes that I wasn’t confident in like BARE and Slider & Tubing.

I revised the night before, and then again in the morning and I felt that helped tremendously. I hope the students enjoyed the class because contrary to what I thought about attending BARE classes, I quite enjoyed teaching it.

Roller & Ball at 9am happened first. I’m getting a lot more comfortable with Roller & Ball so it’s getting more fun to teach. There was a student who previously came up to me and said that I had improved in my teaching, and thanked me for improving (!) You’re welcome, of course! I hope to keep improving!

Today, she told me that she enjoyed my class so much that it passed super quickly without her realising it. I feel so blessed to have students like that who affirm my teaching. Truly. It’s hard to know if students are enjoying class or not sometimes. Some grunts of pain, some peals of laughter. Maybe a slight increase in class size or having the same familiar faces in a class can signal that but otherwise, it’s not an obvious path of improvement.

Also grateful to have an incredibly encouraging Clifton Sim – who (at most times) drives me to the studio in the morning and then spends an obscene amount of time in the gym on his own to pass time.

Thanks for always pushing me harder and telling me to take up that extra class tomorrow morning to continue harvesting experience. But WHY do I have to wake up early again tomorrow?!

(Shout out to the Honey Lime Tea I bought at Fun Toast that helped me survive the consecutive hours of teaching. What a great decision and a good use of $2.40.)

July 23, 2017 by
Daily

Teaching Emily Pilates (Part 2)

After last week’s mess, I was sure that I wouldn’t see the same people in class again. That they’d skip Pilates at the club this week and join something else. Maybe wait for the regular weekly teacher to be back again next week. I was wrong!

I received a second chance and saw familiar faces this time. I made sure to correct all the mistakes I made last week, so I asked for everyone’s mats to be vertical to mine and checked in with them on their bodies. That made all the difference.

Because I knew that the gym had Pilates magic circles available, I had learnt to incorporate them for our exercises. I found them useful as a device to help them activate their muscles.

I’m still improving on making modifications and progressions in a group setting, and looking back now I would probably make them do more isometric work because they were slower to make changes in their positions once they were set. But the class felt so much more manageable today and I’m thankful for that!

The amount of knowledge surrounding the human body in motion is just so incredibly vast. I felt like being humble about it was the key to today’s class being great. I don’t have all the answers and they don’t expect me to.

While packing up, two ladies thanked me and we chatted a bit about their private Pilates sessions which I was excited about because I do think private sessions and machine work are so much better for people with injuries and for people over 50. The lady who had commented last week about the exercises being strenuous to the knees mentioned that the class was challenging but manageable! I was so relieved.

January 3, 2017 by
Daily

Teaching Emily Pilates

On Tuesday, I taught Pilates at a social club here in Singapore. It was pretty exciting to visit, and I could imagine Emily Gilmore strolling in to a similar country club in Hartford. So rich, so privileged. There weren’t a lot of young people in the club, and I didn’t look like I belonged when I was standing at the gym’s reception.

It was fairly packed for a Tuesday afternoon, so you can imagine that these people were indeed the Emily Gilmore-types.

Several things didn’t go too well – and I realise now that I have specific requirements for my Pilates group classes to happen.

1. The placements of the group’s mats need to be vertical to my horizontal mat for them to be facing me. This is how I’m used to teaching, but because everyone started laying their mats horizontal, I decided I’d go with the flow and how different could it be anyway?

It was a mess. The people on the left faced one way, the people on the right faced the other. My cues became slightly messy and confusing.

2. I did not start off the class finding out about their bodies well enough – which came back to me after the class when one lady told me to please let them know if I was going to be doing a lot of exercises that would be strenuous to the knees. Which, of course was a valid point considering that the majority of the people in the class were of an older age.

3. Their age. I was/and am not yet experienced with teaching older people.
I made some modifications and we had yoga blocks to help out, but looking back now I would have done everything differently. There was a lady who had asked for a good, challenging workout but I should have arranged it so that I offered it as an option to her and not made it too demanding on the whole group.

I was feeling awful after the class, but after a really good one today at a corporate class today..I’m a lot happier. You can really tell if a class is good if people are groaning just the right amount but are also given enough time to rest and occasions to actually learn about their own bodies.

I shall ask the PBT team about teaching older people to get ready for my next class at the club. I’ll also need to improve on executing progressions and modifications while I’m teaching. I can only get better.

(I’m experimenting with this journal-style entry to make sure I record these little mundane things in my life. I wonder if it throws things off balance on here, but I would hate to post anywhere else and leave this blog dry and insipid. That said, I shall try to make less edits on these posts.)

 

December 29, 2016 by
Daily

Still searching

Yesterday was my last official day at work. It’s been a whirlwind adventure, and it swept me up in a tornado of things. There was a certain sense of autonomy but also a great sense of responsibility which crippled me.

I told myself to look at it as a challenge, but I realised after fighting for it that it wasn’t me. The industry that looked so enticing at first no longer excites me. I can only describe the disappointment in that discovery as if I figured out the trick behind the magic.

I was constantly on the lookout for the nearest escape route. I could be a librarian. I could be a barista. I could help in the family business. I could do anything I wanted, and live ten thousand different lives. The world was huge and there are other things to explore and learn.

So I decided to leave.

It was difficult because I felt like I owed it to everyone to make it work. But it became easier after I realised that it was the most responsible thing for me to do.

In Singapore, it feels like success is measured with a ruler. Being someone, somewhere, doing something big and important.

I remember writing in autograph books when I was in primary school that my wish was to be successful when I grew up.

What does that look like? I’m still searching.

February 6, 2016 by
Daily

Beautiful insecurity

The beautiful thing about being insecure is that when good things happen, it feels as though the entire universe is working in your favour.

The ugly part about insecurity is that when good things happen, you attribute it to the universe’s alignment and other external factors that undermine your good work.

But it’s okay to do that, it’ll just help you get even better at what you do and it will help you stay real. Just remember to come up for air every once in a while.

Breathe.

October 9, 2015 by
Daily, Social

I’m looking for a job

I was a social media intern as early as 2009 (Facebook got huge in 2006). When I was taking my journalism degree, many of my reports were about social media: The convergence of media in journalism and how Twitter was impacting the industry, What Google+ was going to be about (they were undecided then and still undecided now) and whether it was going to succeed (no), and how our rhetoric has changed in this age of social media (lol). I then used social media to get an internship, and after said internship, I joined a social media agency.

I don’t know what you think, but I think that’s a lot of social media.

It’s great to be an ‘expert’ in a specific area, but I believe that it’s important to diversify our skill set – in the early stages of our careers and even after – so that we do not fall in too deep in our specialisation that we bury ourselves in a dark pit, hiding from anything else outside our little world. It’s why people travel right? To learn and to experience other cultures and lifestyles, it helps us appreciate what we have and to help us aim for better.

Some people have lost sight of what the right thing is for their clients because they haven’t considered other solutions. It’s normal for traditional agencies to suggest advertising on traditional media, it’s normal for social agencies to suggest activity on social platforms.

I’m a big fan of social media. Trust me. I love how I’m able to get help from my friends and family to get an internship, I love that I can spread the word about of issues that bother me, and I love that I can get recommendations on a good tailor. I also particularly enjoy getting updated on the lives of others, especially if they are my boyfriend’s psychotic ex-girlfriend (no link there, sorry).

But I’ve learnt that social media isn’t always the right answer for brands and products, and it has always been very limiting. Social has to be integrated for it to work, just as ideas have to be intrinsically social to be effective. Even if the clients’ budgets don’t care about integration and social media budgets are usually always separate when it should be an ingrained cost in all marketing efforts.

So I’m not looking for a job in ‘social media’. I’m looking for a job to help brands become more human.

Update (15 Aug): I am no longer looking!

July 30, 2015 by
Social

What do you do?

If there was one question I’m self-conscious about, this is it. I’m not sure why, but working on social media strategies and social media content sometimes feels frivolous when a majority of people seem to think all I do is just play around on Facebook. That’s not true.

I play around with Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr too.

May 19, 2015 by
Social

Social media blogs

There are thousands of social media blogs and millions of social media experts on Twitter out there. These blogs and influencers get really repetitive really quickly – because ultimately, there are really just three main things you can get out of them:

That brands have to embrace authenticity and transparency, that they should be listening to what people are saying online and having conversations with them, and that they have to invest in content.

They are helpful in understanding social media – and I read them to find out about new tools, new apps and updates in the space. But they’re really not helpful in understanding people – and their relationship with brands. Maybe someone should start one that allows a little insight into people and their behaviours instead.

April 23, 2015 by
Daily

Begin again

Two years is not a long time – not in the grand scheme of things. But when I first started work at We Are Social, that felt like a reasonable amount of time to stay. So you can imagine how surprised I was when two good years passed by and I realised I had no pressing need to leave. Still, as the months went by I realised I needed a change of pace. Things had changed, or maybe it was because some things hadn’t changed for me and I really needed to get out and start again. Afresh, anew, again.

Someone once told me that if you want to find joy, do what you love. And it was precisely this that I joined the company, it was this that made me stay for a good two and a half years, and it was also because of this that I eventually decided to leave the best first job anyone can ask for. I’m not exaggerating.

I met people I love here; the best kind of people. The ones who’d keep pushing you to be better, the ones who’d be there when you’d trip, then tell you how much they believed in you so they’d fall right alongside, then lift you up and dust the dirt off your jeans. The ones who you’d call family.

And of course, it’s time to move out of the family home for a new adventure.

wasgrouphuga

January 30, 2015 by
Daily

Even if I do miss the night and her silence

I’ve been completely crap at updating you with my life, but I’m on my second month at BBH and things have been pretty hectic. Thing is, I know that in a few years when I look back I’d be able to say that I can’t imagine having it any other way.

The good thing though? I can fall asleep so easily at night now, there’re no instances where I go ‘Shit the sun’s up, I better force myself to sleep’. My brain shuts down at night and it’s pretty damn awesome. What’s also amazing is my ability to wake up in the morning for work. Every. Single. Day. Who knew I’d be able to do that on my own?

Does adulthood mean more mornings and less nights? I can probably deal with that.

June 29, 2012 by