Replaceable Parts

OwnerGuy came onto our lesson for the last 20 minutes or so to look at a few things. That was fine. Then he started inquiring about long term goals and pitching the idea of working with other instructors. How it was so great that I’ve had all these different instructors in my dance life because they focused on different things. And how it would be so great for me to work with someone else every once in awhile.

I’m very much reminded of my time as a manager in a big corporation. Whenever the corporation made a change (like to benefits), we would be given talking points on how to sell it to our teams. Every change was always positioned as an improvement – never mind what you might be giving up. Not to say that there weren’t positives to changes but the main point is that a corporation doesn’t make a change unless there is a strong benefit to the corporation. That’s why we got talking points to sell it.

And maybe living that long in the corporate environment just makes me a little more cynical than the average person when it comes to things like this. I can’t help but wonder what the angle is. If you are selling something that hard, then there must be reasons and I get curious about those reasons.

Let’s deal with the goal thing first. I’ve got a short term goal and that is taking all of my focus right now. With luck, we’ll hit it at the next Showcase and then I can start thinking about what, if anything, comes next. I know we are approaching the time when I need to sign up for more lessons so they want me to express goals so they can justify the number of lessons they want me to sign up for.

The challenge with someone like me is that I dance for the joy it brings me. All of the trappings of the studio like levels and such don’t mean anything to me. Other than an opportunity to learn something new which is another things that does excite me. But I can get the same thing by learning choreography for a routine and I love doing the routines. If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d love more opportunities to perform.

But coming back to the second thing – it feels like OwnerGuy wants to make the instructors replaceable parts. That makes a certain amount of business sense. If an instructor gets sick, you may be able to roll a student to a backup. No cancelled lesson and the money keeps rolling in. And it wouldn’t just be illness. There would be flexibility. Need to move things around to accommodate a higher value student? No problem. After all, a specific instructor is not guaranteed.

I’ll be the first to admit that it probably takes me a lot longer to build up a good relationship with an instructor so I’m not particularly keen on having to take multiple lessons with someone new just to get to the point I’m at with PJ. I can look back at my dance life and see real steps backward when I was forced to switch instructors because someone quite. I feel like we’re in a good place now and I really don’t want to disrupt what’s been built.

I didn’t get into much of this with OwnerGuy yesterday because the time was limited and I wanted to focus on the dance part of the lesson. They may be right. You may learn more from multiple instructors – provided that the instructors are all at a similar level. But that may also not be true for every person.

Anyway, it is what it is. I suspect they won’t push this any harder until after Showcase. Then, I’ll have to evaluate whether this is still the best fit for me.