Hello everyone!
Back in Expanding Awareness #11 I wrote, somewhat cryptically:
I’m also going to have some major life news to share in the coming weeks that will have a huge and positive impact on how this newsletter and the course evolve.
Well, I quit my job a few days later — and I don’t have another one lined up. In fact, I plan to throw myself into this online creator thing, with Alexander Technique as my main focus.
Why? Because:
my hypothesis that there are truly things in Alexander Technique that are new and useful (to people who have never heard of it) has not been disproven;
it turns out that it’s difficult to inhabit the appropriate headspace to build such a novel online course while also working a demanding full time job at KPMG (surprise!);
this may be somewhat egotistical, but where it feels like I am quite replaceable in my current role at work, I have a sense that I can be more ‘additional’ in popularising and translating Alexander Technique for the online age;
I really want to, and
the course has been going well and people seem to be digging what I have to say so far:
I’ll be self-employed around the end of January.
The plan is to slowly ramp up my output as best I can until then, and then you should see a massive increase in both the quality and quantity of stuff I share.
Your spine is longer than you think
I’m currently going through a course called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, because I am really enjoying making videos and YouTube has always been my scene. One of the assignments was to make a ‘YouTube short’, a vertical format video that is less than a minute long, clearly designed for phones and to compete with the likes of Tiktok.
Last week I made this video talking about the true length of your spine, and how it’s probably longer than you think it is. This is sort of an Alexander Technique party trick: when someone asks about AT — and I’m in the mood to talk about bodies — this is what I often demonstrate.
A couple of comments before you watch:
I’ve been getting a lot of comments around the postural and body aspects of AT, so I have decided that I will create some modules in the course around this. I’ll probably bring in guest teachers for this.
I massively misjudged how long one minute isn’t, so I had to edit out a lot of content that would have been useful to leave in. Consider this a taster of things to come 🙂
I mis-speak where I say “spine goes through a hole in your skull”. This is sort of what it feels like, as the spine goes up behind your face, but in fact the skull rests on the top of your spine at the atlanto-occipital joint. Sorry about that - it was a rushed piece of homework (and illustration of why I quit my job!).
And by the way, I’ve also invested about £1k into new camera, audio and lighting gear as part of the YouTube course, so you can expect significant quality upgrades for future iterations of the course.
Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe! Ha.
Course updates
People seem to be liking the course!
This makes me very happy. I still consider it to be in development, so I plan to open it to another 50 people as beta testers on the 3rd of January before I go back to work. This gives me the Christmas break to work on upgrades based on feedback so far.
The price will be $125, which I still consider to be a significant discount based on where it will be when I eventually release it into the wild. Of course anyone who joins will get lifetime access to upgrades and access to the community. Now that I’ve quit my comfortably-paid consulting job, I’m aware of the need for this to keep me off the streets, but I’m also not interested in getting rich off this one course.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in some behind the scenes on course development, I did an interview with James Stuber which you can watch below.
Here’s what we talked about:
Thanks for reading this far! If anything here resonated with you then please hit reply and let me know.
By the way, I also write articles on my website and run another newsletter called Thinking Out Loud. That’s where I write about stuff like building in public, Total Work, solarpunk, carbon removal, sense-making, building communities, creating positive narratives for the future, identity and various other things. I invite you to check them out.
Thinking Out Loud has also been a little quiet given the whole busy job thing, but again, I’ll be putting a lot of work into that one as well as my time frees up.