Need a Day Job? Try Becoming a Pilates Teacher

Becoming a Pilates TeacherIf you’re considering becoming a Pilates Teacher consider the following information. According to Study.com:

“Most pilates instructors are employed on an hourly, part-time basis. According to PayScale.com in 2014, the median hourly salary for pilates instructors was $28. Most pilates instructors wound up earning from $31,543 to $100,534 annually at that time, including bonuses and profit sharing.”

When I started teaching Pilates it was my day job.  I was a dancer, co-directed a dance company, and Pilates was the way that I paid the bills.  The reason that it all worked, was because of the information above.  My Pilates Certification allowed me to make much more than minimum wage per hour so that I could work less and spend extra time on my art.  We have a teacher at The Pilates Studio who is a painter.  She is able to make a good living while leaving plenty of time to work on her art.

Here is another piece to consider.  As artists we see the world in a different way.  Our bodies and our souls are trained in movement along with the subtleties and nuance of observation.  These skills are honed as we learn to make work that comments on the world around us.  We learn to make the whole world more beautiful, to create changes with our voices, and to improve our movement and skills.  Well, let me tell you all of these skills will also help when teaching movement to others who may never have been exposed.

When I was becoming a pilates teacher, I was teaching the bridge to a woman who spent her life writing novels and short stories.  Along with that life came some low back and neck pain, which was preventing her from giving her own art to the world.  We did the bridge.  Quite honestly at that moment, the bridge was an exercise that I had been doing for so many years that I forgot how profound it can be when changing movement.  While I was teaching I was leading this woman through the exercise, I used my hands and imagery to help her movement change, I was present with her as she moved.  Then she sat up and there were tears in her eyes…I was a new teacher, I was a little caught off guard and maybe even a little arrogant because I was lucky enough to move all the time so I had forgotten the power of movement.  In my mind I said to myself, “Woh we just did the bridge.”  But for this women we had moved parts of her body in ways that it hadn’t moved for years.  I had used the skills of my art (though I didn’t know it yet) to create change in this woman, I had helped her dance.  It took me many years of humbling experiences to understand the profundity of it all.  But as a pilates instructor I am able to use my skills as an artist to bring movement arts to anybody I teach…What could be better?  I had a day job that was honing my skills as an artist not distracting me from it.

Do you need a day job?  Why not try becoming a Pilates Teacher?

>