The Art of Cueing, Part 1

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

Cueing is what separates teaching from merely understanding.  Cues are the vehicle that carries your plan into the world.  You can have all the knowledge in the world plus a photographic memory, but if you can’t cue, you can’t teach.  Let’s review what cues are, and, perhaps more importantly, what they are not.

Cues are more than just words.

1. Cues are signals - Cues are more than words.  They include your vocal inflection and body language.  People react to you based on your overall energy, not what you say.  Are you engaged or distracted?  Confident or questioning? For example:  Imagine asking a friend how they’re doing, and they respond, “Fine”, in a dejected tone of voice with their eyes looking down and away.  Would you actually take their response at face value and assume all was well?

2. Cues are relationships - Time for an inconvenient truth:  Students won’t respond to you simply because you’re the instructor.  Authority, on its own, isn’t enough to inspire confidence. It takes time to build a relationship with a student, a class, or a studio.  It’s a process where both you and the student(s) learn to understand and trust each other through trial and error.  This requires patience, practice, and flexibility.

3. Cues (especially verbal cues) are inadequate - Cues can accomplish several things:  Body position, action, and pace.  However, even the best cues cannot fully capture the complexities of a Pilates exercise.  To cover these intricacies you’ll need to rely on multiple cues throughout an exercise as well as non-verbal cues.  These don’t necessarily have to include physical touch.  They can come in the form of modeling an exercise or using other gestures to clarify your intention.

4. Cues are not for everyone - And now for a second inconvenient truth:  Some people will not take your cues.  This happens for a number of reasons.  The most common reason is that they simply missed it or just didn’t hear you.  Taking a group Pilates class is like attending a 50-minute lecture while exercising.  Levels of awareness vary greatly from student to student, from day to day, and from class to class. Even if a student’s attention is focused on that day, you may need to repeat yourself or clarify what you mean to get the point across.   

I’ll go into the specifics of what makes a good cue in my blog, The Art of Cueing, Part 2.