This past weekend my staff put their lives on hold and spent 10 hours over three days training with Pole Star Claudia Renee. These training are not required and it always humbles me how my staff rearrange their very full lives to learn and grow when these opportunities come up. It is pretty amazing to watch my team of incredible instructors get to be students.
I brought in Claudia Renee because our heels and flow programs have grown so much. Instructor Amanda had worked with her and said she was amazing, so I brought her in. Learning more about technique from a new source and getting some new choreo ideas made a lot of sense. But, I’ll be honest, this area of our program I have no personal interest in. I can’t walk in super high heels; I don’t currently have the ankle strength or knee stability thanks to multiple surgeries and I am not interested enough to put in the crazy amount of work it would take to get there (right now, getting back on pole/hoop after my shoulder surgery is where all my energy needs to go). So I was frankly dreading this training weekend.
Then Claudia Renee arrived with her beautiful attitude and radiating kindness and I thought “ok, it won’t be that bad, she’s nice.” And as the weekend wore on I realized it wasn’t bad at all, in fact, it was kind of amazing. I watched some of my team members flourish in ways I didn’t know they had in them. I was seriously gobsmacked by how well some instructors who tell me they don’t want to teach flow did flowing. Like woah. You no longer get to bow out of flow dear instructor because you are amazing and our students deserve to learn from you! I always knew my team was talented but this was a whole new level of wow. This weekend was such a great reminder that I work with amazing humans.
The other super cool part about the weekend was it was the first time that (almost) ALL the team was together with our new hires. Since we added 7 “in trainings” in February we haven’t had any big all hands on deck events so watching my staff come together meant everything to me. It is challenging to add people to a tight unit. Whenever I hire I worry if I am making the team too big and that somehow it will dilute the love and magic between us. But no, it doesn’t, the love just grows. Watching the new and established train together, sharing poles, helping each other, was seriously a highlight for me. I work with such amazing women.
So much cool material. So much. Cannot wait for my staff to start teaching this to our students!!!!! I am so grateful they all took the time to learn because it makes our program better. I am so lucky to work with these women.
My last thoughts on the weekend are that Claudia Renee is just a gem. She is a great teacher. She broke things down so well and gave so many variations. I truly felt like if I wasn’t needing to do my role as documentor, filmer and note taker for the training I could have participated and been successful. Amazing.