How do you deal with a participant who seems to dislike everything?
Hi everyone,
I’m a Pilates instructor in training and have been teaching my own classes for almost two months now. Even though, I’m still nervous for each class, I really enjoy it and I’m eager to improve. My mentor and the majority of the clients have been very positive about my progress!
However, there’s one participant who keeps throwing me off.
Before class, there’s almost always something wrong: she’s tired, it’s too early, or she isn’t really in the mood. I try to uplift her by saying “I hope this class will help your body feel better afterwards”
During class, she seems to have an issue with almost every exercise, even the warm-up. If I offer a modification, she says it doesn’t feel right or that she doesn’t feel anything. If I give her a simple correction, she immediately explains why she doesn’t want to do it that way.
She also suggests a lot of exercises that I should include in future classes because she likes them, even though they’re not part of the curriculum I’m currently teaching.
After yesterday’s class, she gave me some feedback. She said I should number my exercise sheets and that I spent too much time explaining the equipment to new participants. When I replied that I was still figuring out what worked best for everyone, she rather passively said, “I thought you wanted feedback.”
Normally, I’m very open to feedback, but with her it feels like nothing I do is ever good enough.
The hardest part is that it’s starting to affect me. I find myself dreading seeing her name on the class list. After our interactions I feel completely drained, and with yesterday’s class I was honestly just annoyed. I also noticed that it affected my teaching, which is exactly what I don’t want.
Has anyone dealt with participants like this? How do you handle someone who always seems to have a complaint without letting it affect your confidence or enjoyment of teaching as a new instructor? :(