What lead to Leading Moves.
“I had to come to terms with the beautiful (albeit inconvenient) fact that the nature of teaching human movement will always stay relatively the same; together, in a space, face-to-face, gauging energy, directing the flow of information, providing care and helping to create easeful movement.”
Hi, I’m Rachel Biffin. I’m an Australian who started Pilates at the age of fourteen to supplement my dance training to be a professional contemporary dancer. At twenty-three, I formalized my Pilates knowledge and learned to become a teacher through the University of Technology, Sydney’s Graduate Diploma in Pilates.
Graduating in 2002, Pilates in Australia went “boom”.
Boom meaning, I got forty phone calls in one day in response to some mat class course fliers I dropped around!
Already having ten years of Pilates behind me, stepping into the burgeoning Pilates world felt almost effortless, familiar. After being in the self-focused world of the ballet studio, it was gratifying to share my knowledge of the body using a method that was so helpful to rehabilitating and making people feel great. So began fifteen years of teaching.
I taught in Pilates studios in Sydney, in corporate settings, evening colleges, charities, gyms, and had seven brick-and-mortar practices of my own along the way (hands up who’s good a painting walls!)
Around 2015, thirteen years in, I began to feel tired, achy, and unsupported. But I thought my training, my experience, and my skill set was all going to disappear if I stopped expressing it through teaching.
I worked hard to find an alternative, a less labor-intensive way to share my knowledge teaching Pilates. Indeed in 2015, I tested the idea of an online studio by creating fourteen video lessons in Pilates, Meditation, and Physiotherapy.
Great experience as it was, I had to come to terms with the beautiful (albeit inconvenient) fact that the nature of teaching human movement will always stay relatively the same; together, in a space, face-to-face, gauging energy, directing the flow of information, providing care and helping to create easeful movement.
By mid-2017, with three children under five, a back injury, and a supportive husband, I stopped teaching. I was devastated. It took me at least a year to lose the sting of no longer being a teacher. Over the following year, I was tempted to go back. It was hard feeling stripped of my career. I felt I was floating, in orbit, out of my familiar habitat.
But I knew I had to stay the course; “mind the gap”, per se. This time helped me both think deeply about the instructor’s experience and personally transition away from an identity I held so close.
As the sadness lessened, I became more objective about the skills I had developed as a teacher and practice owner over the last seventeen years and started to translate them into new creations, new enterprises.
I wondered:
How I could fill the gaps I felt were missing in my years as an instructor?
Could I provide a place of warmth, safety, and regularity for teachers to retreat to where they were heard, understood, and could float ideas?
Could I give them tools and courses both from my experience and harnessing the wisdom of others to make them more energy-efficient, happy people who could have long, fruitful careers?
Could I share the benefit of some of the hard lessons I’ve learned being a teacher so that teachers have long, sustainable careers where their clients enjoy the accumulation of their knowledge and experience for decades to come?
By sharing my knowledge and experience with teachers, could they translate it into their own unique angle for their clients?
And, with three years of creative production now behind me, could I create ‘real-world’ tools and services that support Pilates teaching practices?
I felt an upswing. A desire energy continued to grow each day. Yes, I thought, yes I could. Enter Leading Moves.
