Working as a Rolfer (Part 2)
For the first two years, referrals kept the practice full. Then, in the autumn of 2017, it stopped.
From September 2017, for about six months, my clients had come full circle and, for the first time since opening, fewer people arrived than I expected. It never went to zero — looking back, I was better off than many — but it was the first time the flow had failed.
This is what I tried in those six months, what did nothing, and what finally worked. It is also the period that changed how I describe Rolfing at all.
What had worked stopped working
2017 was a busy year. I ran cooking events, a course on listening, seminars with outside speakers, and a book club. I learned a great deal about filling events and setting prices.
And yet the Rolfing sessions, and some of the events, did not fill. At the end of that year I wrote that everything I had believed was working had come apart, and that I was starting again from the beginning.
The methods that had carried the first two years no longer carried the third. That is the part worth saying plainly to anyone starting out: once something works, it is hard to change it.
Looking for the answer outside
The first thing I suspected was the room. I cleaned it every day, kept it in order, added plants. Sometimes it seemed to help. Sometimes it did nothing.
Then I asked people for advice, and tried what they suggested. I read books on spiritual practice. What I wrote afterwards was that when you are struggling, other people’s advice occupies you, and your own judgement quietly goes missing.
Neither the room nor the advice brought clients back.
The answer was inside
By the end of 2017 the numbers had returned to what I had expected. Writing about it in January, I said that what had actually worked was simple: the solution was not in the room or in anyone’s advice, but in deciding, myself, that I would solve it.
Saying it and meaning it were not the same thing. The shift came at the end of February 2018. I set the spiritual books aside and worked from a different question: what do I think, and what do I want to do?
The thing I watched most closely was my own language. Saying “it’s hard to get clients,” “new clients aren’t coming,” “nothing is working” moves you in the direction of the sentence. When I caught myself, I didn’t argue with it; I reset it and moved on.
And I met people. Whenever I have been stuck, the most reliable thing has been to sit with people, listen, read what they recommend, and let my thinking change. Keeping company with people who had already come through the same problem helped as well. From February that year I also became involved in starting a business network, which put me in front of people from other fields every week.
By April 2018 the room felt alive again.
The sessions changed too
Something else changed in that year, and for a Rolfer it may be the more useful part.
In my first years I looked at people through what I had learned in training: how do I make this into a session? There was not much room left to see the person. When you lean on knowledge, your attention moves from the person to the knowledge, and a hierarchy appears between you and the client that neither of you wanted.
I had taken a lot of continuing education in 2017. What changed was the question behind it: not what will I learn, but what will help this person. I began using knowledge afterwards, to review the session, and starting instead from whatever caught my attention. The sessions got better.
One phone call
On 4 April 2018, just as things were turning, a national television network called. They wanted Rolfing for a Friday evening special. A writer on the programme had become curious about Rolfing, looked into it, and found me.
What struck me then was that keeping at something in public brings this kind of luck. I also wrote, that day, that I had learned what it means to publish your own work.
Filming was on 11 April. Every booking around it was cancelled. The broadcast went out on 4 May, in the evening, during Japan’s spring holiday week. Expecting enquiries, I cancelled a Rolf Movement training I had planned for that week and moved the website to a higher server plan.
After the broadcast
Traffic to the site went to about ten times normal from the moment it aired, and stayed high for a week. Enquiries arrived while the programme was still on. That month brought the highest number of introductory session bookings I had ever had — and, fortunately, a number I could still handle.
Google Analytics showed that eight in ten visits came from phones and nearly half came from Google search. The terms people used most were “Shibuya” and “Rolfing.” Facebook accounted for 18 per cent, less than I had assumed. That was the point at which I started using Twitter and Instagram as well.
Twenty minutes became two and a half
The filming ran fifteen or twenty minutes. What aired was two and a half. Watching my own work cut to that length taught me something about explaining Rolfing in the time people actually give you.
I rewrote the site’s front page as well. In the early years I had tried to describe Rolfing exactly as I had been taught it, and the result was academic. From a client’s side, it did not answer the question they were asking.
So I stopped leading with Structural Integration and started with ease — what changes in how you stand and move when you are no longer holding yourself up. I set out three things about the work:
- it ends — ten sessions and you are done
- you find your own ease; it is not given to you
- change in the body brings change in how you feel
More people moved from an introductory session to the full series after that. On 11 October that year, the hundredth person completed the ten-series.
What the six months taught
When clients came full circle, nothing outside me solved it. What worked was deciding to solve it myself, changing the words I used, and meeting people. The television coverage arrived once the flow had already turned, and its real effect was not the week of traffic but the language it forced me to find.
A year later I wrote that running into the problem early was probably my good fortune. Two years in is a survivable time to discover that your methods have a shelf life.
In this series
The twelve-year record is collected in Working as a Rolfer — A Record of Finding Clients and Running a Practice.
- Part 1 They Came Without Any Advertising
- Part 2 The Six Months When Clients Stopped Coming (this article)
- Part 3 Four Moves, and a Room I Always Meant to Share
- Part 4 Funding and Rebuilding Through the Pandemic
- Part 5 I Moved the Articles, and Search Lost Me
Each year of this record was written as it happened, in Japanese, on my other site.