Why I Don't Copy Other Teachers

One of the easiest things to do as a teacher is fall into another teacher's style. You watch someone you admire — the way they cue, the way they layer instruction, the way they move around the apparatus, the rhythm of their voice — and the natural instinct is to incorporate what worked for them into your own teaching. We live in an age that makes this easier than ever. Endless video, endless workshops, endless social media content of teachers teaching. The shortcut is always available.

It works in the short term. It does not work in the long term — and the reason it does not work is worth understanding.

Inspiration and Copying

There is a clear difference between being inspired by another teacher and copying them. Inspiration sees something work and asks why. It then translates that understanding into something the inspired teacher can apply to their own teaching, in their own voice, with their own body, with the clients in front of them. The principle survives the translation. The execution is original.

Copying skips the why. It takes the words, the gestures, the sequencing, the pacing, and reproduces them. It can look correct. It can sound correct. But it is borrowed material, and what is borrowed always carries with it the assumptions of the person it was borrowed from.

The deeper problem with copying is dependency. If your teaching is built on what someone else produces, you cannot teach beyond what they have produced. You wait for their next workshop, their next post, their next video. The source becomes the limit of your range. That is not growth — it is reliance.

Why It Cannot Transfer Cleanly

Even if you wanted to copy another teacher exactly, it would not work — and the reason is that the variables are not the same.

Your voice is not their voice. Your diction is not their diction. The body language that is natural to them may not be natural to you. The cultural context you are teaching in is not the context they are teaching in. The clients sitting in front of you are not the clients sitting in front of them. Each of these differences accumulates. Words that landed perfectly in their session land oddly in yours, not because the words were wrong but because the context they were spoken into has changed.

Take cueing as an example. A client who is energetic and engaged needs to be met with energy in return — the cues are vivid, the pace is brisk, the instruction matches the client's quality of attention. The same cues delivered at the same pace to a client who is quiet, hesitant, or sensitive to verbal volume will overwhelm them. They will not absorb the instruction. They will become more anxious rather than more engaged. The exact same words from the exact same teacher work in one session and fail in another, depending entirely on who is in front of them.

This judgement — what this client needs, in this moment, in this exercise — cannot be copied from anyone. It is built only through paying attention to actual clients over actual time. No video, no workshop, no recording teaches it. It is yours to develop or not.

Adapting to the Client You Have

The same principle applies beyond cueing. Clients arrive with different comfort levels around touch, different histories with movement, different capacities for verbal instruction, different cultural and personal preferences that shape what works for them. The teaching has to adapt to this reality.

For example, a client who is hesitant about hands-on touch — for any number of reasons — still deserves the full benefit of the work. The lesson has to be planned and cued so they receive the same teaching value without relying on physical contact they are not comfortable with. This requires the teacher to have a range of approaches available — verbal cues that can substitute for touch, a brief illustration of a principle on the apparatus where neither words nor touch are an option (the one exception I make to my general rule against demonstrating), sequencing that uses the apparatus itself to give the body a felt reference.

None of this can be copied from another teacher's videos. Their videos show what works in their studio, with their clients, with their range of approaches. You have to build your own range, suited to your own clients, drawing on your own creativity.

Creativity as the Alternative to Copying

The opposite of copying is not refusal to learn. It is creativity — using what you know to solve the specific problem in front of you, in a way that no one else has solved it because no one else has your specific client and your specific studio.

Take the arm spring series on the Reformer as an example. In the standard sequencing it sits relatively late in the work and requires the client to have built sufficient capacity to manage it. But the exercises themselves contain real value that should be available to clients earlier than the standard order would suggest. How do you give them that value without compromising the integrity of the work?

The Arm Chair is one option. The arm spring sequence transfers cleanly onto the Arm Chair — the springs are lighter, the moving parts are fewer, the demand is reduced enough that almost any client can work through the sequence safely. The exercise principle is preserved. The client gets the benefit. The teacher has solved the problem creatively rather than waiting for the client to be advanced enough for the original placement.

Or take it further down. If even the Arm Chair is too much for a particular client at a particular stage, the same series can be approximated with a small TheraBand on the mat. The sensation is different. The mechanical demand is much lower. But the movement pattern is there. The client feels the principle the exercise is designed to teach.

This kind of adaptation cannot be looked up. It is the result of knowing the apparatus thoroughly, knowing the principles behind each exercise, knowing the client in front of you, and using that combination to produce something specific to that moment. That is creativity in teaching — and it is what copying cannot give you.

What I Have Settled On

I learn from other teachers constantly. I watch their work, I think about what they are doing, I take the principles I can identify and ask whether they apply to how I teach. What I do not do is reproduce their style as my own. I do not borrow their phrasing. I do not imitate their delivery. I do not let what works for them substitute for the work of figuring out what works for me.

None of this is in tension with teaching the method faithfully. The method itself — the exercises, the sequence, the principles — I teach as I was taught it, without deviation. What is mine to develop is not the work but the delivery of it: how I cue, how I read the body in front of me, how I bring the same method to a particular person on a particular day. Fidelity to the method and originality of delivery are different things. Copying another teacher's delivery would not make me more faithful to the method, only less myself.

The result is that my teaching is recognisably mine. It is not the most polished or the most refined version of anyone else's style. It is what I have built over years of paying attention to actual clients in actual sessions. It will keep changing as I keep learning. But the changes will come from my own experience and my own thinking, not from absorbing someone else's voice and pretending it is my own.

The teachers who taught me gave me the foundation. What I do with that foundation is mine to develop. Copying their style would honour their work less than building my own does.