Interview with the founders of the Embodied Course Creation Program

“It is to make the switch from selling your soul per hour to leveraging your knowledge and passion using the new knowledge economy model.”
This is the quote that grabbed my attention right away when I took a first glance at the free blueprint created by Chantill Lopez and Anne Bishop.
As a teacher, you know how the pay structure in the industry works. It doesn’t matter whether you are a studio owner or a Pilates teacher working at a studio or at a fitness facility. In most cases, you are paid by the hour. Once you reach a certain pay bracket you hit a pay ceiling. In order to break through you either need to add more teaching hours or find creative ways to expand your income.
There are a few facts that I find true about most of the Pilates teachers that I have ever met or worked with:
- Pilates teachers are self-motivated.
- They are lifelong learners who are obsessed with expanding their education
- They are creative and always look for new ways to use their knowledge
- They are skilled in what they do and they truly care about helping their students achieve a greater quality of life through movement
Over the years of teaching, all of these qualities create a powerful toolbox of knowledge and skills that they can share with their students. You can’t bottle it up and put a simple hourly price tag on this toolbox.
You might have considered creating an online video platform or courses that you can sell to expand your income yourself. As a website developer who works with many Pilates and wellness professionals, I have helped set up multiple online offerings. I’ve seen both success and failure in these programs. I’ve also seen unfinished projects that never saw their completion.
From my experience, here is the biggest contributing factor to the failure: loss of motivation in the late stages of the project. So many teachers put a lot of effort upfront into creating their product and they get burned out by the time they reach the marketing and selling phase of the project. They have only about 5% left to push across the finish line and finally reap the rewards for all of their work but they are done mentally. They are exhausted and don’t see the sales they were hoping for and defeat sets in. It’s heartbreaking for me to see this happen because I personally want every project that I help with to succeed.
Here is where Chantill Lopez and Anne Bishop come in. They are the creators of the Embodied Course Creation Program. I had an opportunity to speak to both of them and ask them very practical questions about what it takes to break through the hourly rate barriers for Pilates teachers. We looked at general concepts that they cover in their program and then broke them down to down-to-earth practical answers that YOU want to hear.
In this interview, Chantill and Anne share their “secret sauce” to successful launches. Their approach completely eliminates the failure factor that I described above. You can jump into it right away here but I really encourage you to listen to the full interview or read through the highlights below.
Here are the questions that we cover in the interview:
- Who should Pilates teachers consider switching from the hourly pay structure?
- What are the alternatives to the dollar-per-hour service economy?
- How can this new knowledge economy approach be practically implemented into Pilates studio/teacher offerings?
- How can teachers find time to create these new offers for their students?
- What technology is necessary to set up and run a course?
- What is the cost of the technology necessary to run the courses/programs?
- What type of marketing is necessary to make the course offering successful?
- The “secret sauce” of having a successful course launch.
Watch the Interview: How to Break through the Pay Ceiling for Movement Service Providers
Resources
- Schedule a free Teaching Strategy Diagnostic Call with Anne Bishop and Chantill Lopez. You will discuss what’s working in your online business, what’s not, and if the Embodied Course Creator Accelerator Program can support you at this time. Click here to schedule
- Join Free Facebook Group: Lucrative Course Creation for Movement Teachers + Workshop Leaders
- Access Free Blueprint: Get Instant Access to New Knowledge Economy Blueprint
Interview Highlights
Meet your Speakers:

Anne Bishop opened her Pilates studio in 2002. Her love of movement education led her to pursue a graduate degree from Harvard University with a Master’s Degree in Mind, Brain, and Education. She co-created the Embodied Course Creators Program with Chantill Lopez because she wanted to teach others what she felt was missing in mind-body education: brain science, educational best practices, and solid pedagogy. When you combine this with a killer business model you can leverage your talents as a Pilates teacher to bring your ideas to life. Now Anne’s focus is on supporting other movement teachers to create 6-figure incomes through body + behavior transformation.

Chantill Lopez started her professional life as a journalist and quickly moved into the realm of movement where she has stayed for more than 20 years as a solopreneur and studio owner. She is an innovator, international educator and presenter, mentor, and coach whose passion is supporting teachers in optimizing their value and charging their worth. Her creative partnership as a founder in The Master’s Program has been a dream come true, allowing her to support teaching from the whole-person and whole-body perspective, drawing from brain-based learning frameworks, motivation and communication science, somatic and humanistic psychology, and other emerging models such as the Polyvagal Theory.
Why should you consider switching from the hourly rate?
Chantill: What’s not wrong with it? I feel like it’s an interesting thing to reflect on as a teacher. When Anne and I started really cultivating this position and this idea, we came to the realization that this is just the model that’s been handed down.
We have been handed down a paradigm and a belief that our biggest impact is made one-on-one. And I certainly believed that for a long time. And I leaned deeply into manual queuing and adjustments. And I was always a big hands-on teacher intuitively.
And I love that, and I love the relationship. But, it holds us hostage to always teaching, exchanging essentially X amount of dollars per 55 minutes, 50 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever the framework is that you’re teaching, which means that at some point you are completely limited in the amount of money you can make. This is the service economy. “I’m going to trade my time for your money.” And we tell ourselves that it’s so fulfilling until it’s not.
That is a huge issue. We are so talented and so driven and so knowledgeable, and we make a huge impact on people’s lives. And to think that we are limited by what we can charge per hour is unacceptable in my opinion.
Anne: Your knowledge matters, your smarts matter.
If you’ve been teaching for a while, you get really good. You’re like a body whisperer. And there are many body whisperers in our community. Many of the teachers in our community are so educated and knowledgeable and they understand their clients so well. In the service economy, the dollars-per-hour economy, unless you’re charging a lawyer’s fee for your hour, you are stuck.
It’s important that we consider the shift because you just don’t need to stay stuck in the dollars-per-hour economy. Because
- You don’t teach the same way you did 20 years ago.
- You don’t run your business on a 1997 Pilates model.
We are not saying, “through it all out.” Absolutely NOT. There are so many other possibilities and ways to teach with all the knowledge you have, and most people are not going to come into a studio and want to pay $300 an hour to work with you.
Chantill: No matter how much education you get, there is a ceiling to how much you can charge and how much you’re willing to charge for your private or group sessions.
A lot of teachers struggle with the fact that they want to keep their services accessible because they care so much about people. There are different ways to do it that don’t mean that you have to be exclusionary in the cost.
What are the alternatives to the dollar-per-hour service economy?
Chantill: What Anne and I do through the Embodied Course Creation Program is lean into our two areas of expertise and our 40-plus years of experience.
Anne has a degree from Harvard in mind-brain education. She brings to the table this amazing wealth of knowledge about curriculum design. So designing education that is extrapolated, driven by how the brain learns and how the brain learns movement, specifically and how to best teach in an online format.
My expertise is in the nervous system and behavior change through the nervous system, through the body.
We bring all of this to bear and we are supporting teachers in creating a curriculum that is transformative.
So it starts with identifying problems that your students face consistently. And then we help you take all of your experience and knowledge and organize it in a way that is motivating, engaging, and supports transformation and behavior change, whether you are doing that in person, or online.
The feedback that we’ve gotten over and over again through COVID and beyond is that “my students are actually gaining more ground, experiencing greater outcomes, and have greater self-advocacy and autonomy.”
How can this new knowledge economy approach be practically implemented into Pilates studio/teacher offerings?
Anne: On a very practical level, if you’ve been teaching for a while, there’s a chance that some of your clients have moved away. Your new offer can be targeted towards these people.
You can create something like a six-week program for new students coming in.
Some of the teachers love to do retreats. Retreats are very popular right now. You can design a program that your students engage in before or after this retreat.
Another implementation is mentorship programs.
Chantill: We all want to feel valued and have a life that reflects our work.
There should not be a disconnect between our business and our life. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice making a lot of money or even just enough money if you have a passion job.
How can teachers find time to create these new offers for their students?
A lot of teachers are already teaching full-time non-stop. Some of them are feeling burned out and exhausted. How can they find more time in their schedule for learning and creation?
Anne: This is a challenge. A lot of teachers are caretakers, they have families. So sometimes you have to do it after the kids have gone to bed or between the clients. You have to find creative opportunities in your schedule to make it work, but, in the end, you know that you are building something that will serve you for a long time instead of just trading dollars for hours.
Chantill: You’re either gonna make the choice or you’re not gonna make the choice. You have to decide whether the output is worth the outcome for you.
The difference between creating a course and learning how to create a transformative and embodied curriculum is that once you learn it, that’s the whole point, you are no longer trading dollars for hours.
And once you have done it once, doing it a second time is a breeze, doing it a third time is even easier, and doing it a fourth time is even easier.
And so it might take time to build and fulfill, but once you do it the first time, it gets exponentially easier while you make more money.
It seems a little bit like a magic bullet, you know, but it really is. It really is that.
What technology is necessary to set up and run a course?
Many Pilates teachers deeply dislike technology. I know this for a fact because I work with many Pilates and wellness professionals as their website developer and technical support team member. How complicated is it to integrate the technology, and are there any tools that you ladies provide or help them with?
Anne: We provide support for educators to set up their programs and use technology with tutorials tailored to their needs.
What is the cost of the technology necessary to run the courses/programs?
Anne: Well, I will say it’s cheaper than most online scheduling software, particularly the big ones that most of the studios use. If you teach Pilates you’re also an entrepreneur and it requires investment.
If the cost of the software necessary to run the course is a concern and you absolutely want to do it the least expensive way, then you can do it for free. We’ve had many of our teachers use Google classroom, which is completely free.
You can even email people videos, and we can support you with that as well.
Chantill: We literally have a guide to tech that we give you that says:
- Here are the things that we know work.
- Here are the things that we use.
- Here’s an entire list of everything we use to run our business.
- Here is the cost breakdown: what’s free, what’s low cost, what’s medium cost, and what’s high cost.
What type of marketing is necessary to make the course offering successful?
Many teachers do not enjoy marketing or selling. They just want to teach and create. How do you support your teachers in helping them sell their new offers?
Chantill: I would like you to invite the idea of not separating marketing and selling from you sharing the passion of what you do.
We talk a lot about teaching as marketing. So standing into your teacher self, your educator self, this experience, this beautiful experience that you have of communicating what you do and taking that voice in all of your marketing. You can do it in many different ways -through emails, which we’re a huge advocate of, through in-person demonstrations and workshops and community events, and getting on somebody’s podcast to talk about what you do.
The bottom line is, can you communicate the value and can you see it not as selling, but as sharing?
The “secret sauce” of having a successful course launch
Anne: In our last cohort our group sold roughly $40,000 in online programming and all of the people got their programs outlined on a course and received deposits.
We know that selling, technology, and the topic of the course are the things that tend to hold people back the most. In our program, we focus on helping our students receive a deposit before the full course has been created (PilatesBridge: If you were looking for the “secret sauce” to successful product offers: THIS IS IT!) We know that the teachers in our programs have enough integrity to deliver the course once they have received the deposit. The excitement of this early success keeps them rolling forward.
We are committed to getting teachers more revenue, more inspiration, more profit, less time, and a lot more creativity.
We invite you to take the first step if you want to learn more – a Diagnostic Teaching Strategy Call. We will talk about what’s working in your online business, what’s not, and if the Embodied Course Creator Accelerator Program can support you at this time. Click here to schedule.
Resources Mentioned in the Interview
- Schedule a free Teaching Strategy Diagnostic Call with Anne Bishop and Chantill Lopez. You will discuss what’s working in your online business, what’s not, and if the Embodied Course Creator Accelerator Program can support you at this time. Click here to schedule
- Join Free Facebook Group: Lucrative Course Creation for Movement Teachers + Workshop Leaders
- Get instant Access to New Knowledge Economy Blueprint