AT skills - an occupational asset

Alexander Technique (AT) addresses one of the great unsolved problems of modern society: how to work smarter. Because we all need to work smarter if we don't want to work in a state of continual pain and discomfort.

Most jobs involve upright activities. Unless you are a professional mattress tester, you probably work in an upright position (either standing or sitting). Being upright for extended periods of time is difficult, especially in stillness. So you are already meeting one serious challenge - just maintaining a standing or seated posture - before you even begin the work you are being paid for.

In response to this predicament, a great deal of ergonomic furniture is bought and sold every year with the promise of making work in the upright bearable. But for the most part, furniture will not change things very much. Because the equipment that is malfunctioning is not the furniture. It's our selves. How we do what we do is the problem.

If you spend many of your working hours in front of a computer, your arms and eyes are probably pulling you forward and downward. You hunch over, forget to take breaks, and forget to breathe. And the discomfort you feel affects the way you feel about your work. But it doesn't have to be this way.

When you're working hard, Alexander Technique (AT) can stop you from being hard on yourself. It can also help you enhance your performance at work. How? By making you more aware of the unnecessary tension and unhelpful postures you may be assuming unconsciously, and teaching you how to support yourself more efficiently for healthful, well-coordinated movement. Because AT was created to make upright posture work for us, not against us.

Certain callings are likely to provoke on-the-job distress because they require long hours in difficult postures. Many professionals, in all different kinds of specialized fields, find their routines leave them sore and stiff at the end of the day. Dentists, surgeons, videographers, hair stylists and plumbers all have their own particular kinds of aches and pains. And concert musicians suffer for their art in a very literal sense.

Alexander Technique can be especially helpful to people in these and many other particularly challenging lines of work. Even though the specific activities involved differ widely, specialists can use what they learn in Alexander Technique lessons to adapt the underlying principles of good upright self-use to each task in ways that improve the experience of working - and even improve the work product. Because removing the continual distraction of discomfort can only help make what we do have better results.

Whatever you do professionally, Alexander Technique offers strategic alternatives for working smarter. Using AT, you can maintain mindfulness in activity – minimizing or eliminating pain and enhancing the quality of your performance on the job.