Description

Regular lessons are a training-session format that implies a long-term relationship between the instructor and his students. It’s theoretically the most effective training format, as it involves repeated meetings with students, the opportunity to go into great detail with them, and allows them an unlimited number of attempts.

Lessons can be held from one to three times a week. They can take place any day of the week and at any time convenient for working people. There’s no point in having the lessons themselves last more than 3 hours (including the break), so as not to wear out the audience. Now freed from the need to have students urgently make attempts immediately after the session, you are at liberty to set any schedule you see fit. Students will usually have up to a week to make attempts, and they can make them only when conditions are conducive.

Such groups can also be open enrollment. A new student coming to the lessons for the first time will be grouped together with more experienced practitioners and will gradually catch up with them. It’s common to have from 20 to 30 regular students. This format can be combined with one-time lectures and three-day seminars if such events are considered to be the first stage of instruction and regular lessons the second, more advanced one.

You can also plan special lessons for advanced practitioners and those who are already well-versed in general theory. Such special lessons can be held every few weeks or even months. However, the instructor should be extremely experienced if he is to competently conduct such lessons and field questions from the more demanding audience. These instructions do not reflect the lesson format at so high a level, and so the instructor himself will have to take the initiative and use all the knowledge at his disposal.

I woke up to an alarm that went off in my dream, and began my exit right then and there… Wait a minute! It was not even a separation, but rather a tearing out of the body, as though it were just a piece of paper… I became scared that something unusual was going on (unwarranted inference), and decided to return to my body to try doing the known techniques (unwarranted action)… However, I soon realized that I was doing so in vain, as I did not come back into my body because I was already in out-of-body experience, and was only wasting my time by trying different techniques. After that, I got out of my body: I simply crawled out. After remembering to deepen, I began to palpate everything. But deepening apparently did not work, because I immediately fell asleep as soon as I went out into the hall (lack of maintaining).

The organizer himself should determine what the price or suggested donation for his products or services should be. Find out what amounts are realistic and commonplace from the competition or other people who work in similar fields. Pricing also greatly depends on the training format. For example, admission to a large-scale event with several hundred participants might run from 3 to 10% the average local monthly income, while one-on-one lessons (especially for an entire course) might cost anywhere from one-third to one-hundred times the average monthly salary. The affluent might pay whatever amount asked for your opening the door to life in two worlds, which is indeed what the practice of out-of-body experience is. You can come to a separate agreement with each VIP client.

Since pricing falls squarely on the business side of things, you need to approach it like you’re running a business. For example, you might offer a discount to people who do group-buys of tickets, as well as use other well-known pricing and event-promotion incentives.

Considering the nature and uniqueness of the methods on offer and the fact that this is indeed to the only attainable "superpower", the organizer should feel free to play with the pricing until he finds the ideal solution. The price or suggested donation should be sufficiently elastic. For example, sometimes doubling the price doesn’t cut attendance in half, but instead has a negligible impact on turnout.

Perhaps paradoxically, advertising low prices does not necessarily lead to people being more willing to buy tickets to seminars. Low prices might put them on guard, especially if similar kinds of training sessions in other fields cost substantially more. There is also the paradox of perceived value, which means that high prices often don’t put people off, but attract them instead. Explanations for this phenomenon include people attributing increased importance to the event due to the increased expense, thinking, "It’s expensive – that means it must work and that everybody needs it. I am going to carefully follow all the instructions."

Meanwhile, don’t forget that you’re putting your own money at risk when fiddling with the pricing: you’ll still have to pay for the auditorium, advertising, and the work of the instructor if you’re only performing the role of the organizer.

 

Before Training Sessions

Since many people will sign up ahead-of-time for your training sessions (sometimes by a month or more), there will be the issue of how to maintain their interest. For example, if a person signs up for a seminar 6 weeks in advance, then in most cases he will change his mind or decide go to another seminar instead. This might happen within only a week or several days of signing up. People often simply forget that they had been planning to go somewhere in the first place. This problem is partially solved by asking for upfront deposits. You can try several tricks for keeping your students.

First, begin to actively promote your event 2 to 3 weeks beforehand if you have planned powerful promotional activities that are known to be effective. This will help you retain more of the already-enrolled students on whom you have already spent a portion of your advertising budget.

Second, you can give people pre-seminar tasks or readings to complete. This will draw them into the subject matter and reinforce their desire to explore it in more depth.

Third, you can put those who have just signed up on a mailing list and send them not only event reminders, but also a large amount of beneficial and interesting information.

Fourth, everyone who signs up should be reminded of the event regularly. To do so, you should call them 1 to 3 days after they sign up to confirm their spot, and then send them a text message 2 weeks prior to the event, a week before it, and the morning of. Little things like this will allow you to get many more people to come to an event.

If possible, have the notifications request that people not make attempts to enter out-of-body experience on their own for about an entire week before the seminar. This will allow people to accumulate more willpower and desire, which you can then put to use as they improve their technique. This will improve the quality of instruction in the long run.

The instructor needs to have a basic understanding of what kind of person attends his seminars and why those people chose the given seminar format. Most of the information given out can be gleaned from books or various videos that are freely available in great number online or can be bought in stores. Meanwhile, people sometimes fly in from the other side of the country and spend a lot of money and time to take part in a live seminar. Why? Knowing the answers to this question will help you to better meet the needs of your audience. Reasons might include:

– they want to be in a down-to-earth atmosphere with like-minded people

– they want to obtain more motivation and desire, as well as be psychologically jolted into action by the instructor

– they want personal help from the instructor

– many dislike reading books

– it’s easier and simpler for them to learn the techniques from somebody else than to spend a lot of time learning something on their own

– it allows for quicker progress since fewer mistakes will be made during attempts

– they want new information instead of antiquated material from books and videos

– somebody wants to meet you and talk with you personally

– many people simply like to go to various seminars as a form of entertainment and personal development

– somebody wants to get first-hand experience of a seminar before holding his own

– somebody just happened to tag along or is taking the place of a friend who couldn’t go

– some people simply don’t know that all this information is freely available

As you can see, people rarely attend for learning’s sake alone. They need something else, and the instructor should always keep that in mind. Don’t be surprised when a very experienced practitioner who knows the techniques better than the instructor himself still attends seminars and obtains much satisfaction from doing so.

Most attendees are no problem at all to teach. However, there are some typical characters who are nearly always encountered in the audience and who you should know how to deal with so as not to harm the general atmosphere or make things difficult for yourself or those characters themselves.

The Skeptic The skeptic will try to cast doubt on almost everything you say. He will often do this in a way so that everybody or at least his neighbors can hear him. It’s never, ever worth it to get into a discussion with him. You should politely ask him to keep quiet and hold his questions for the question-and-answer session. He will quiet down on his own if you ignore him after that. His neighbors will often help him to do so.

The Gullible Some people are so open to new information that they will take every word of yours to be the God-given truth. The problem is that it’s hardly likely that it’s your personal powers of suggestion that are so convincing. What’s more likely is that they approach everything in a similar manner, and so their heads might be full extraneous garbage that would seriously interfere with their practice. All of their "knowledge" will usually mix together with the unadulterated procedures you give them, and no good will come as a result. You usually have to talk to them one-on-one to warn them of the problems that they might run into.

The Know-It-All This type of student attends lessons and yet for some unclear reason stubbornly does everything in the way that seems right to him, which is often the exact opposite of the instructions he was given. Politely ask a know-it-all to follow your instructions, and only your instructions, during the seminar, and then do things any way he wants after the lesson. Let him know that you can’t help him until he follows the procedure he was taught when making attempts.

The Motor-Mouth You need to be very careful when asking this type of student a question and even more careful when giving him the floor. Instead of a clear answer, you might get a 5 to 10 minute speech about everything and nothing. Immediately nip it in the bud. There usually isn’t enough time during the lesson for what’s most important. Moreover, other attendees don’t really want to listen to motor-mouths either, as they came to listen to you.

The Wallflower If you notice people who sit as far back in the room as they can and participate as little as possible in everything, put them in the front row on day two. Involve them in the process and ask them more questions, as otherwise there’s the risk of them ruining your rate-of-success due to lackluster and unfocused attempts.

If somebody constantly gets sidetracked, simply ask him questions more often during the lesson. In critical situations you can always ask a disruptive person to leave the classroom so that he doesn’t interrupt the lesson. You should do so politely and give him a full refund if it happens on the first day. However, such situations are quite infrequent.