Working in Movement

I know that on-line bookstores like Amazon offer lots of books -- long tail marketing and all that. But Amazon doesn't offer expresso on-line, so off to Borders or Barnes and Noble I go regularly. Yesterday's browsing turned up a book by Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars.

Godin's basic premise seems to be that people have a particular worldview, a set of experiences, values, learnings that shapes how they view what's happening in the world. If you want to market stuff to these people, you have to relate to their worldview, which you do by telling some sort of story. It all sounds pretty plausible. A bit like George Lakoff has done for politics in Don't Think of an Elephant. Godin even mentions Lakoff, and I've posted about it here.

I like the idea of relating to a person's worldview with a story. After all, I ended up buying the book. But as I'm thinking about all this stuff, I see a kind of basic problem with it, at least relating it to talking to people about the Feldenkrais Method that I practice.

What if there's not much or any room in a worldview for a category of experience that's radically different than anything the person is familiar with? I run into that especially with athletic trainers. I usually describe Feldenkrais as "a system of small, easy movements that improves the ability to feel what you're doing as you're doing it." Most of the jocks I try that on almost immediately try to relate it to something they are familiar with: "It's all about core conditioning,or yoga, or Pilates, or mind/body exercises" or some such.

"Well, not really," I usually reply. "Let me give you a sample," and then I usually give a very brief experiential demonstration. Most like the experience, but again relate it to their athletic training, "Oh, I see, it's all about learning extension (or some other biomechanical type of term. I can go on to explain that different lessons address different patterns of self-use, but it's usually too late.

At some point in his writings, Godin talks about stores like Target successfully challenging people's concept of stores. But what I think I'm running up against here is something like there not even being a category of store to relate to.

I'm not sure what to do with all this. Obviously, using Godin's and Lakoff's terminology, there's a worldview that supports Feldenkrais. Otherwise, thousands of people wouldn't have invested the time and money to pursue it. But what about the rest, the people who don't even seem to have a category to fit it into? What story, if any, makes the most sense for them? I dunno. Any ideas are welcome.