A “Managed Heart” in a Pilates Body
Emotions are a way of knowing about yourself and the world around you. The brain uses emotional information along with past experiences, context, and societal expectations to guide the creation of a model of how you perceive reality. It then uses the model to predict outcomes to our actions. Emotions are not universal reactions nor are they fixed for every human. They are personal reactions built by the brain through the filter of your unique past, your societal and familial expectations. Thus, it is the work of every individual to manage internal feelings based on their own private system of information set within a social framework and make decisions about acting on their emotions (or not as the case may be). This ‘work’ that every individual does to direct their feelings is their emotional labor. This concept and term was coined by Dr. AR Hochschild, an American sociologist, in her seminal book, The Managed Heart. Her book details the astonishing (at the time) revelation that “Just as manual laborers sell their physical effort, service workers sell their capacity to manage and present specific feelings”.
Emotions communicate information to our bodies. They give the brain vital clues about our safety (fear may guide you to step back from a threat ), needs (sadness that tells you and others you need comfort or support) , and values (like when anger tells you someone has crossed a personal boundary) in any situation. ”Emotion is a sense that tells us about the self-relevance of reality”.(pg 85) They are shaped by our upbringing, social setting, and gender and organized into "feeling rules" or cultural conventions. These shared guidelines help people understand, express, and manage their feelings during interactions so social life stays smooth and predictable. The management of our emotions is like a ‘currency’ or a way of showing respect and care. It can be unequal and, within a setting or within an interaction, can help to define one's role, for example the role of a parent might have different emotional regulation expectations to that of a friend, acquaintance, or stranger. But, what happens when the “feeling rules” are constructed by company policy? When emotional regulation and deference is a compulsory and fixed transaction of emotional management for financial benefit? And further, what happens when the fullness of the benefit is not immediately and directly given to the one managing their emotions, but to a corporation, board of directors, or government? The cost of corporate orders on emotional conduct is a weakening of self-awareness and emotional connection. Valuing outside standards over personal intuition often creates a deep disconnect from one's true emotional experiences and sense of self.
Emotional labor in the marketplace is standardized. Each worker must manage their feelings to match the company rules. This means they may hide their true feelings from the customer and provide a smile, warmth, enthusiasm etc upon demand. The employee’s true human reactions are pushed aside and they become split between their real self and their work self. Estrangement happens when a feeling no longer belongs to the person who feels it. “A person's contribution of feeling is thinner, less frightened with consequence, but at the same time it is seen as coming less from the self and being less directed to the other.” (pg 13). When care, empathy, or a ‘personal touch’ become something you can buy and sell it acts like a regular commodity. In the Pilates industry, instructors are not just selling their expertise in the method, keen observational skills, expert level knowledge of anatomical and physiological movement patterns and principles, and ability to recognize and work with physical limitations on a complex set of apparatus. Pilates instructors are also selling the “vibe," energy, and emotional safety of the studio. The instructor’s enthusiasm, intuition and empathy are part of the paid service.
An instructor must manage their own feelings during a session and create a sense of happiness, enthusiasm, and capability as the “emotional style of the service is part of the service itself.” This management of emotional response is a Pilates instructor's emotional labor. Their energy becomes a commodity for the client to purchase and can cause detachment between the instructor and their own ability to know how they are feeling. For example, feeling sudden frustration or fatigue can be a "clue" that a client is crossing boundaries, resisting instruction, or projecting their own anxieties onto the instructor but the instructor might be unable to “hear” or respond to that clue due to the expectations or dictations of their employment.
This ‘emotion work’ is the often unpaid, private efforts we make to align our feelings with social expectations. These expectations or ‘feeling rules’ tell us what are socially expected and acceptable feelings in a given situation. When private feelings are externally regulated by company defined boundaries and emotional labor is divorced from our internal ability to decide how we feel and we become disenfranchised from the self. Thus, when company policy decides “how much anger is warranted by how much insult.” our ability to define for ourselves the boundaries or rules of behavior may be lost. The commercialization of feelings leads individuals to question what is genuinely authentic: when our smiles and empathy become part of a job description, the boundary between our true selves and our work persona becomes blurred. Pilates instructors who teach many back-to-back classes often struggle to find where their "teaching persona" ends and their real personality begins. The strain from this “emotive dissonance” forces instructors to align the work persona closer to the private persona. They may find themselves using their high-pitched, enthusiastic "studio voice" and hyper-encouraging manners in their personal relationships, prioritizing others' comfort or growth ahead of their own.
In the Managed Heart, Hochschild details two ways that feelings can be managed: surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting is shaping or disguising one's outward appearance (like forcing a fake smile) to manage within a situation, for example an instructor finding a bright smile and using an energetic voice for a 6:00 AM class, despite being exhausted, nursing a personal injury, or dealing with a difficult personal matter. Deep acting involves consciously manipulating or creating the inner shape of a feeling to actually feel the required emotion. For example, instead of faking patience with a client who constantly complains or forgets, the instructor consciously reminds themselves of the client's high stress levels or past trauma. This shifts the instructor's genuine internal feeling from irritation to empathy. In either method of management the feeling is distanced from the actual truth or outer context. The managed environment of a workplace can also be used to aid in ‘acting’ just as costume and set design help an actor get into character. This “institutional emotion management” might look like a highly aesthetic studio with specific decorations that manage what is available to the workers view, guiding what they see and what they are likely to feel; peaceful, mindful, energetic, etc depending on the decor.
Often these modes of manipulation are highly beneficial and useful to the instructor. Hochschild uses theatre acting as an example of how we accept and engage in the management of feelings both in the actor's case and as an audience member. Hochsild terms these exchanges in the management of feelings as a “gift” or a way of paying respect to a “feeling rule”. It is in the open acknowledgement of ‘acting’, the roles of the players in the exchange, and the idea of what emotional work is ‘owed’ that the mutual benefit is found. However, there is damage in a working environment where the psychological costs of these manipulations of feeling are unacknowledged by the company and even perhaps unknown by the employee. When the roles are uncertain or misunderstood the feeling rules are equally destabilized.
Lastly, in the Pilates studio there is both a smile with the service and a command for payment. Hochschild terms this the ‘toe’ and the ‘heal’. “When an organization seeks to create demand for service and then deliver it, it uses the smile and the soft questioning voice. Behind the delivery display, the organization’s worker is asked to feel sympathy, trust and good will. On the other hand, when the organization seeks to collect money for what it has sold, its worker may be asked to use a grimace and the raised voice of command. Behind this collection display the worker is asked to feel distrust and sometimes positive bad will.” (137) These two roles both require emotional labor. Pilates instructors must balance warmth with authority. They use controlled, assertive emotional labor to command a room, push clients past physical comfort zones, and maintain safety during complex exercises, and create genuine connection and community while assuring payment for their services. Often studio owners must justify their price point and enforce late-cancellation fees at the same time that they support their client with genuine warmth, validation, and personal care. This internal dichotomy requires a disconnect that the teacher must reconcile. This rapprochement is another form of emotional labor performed by some Pilates instructors.
Scaling Emotional Labor for the Pilates Corporate Environment
The Pilates industry is multifaceted and largely unregulated with wildly different business models and methods of instruction encompassed within the Pilates label. A home studio with an apparatus, a studio with five reformers and small classes, a studio within a Physical Therapy setting, a mat studio with no apparatus, and a business franchise studio with 16 reformers in a room with neon lights are all “Pilates Studios”. It is not the intention of this article to discuss every situation and experience but to compare two broad categories of studio model: the owner/instructor smaller, boutique studio with the large, corporate franchise studio. As a disclaimer, there always exists exceptions to the general comparisons and the Pilates world lives in the shades of grey between the disparate delineations described below.
Within these two broad categories of corporate and boutique studios, the “feeling rules” (i.e. what feelings are appropriate to a certain series of events) are defined by different authority figures. The corporate chains standardize the emotional experience to ensure brand consistency. The instructors are handed behavioral scripts like specific welcoming phrases, timed sales pitches, mandatory introductory movements or closing exercises or experiences. This manufactured “deep acting” that calls on the instructor to project the corporate “brand energy” can feel artificial and lead to rapid fatigue on the part of the instructor as the emotional anchor of the class and also for the participants who recognize the contrived environment. In the case of a smaller boutique studio, the “feeling rules” are unwritten with the instructor using their intuition and empathy to read the room and adapt their authentic mood to the clients. “Deep acting” feels more natural to both the instructor and the clients as they are generating connections and building community based on the organic personality of the instructor. As the connections are more personal and less standardized there may be more emphasis on emotional gift exchange and what feelings are “owed” to both the client and the instructor.
The scale of the business changes how the clients emotions are treated. In the case of a large corporation, the client's emotions are a metric for corporate retention. Emotional labor is explicitly weaponized for profit. Instructors are often judged on key performance indicators like class capacity, membership sales, and retail upsells. The warmth and validation of the instructor is used to hit sales targets and the genuine kindness or emotional skill of the instructor has been commodified into a sales tool. Further, it is more likely that a separate person will handle the membership management and collection of money, which can often be upsetting and not associate the instructor with negative feelings. In the boutique studio, the instructor often builds a genuine neighborhood relationship and the lines between private and public life blur significantly. Because the studio is small, instructors often develop deep, long term bonds with the clients. The emotional labor shifts from “selling a brand” to managing a community and makes drawing professional boundaries much harder as clients expect personal friendship alongside physical training. Further, as the studio likely has a smaller margin and less ability to absorb client dissatisfaction, the pressure to adjust with every dissatisfied client and compromise on fee collection or offer a modified pricing is higher.
Emotional labor in the studio requires monitoring to ensure that the ‘product’ is delivered correctly. In the case of a large corporate studio the surveillance is structural. It is organized by corporate management through algorithmic client feed-back surveys, five-star rating opportunities for individual teachers, a front desk corporate presence, and systemized customer dis-satisfaction scripts and procedures. If an instructor fails to smile enough, it will show up on a corporate report, forcing constant and exhausting surface acting. On the other hand, a boutique studio’s observation is personal and immediate coming directly from the owner/ instructor who may be teaching in the same room. The instructor faces pressure to match the owner’s personal passion and work ethic. If the owner is worried about client retention or rent that anxiety trickles down creating an environment where the instructor must manage both the client's emotional experience and the boss’s emotional state as well. Both types of instructors are also subject to the constant and chaotic ‘surveillance’ from online review websites. These sites provide a space for public ‘monitoring’ of teachers and studios. Should an instructor or client have an ‘off’ day or simply not enjoy their experience enough, they may leave a lasting public critique.
Further, as the emotional labor offered by instructors is advertised and displayed ubiquitously on social media, the scrutiny, supervision and pressure to deliver the product worldwide can be severe. Any instructor navigating this digital landscape requires immense emotional labor. Pilates teachers are pressured to project an image of effortless, anatomical and movement expertise, while simultaneously facing the industry's deep-seated aesthetic idée fixe. The algorithmic demand for tight activewear, revealing angles, and performative movement forces instructors to additionally commodify their bodies just to stay visible and marketable. This is exhausting surface acting. An instructor trying to authentically teach anatomy and functional movement, must acknowledge the digital marketplace demands to sell a sexualized, curated fantasy. This jarring dissonance between genuine learning and guidance and the commercialized performance of fitness-influencer culture can lead to emotional dissonance.
Both instructors working in a Pilates studio franchise and those working in a smaller, local, independent setting are vulnerable to burnout and emotional estrangement; however, the psychological mechanism of estrangement differs based on the structure of the workplace. In a large corporate environment teachers must perform with energetic, cheerful, capable, personal attention to a rotating door of 12-20 strangers every hour. They quickly develop a ‘surface acting’ veneer and experience emotional numbness. They may disconnect their true self from their work self, splitting their two states as a survival mechanism. By disengaging from their natural feeling and constantly performing, using themselves as an instrument for commercial profit they lose access to their authentic emotional self and develop a cynicism and burnout. Instructors at a boutique studio are vulnerable to emotional exhaustion from over extension. Because the relationships are so intimate, instructors genuinely care about their clients’s personal lives. They absorb clients' traumas, stressors, and demands without the protective shield of corporate anonymity.They burn out not because they are surface acting, but because they have given away too much of their authentic emotional reserve.
The Pilates industry stands at a crossroads where the commodification of human emotion risks eroding the well-being of its most vital resource: the instructors themselves. To move forward we must recognize emotional labor as a professional skill and a tangible service within our industry. The energy and empathy that Pilates instructors provide are measurable assets that, more often than not, go unrecognized and unpaid. The exhausting realities of both deep and surface acting and the pressure to monetize both body and emotion in the digital landscape are driving high turnover, resulting in a young and potentially undereducated and inexperienced working group. We must stop treating instructor burnout as an individual failure. Whether working in a corporate franchise or a boutique studio, instructors share the same systemic risk of estrangement from their authentic selves. By acknowledging this shared struggle, we can foster a sense of solidarity. We can work together to reclaim the autonomy to define our own ‘feeling rules’ by establishing Pilates as an occupation of professionals with supporting education, ethics, accountability and conduct. We can establish firm boundaries that protect our emotional reserves from being used for profit. We can transition from being "instruments" of commercial delivery back to being autonomous professionals. By prioritizing instructor visibility, unity and control, we can transform the Pilates studio from a space of commodified performance back into a sanctuary of genuine connection, health and growth, ensuring that the "managed heart" remains the instructor’s own.