The Value of Feng Shui Certification, Part Three

Read Part One and Part Two

I have studied with several teachers/mentors who are not affiliated with any organization, as a deliberate choice. I have colleagues who mention they prefer to study with different teachers/mentors and out of their training form their own unique modality.

Even with the advice of mentors telling of the pitfalls of belonging to an organization, when I began the process of taking certification courses ‘credibility’ and acknowledgement as a graduate of that school seemed important. This is probably really useful for someone starting out in their practice in a new field, but on getting experience I saw that many clients don’t care who you’ve studied with as long as they can get a sense of who you are, and feel they can trust you. Most of what I have tried to do as my business practice is work on building a sense of trust and confidence in my work. And keep in mind that if people will hire someone who has no formal feng shui training to work, there must be something other that credentials to account for it.)

So in one sense it was easy to give up official acknowledgement of credentials when circumstances put that choice in front of me. How it happened was that the teacher I studied with introduced a trademark process for her business and all students and teachers were required to sign a license agreement to continue to affiliate themselves with the school.

As a business owner I can appreciate a decision of trademarking and licensing to protect the investment in the business one has created, but my conclusion was that it was not in my best business interest to sign the license agreement. For one thing it would have brought a level of control into my business that I wasn’t prepared to live with.

It was a good lesson also on the difference between personal business decisions and the aspect of community that can be a result of certain types of businesses. On the community level it stung: the community being all of us practitioners and the practitioners who took further courses to become teachers, and then teachers of teachers. ‘New age’ professions often do not translate well into business terms. In this case there was a perception of collective ownership, especially among senior teachers; there were official volunteer positions and other teachers and graduates who gave, often extensively, of their time and expertise to continue to build the school/community.

On a personal level not only did I lose official recognition of my practitioner and teaching credentials but also a community. In a larger sense I saw it as an overall loss for those who signed the new format as well as those who didn’t, in the breaking of that community.

What I have that is ‘mine’ is more than a decade of experience in feng shui, as well as my history and my writing. I would not be in the position I am today as a feng shui writer and teacher if I had not taken the certifications. The trainings, in hindsight, were not about the knowledge in feng shui as much as it was about owning an identity and stepping into it. When I did my practitioner certification course one of my classmates said that I was there to ‘step into my power.’ I had no way of knowing then that to really step into my power I would have to also step away from the school.

And step into my power I did. As the training I invested in was structured as a certification course for practitioners, it was the next logical step for me to create my own practitioner certification curriculum. I love the work I created. But something didn’t feel right and it took a long time to figure it out.

Part of it is simply this question about the value of certification in feng shui which has nagged at me almost from the very beginning, when I was the only ‘certified’ practitioner in a location but competing for jobs with feng shui hobbyists (their words). Secondly I’ve had time now to assimilate my experience and recognize the potential for future difficulties, of maintaining my own level of devotion to a business model over a long period of time.

I could have simply said, “I’ll never make those choices” and therefore never have to make a difficult decision where someone I’ve trained and given a certificate to would be unable to officially recognized as a practitioner in my school. Or I could have said, “I’ll structure my course the way I want it to run, right from the beginning” (only I didn’t because I didn’t have the hindsight then). Also I know none of what happened in my experience with the feng shui school was planned, but evolved that way. That is my concern: being unable to predict what will happen five or ten years from now. Already my interests are shifting because that’s what happens in life.

I believe there are levels of training needed in feng shui that are professional and yet not certification courses. I am still searching for the model that feels the best vibrational match for me, and there is more to consider than just the format my future work will take, such as how much of a role I want to play, from little involvement (publishing in a book form) to high involvement (such as a mentoring relationship). My course is essentially ‘on hold’ while I figure it out.

As I step away from the ‘certifying’ process in feng shui, at least the model that I was trained in, I keep in mind that the only constant in life is change. Holding on to what was, or what we hoped it would be, never really works, and I am looking forward to moving forward with my career in feng shui – on to the new and better thing.

© Deborah Redfern 2011. All rights reserved.