Salon Associate Accelerator
Salon Associate Accelerator
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Get Started - The Need to Know Stuff
Welcome to the Salon Associate Accelerator. I’m Chris Baran.
I’ve taught hundreds of thousands of stylists in salons, in schools, and on the biggest stages all over the world. In that time I’ve learned a lot about the beauty business, and about how to teach hair. I’ve spent the last 5 years working with some of the most successful salons in the country to create the Accelerator, so you know this is the real deal.
If you give me a few minutes here, you’ll skip hours of frustration inside the program and beyond. This is where we set you up to win.
I’ll start us off with a little science. On each page you’ll find a downloadable journal sheet, or you can download and print the whole book at once. If I didn’t take a second here to explain why they’re there, most people would skip them, and that would be a huge mistake. Here’s why it’s important:
Passive learning is what they call it when you sit and watch a video and whatever sticks, sticks. Long term you might retain about 20% of the information.
Active learning is when you participate, like getting off your butt and cutting hair while you watch. That boosts your retention up as high as 75%, and you’ll learn how to do the thing. That’s pretty good, but you still might not understand the why behind each step.
The best learning, 90% retention and above, is where you know it so well you can solve problems with it, applying the knowledge creatively in the real world. You can’t get there without a debrief step, but it’s easy. Give yourself a minute to think about what you just did.
- What worked?
- What didn’t?
- What did I learn?
- What would I do differently next time?
- What did I learn about myself?
- Do I still have questions?
Write it all down and talk it through with a partner. This can increase your understanding by a factor of twenty times. It’s the difference between good and great, and all it takes is three or four minutes, plus you’ll be able to look back on your progress and future you will love you for it.
If I’ve done my job you will never skip the debrief, and you’re going to be extremely successful with the Accelerator.
Here’s another way the Accelerator is different:
We’re going to get your hands in hair right away, but we’re doing much more than learning haircuts. I could teach you a haircut and make you practice that haircut fifty times and you would know how to do that haircut, but would you understand hair? Not really. You’d be in trouble as soon as someone wanted a different haircut.
Instead, as we go, the Accelerator gives you the principles that apply to ALL hair. What are principles? They are the underlying truths that apply no matter what, like gravity, or yellow and blue make green. Move the hair in this particular way and cut, and you will always get this result. It’s a natural consequence. Once you understand the principles, you have the tools that unlock any cut, any style, any time – even if a client brings you a magazine photo.
Each new skill can be applied by itself or in combination, and knowing how to do that makes you an unstoppable creative force. Solve any hair problem, create any look. No other associate program can do that.
We start with the Jumpstart, with skills that make you a valuable and essential part of the team immediately – not in six months, but in just three weeks. You’ll learn the Shampoo Experience, color, foils, flat iron, root tong, and blow dry skills you’ll be able to use with clients right away.
Then, in Indispensable Color, you’ll get the 4 techniques that allow you to create any color pattern you want.
And in Indispensable Design & Finishing you’ll learn the 3 movements that apply to all haircutting, the 4 types of graduation, clipper cutting, and the reason editorial stylists use so many different types of hairbrush.
For each new skill page, read it all the way through so you know the equipment and what to expect, and set up your work space so you can see the screen. A laptop or tablet is going to be better than your phone, and we suggest wireless headphones in the salon. Check with your educator for any direction going in, and then work along with the videos step by step. When you’re done, go through the debrief with a buddy, and then your educator will review your work, offer constructive feedback, and help you resolve any questions you still have. After you’ve had some opportunity to practice, you’ll schedule the assessment with your educator. And once you’ve passed that, you get to add that skill to your client-ready portfolio.
How long it takes to complete the program really depends on you. Your salon will block out time for training and practice, and we encourage you to practice on your own time as well. More practice is only going to make it easier to pass the assessments. For most people, you can aim for about three months.
What equipment will you need? I promised hands in hair, right? We learn by doing. You’ll need the usual suspects:
- shears
- a flat iron
- a couple sizes of curling iron
- a blow dryer with nozzle and diffuser
- clips and elastics
- a spray bottle
- color brushes and bowls
- applicator bottles
- foils
- a cutting comb
- a tail comb
- and clippers.
You’ll also need 4 mannequins for the coloring and cutting workshops, but only 2 of them will be cut. We like the Pivot Point Erica for its high quality hair and hairline.
This is a new way of doing things. It offers a path, accountability, and consistency. All this leads to an incredible shift in the culture of your salon. You’ll quickly feel like a valued member of a united team. Customers can sense it, and they come in more often because they like feeling part of it.
Let’s go start collecting some wins. Stay open to new ideas, practice every chance you get, and don’t skip the debrief.
Hack Your Brain - The Simple Secret to Success
How would you like to be the superhero of your own success?
There must be a thousand self-help books out there that will charge you thirty bucks for 300 pages that might or might not deliver what I’m going to tell you in the next three minutes.
This is how you hack your brain for more success, more confidence, and more happiness in every aspect of your life as an Elite Learner. Yep, I’m giving you the secret to happiness. Here we go:
First, we like to be comfortable. This seems obvious, but it’s important to be aware of it so we can tell when it’s holding us back.
Built into our DNA is something called risk-aversion. It’s a distant part of our evolution that saved us from sabre-toothed cats and walking off cliffs. It’s right there in the oldest parts of our brain. The amygdala is key for fear and threat detection; it makes very quick judgments based on prior experiences, enabling learned responses to danger that historically helped us live longer. It’s a bit of an oversimplification but we call this ancient area our ‘lizard brain’.
Look at kids. They have no fear. Toddlers will crawl right off a ledge or grab a burning candle. Even as I said that, you could feel your learned danger response, right? Experience with a hard fall or a hot stove taught you risk-avoidance. Or how about, in school, when I raised my hand in class and gave the wrong answer, and everyone laughed at me. The next time the teacher looked for answers, I felt that fear, and my hand stayed down. Sound familiar? That’s the lizard brain for you. Risk-avoidance. We like to stay comfortable.
Much more recently in our evolution we developed the pre-frontal cortex, which governs our working memory, planning, and decision making. It allows for reasoned, goal-directed behavior. It wants you to grow and to explore, and it loves to win. It makes great things possible for you. I call it our ‘wizard brain’.
The lizard brain can overreact in situations that are stressful but aren’t truly dangerous, like raising your hand in class, or public speaking, or confronting a moment of change.
The wizard brain can step in to override those emotional reactions when there is a rational reason to do so.
The key is to recognize when fear is holding you back, and to make the conscious choice to step outside your comfort zone.
This can be really hard to do. It might feel impossible. So it can be really helpful to change the way you think about risk.
Here comes the magic:
When we face the prospect of trying something new, we can feel intimidated.
There’s a risk we will FAIL, and even saying that four-letter word can jack up the heart rate.
So we do a little brain hack. You WILL make mistakes, and you may feel embarrassed or stupid for a second, but mistakes are an opportunity to learn, and learning is always a solid step forward. You learned something new, and that is always a win. And winning feels pretty great, right?
Look at that. You just taught your brain that risk brings reward no matter what.
It’s hard to overstate how huge that is. Keep doing that, and now, because you associate risk with reward, you’ll actually start looking for those opportunities to grow because it feels good!
That is the Elite Learner mindset.
They know that persistence in working through the mistakes is how you learn a skill, and they’ve reprogrammed their brains to love the sometimes uncomfortable process of learning.
That’s why we included the debrief step throughout the course. It helps you turn a mistake into learning, and learning is winning.
With that mindset, you WILL grow. You can’t lose. Can you see how that will lead to more confidence, more success, and more happiness everywhere in your life?
Be the unstoppable superhero of your own success.
