Dear Sarah,
I’m a service submissive that is currently looking for a Dominant, and in the meantime I’d like to improve my skills. Do you have any recommendations for ‘polishing’ up my service skills?
Dear reader,
May I suggest a supply of good quality jewelers polishing rouge and a soft cloth? Seriously, though, looking for ways that one can more fully serve our potential dominants can offer some useful ways to spend our time between relationships that produce personal growth (thereby increasing our potential value to partners), rather than bemoaning our current non-attached state or the lack of quality dominants on the market. Let’s pretend that you get to attend a very special college just for submissives that wish to learn new skills…we’ll call it SubSkool ™.
Before we go to school, we need to figure out what it is, exactly, that we want to learn. Have you worked on making yourself a checklist of the skills that you have, as well as the skills that you’d like to work towards gaining? I often suggest that submissives, slaves, and service oriented bottoms spend some time thinking about what kinds of service that they would like to offer, and then use that list to develop a checklist of skills that they wish to gain or improve. I often group the ways that service can be offered as follows:
By starting with these broad groupings, you can brainstorm a huge number of skills that you may wish to offer…and as with all other brainstorming projects, it’s important to remember that you don’t censor yourself or limit what you write. Even if the service act (such as cleaning toilets) seems obvious or even ridiculous to you, write it down. This is a list just for yourself; it doesn’t need to be perfect!
Once you’ve written down the skills that you’d like, pick a few that you feel most strongly that you’d like to develop. These will be the focus of your first “semester” in SubSkool™. And just as in colleges, your studies can be completed in a wide variety of ways. You can take classes from mainstream colleges or schools – classes on everything from personal accounting, to chauffeuring, to landscaping, to small engine repair is available to you, and often very inexpensively. You can also take classes from experienced submissives and slaves, or from others in the community that have a good grasp on the skillset that you want to develop. You can do individual study – use the internet, books, phone or email interviews, and trial and error to discover ways to perfect the service skills you wish to gain. You can even do a “work study” program by asking a trusted dominant, master, or trainer to guide you in your efforts to practice your skills as you grow.
How do you find classroom space? Look within your community – whether it’s online or in person – and start listening to the people around you talk about service. Listen for the kinds of experiences that you’d like to have, the kinds of skills that you’d like to learn. Approach them – you’re asking for them to mentor you, either briefly (perhaps a quick demo in person) or more long term, such as an ongoing mentorship. Learn the resources that are within your reach – websites like Kink Academy, discussion groups on Fetlife or in Yahoo or Google groups, your local library’s learning resources – and use them! All of the time that you put into building your own skillset as a submissive will pay off in the long run, when you have the opportunity to serve the dominant that you want to serve in a way that shows your value and talents at their finest.