What Would Tabitha Do?

As a hairstylist who is considering opening my own salon, my clients are constantly asking me if I’ve seen Tabitha’s Salon Takeover. I’m usually ashamed to admit that I haven’t. I had seen her on Shear Genius in the past on a marathon stint that got me caught up (gotta love Jet Blue). The truth is that we’re too cheap to order cable. I actually had so many people asking me this that I asked my husband if we could justify it considering it would be a “Salon Business Planning Market Research” or some sort of tax write off, wouldn’t it?

Thankfully my clients are very good at telling me stories from the show and they catch me up quite well, but when I was at the hair show this weekend I felt I owed it to them in a way to go to her class. I found it very intriguing. Mostly the things she said were common sense. It was refreshing for me to hear that almost everything she said I agreed with. The things she brought up that were challenging to me were areas that I knew I was weak in already, so it was nice to have someone drive the point home for me to really seek on improving in those areas.

What I loved about her is that she has taken the platform that she had and used it to pour back into the industry. The next thing I noticed really impressed and inspired me; all of her standards as a beauty professional were just that-professional. Her standards, if followed, will raise the bar and force people into a new and better way of doing things. She also was very honest and realistic mentioning things like “you will mess up, everybody does, just get back going in the right direction again, start over now if you need to, keep committed to bettering yourself constantly.” As the class was dismissed and we were walking out of the room she announced, “Wait! I just had these bracelets made because so many of you were requesting them!” They were black (hairdressers wear black) silicone with the inscription WHAT WOULD TABITHA DO? I think I can rightfully assume that these are a spin-off of the popular WWJD bracelets. Interesting. It’s interesting to me how as people we sometimes need reminders to keep our standards the best.

The more I thought about this the more similarities I saw in her mission and Jesus’ mission. When Jesus came on the scene, his popularity and fame seemed to rise almost overnight, much like Tabitha’s. They both have the ability to draw massive crowds to hear what they have to say; Tabitha had a line of people waiting down the hall, down the stairs, and around the bottom of the stairs. Jesus drew a crowd of 5,000 people in a place with no cars. Tabitha presented us a new way of doing things, a better way, the best way. She admits we will stumble and fall, then says, go forward from here doing that no more. She knows her way is challenging to us, yet she believes in us (probably more than we believe in ourselves) and encourages us that we can do it. She also announced that she is there for us, being dedicated to answering every last e-mail, facebook, and twitter and it is the real her responding to them. We can go to her directly with no middle man and she will answer us. Yes, I think she has a lot of similarities with the other One with the bracelets.

-Krystal is a blogger for The Daily Vine. Check out her bio to see where her view comes from.