As with the question of ultimate success, there are so many individual variables that it is really hard to say for sure - but many people do experience substantial improvement in a first lesson!

Some years ago I gave taster sessions as pat of an introductory talk! I worked for about 10 minutes on an elderly lady with many physical problems: at first she was firghtened that her back was too fragile for me to touch her and she said that she had been in constant pain so much that she could hardly sleep for several months.

On the other hand some long term and apparently very committed clients have progressed much more slowly - for identifiable reasons in most cases. This is most likely where someone has a long term affliction, for instance a severe stammer. Although they can easily learn to do/notdo the things that allow the stammer to go for a short while, they can't keep it up long term, because the behaviour is so ingrained as to feel like an essential part of the personality - giving it up provokes a kind of identity crisis. This kind of thing requires some persistence and sometimes other therapeutic modalities.

Improvement doesn't always come in the form expected. In the opposite situation to the above, it can also happen that improvement takes place so subtly and is so well integrated, that one just continues feeling 'normal'. A long term client remarked, after a year in which he had progressed from being more than a little stiff in every movement to great freedom and suppleness, that he didn't feel any different. He just felt 'like himself'!