Success and other dreadfully sticky topics

Right after I graduated from my teacher’s training, I sat myself down with a very large pad of lined paper, a bucketful of coffee and a template from Enterprise Fredericton called “How to write a business plan”. It took two weeks of skull sweat and about 18 draft versions before I had it “done”. Two weeks ago, I met with my Business Development Officer, Chris Guerette, for her review and critique.

Not having ever written a business plan in my entire freaking life, it was a bit of a stretch to say the least but the exercise in and of itself was incredibly useful. It made me really think about how I was going realize this nebulous idea of being a yoga teacher to actually getting real bodies on real mats in real rooms. It meant working out schedules and paying room deposits and just a whole pile of thinking. It’s thinking about big things – what are my long-term goals? It was thinking about little things – supply mats or not? And a hundred points in between.

Yesterday, I got Chris’ critique back. Wow!!! Seventeen points where I need to clarify. Some of them are housekeeping details and will be smoothed out by inserting a sentence or paragraph.

But here’s the one that’s knocked me off my feet:

Really define your 2-year goal. Securing Financing? Being Successful? What does that mean? …

Excellent bloody question, I say, excellent question. Exactly how does one define success as a yoga teacher? Is it how many students I teach? Is there a magic number of students for me? Is it my retention rate that I’m going to look at – the percentage of students who return to my classes? Is it a monetary figure – not likely, as I have no intention of earning a living at this for many years to come. Right now, I would rejoice at breaking even.

I certainly didn’t sign on to this with dreams of making buckets of money. Which is bringing me back to something I need to reaffirm in my own head. Why teach in the first place? Why do I want to teach yoga? Again, here we go with the excellent questions that you just know are going to cost you about 8 hours of serious thinking.

I took my teacher’s training mostly on a whim. Well, somewhere between a whim and a plan. I hadn’t taken a great deal of yoga classes when Kathryn announced she was offering the first yoga teacher’s training in this region. I really didn’t think I had enough experience on the mat and probably would have dismissed it but for the little voice from within that said… ‘Do it”. And upon investigation, all the little obstacles, like time and money, could be overcome or solved and voila, I became a yoga teacher. That’s when the fun began.

For many reasons, I’ve come to accept that teaching yoga is my dharma – my life’s mission and in order to complete that mission, I needed a plan.

I’ve talked or more precisely not talked, with a few people in this area and there seems to be a real reluctance on the part of some to frame the teaching of yoga into a business model. Yoga at its core is a spiritual pursuit and somehow all this talk of money sullies that.

Say what you want about it, money does have some very useful features. One of its more useful ones is that it’s a convenient medium of exchange, thereby making it much easier to secure rooms in which to teach. It also has the distinct advantage over bartering in that it provides a discrete and quantifiable measure we can use to compare one thing over another. It becomes the means by which I fulfill my mission. I need money to rent rooms, pay for my education, purchase supplies and advertise to students to who need yoga in their life. It’s not money for the sake of accumulating money – money becomes the means to the end.

In my mind, and perhaps no one else’s, I’ve made a promise to my students and my theoretical students of the future to be there as a guide and a presence on their journey through this thing called Yoga. The only way I can honour that commitment is by taking care of my responsibilities towards the business end of yoga. It’s time to get serious about that business plan.

And it suddenly dawns on me that really what I’m talking about is the overall big picture concept of Dharma. In Gary Kraftsow’s book Yoga for Transformation, he has great picture of what I’m trying to get at. He says it better than I can, so here are Gary’s words on Dharma.

We all have certain fundamental responsibilities and obligation to fulfill in life. As parents we have responsibility to our children. … As social beings, we have responsibilities to our employers, employees, society and government. As students, we have responsibilities to our teachers. And, as teachers, we have responsibilities to our students.
These responsibilities must be fulfilled – they constitute a personal dharma from which there is not honourable escape. …. All too often, we use our ideas of the spiritual realm as an escape from the real situations of our life that face us day to day. Thus [the ancients] taught “dharma raksati raksata” which loosely translated means “as we take care of our responsibilities, we will be taken care of.”

So that pretty much explains why I’m back revising my business plan. It’s about taking care of my responsibilities towards my students and to my teacher and to my tradition and to myself and ..and.. and . The list just keeps growing.

But what it doesn’t answer is the original question that started off this entire philosophical conflab. What constitutes success? What measures will I employ to know if my efforts have been fruitful and if I’m attending to fulfilling my dharma.

So, all you yoga teachers out there – how about a shout out here? How do you define success? What are your measures? What do you look at to make sure you’re still on track?

Thanks for reading and Namaste,

Kate

Another pothole in the Learning Curve avoided.

Whoaaaaaaaa, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. I’ll blame the Universe™ for that one. The Universe™ has been fairly busy in my life, teaching me all about being a yoga teacher.

Some lessons gleaned thus far from the School of Hard Knocks:

1. Time and money are largely interchangeable. No time costs you money; no money means it’s going to cost you time.

2. Always factor in your opportunity costs.

3. Keep your notes – they’ll prove useful in the inquiry.

Ha, ha, just kidding about the last one. That’s Policing 101.

To say things are moving at a breakneck speed would be an understatement. Last week, I got a job offer, tentatively accepted it, tried to renegotiate the contract prior to signing it and had the job offer withdrawn – all in less than 24 hours. My head’s still doing the whirly-gig.

And that’s where things always get messy in my life. Things go bad when I start making decisions without giving myself the chance to reflect on them. What happened is that I got an email from the regional rep of a national gym wanting me (ME!!!) to teach yoga in their club. The ego basked in the glory of it all. They wanted ME!!!

And they wanted ME now. Thursday night they were looking for someone for Monday following… Okay, now in policing I’ve got something figured out – “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine” – but of course, ME didn’t take that into account.

When the contract arrived the following morning, it was an exercise in sobriety. I thought I was contracting to teach an hour long, beginner level yoga class. Wrong, Bucko! The contract was very one sided. It quickly disabused me of the notion that I was being contracted to do anything. I was being recruited as a “plug & replace” employee – we can change your hours at our whim. We can change your class. ..we reserve the right…we … we…we… You get the drift.

The kicker was they owned the practices I taught for their use forever and a day. They would be free to replicate them, trademark them, and sell them into perpetuity because this contract was about me signing away all my rights. . Uhhhhhhhh, no. And sure as hell no for $30. Thank you very much.

I was about 60% to the side of saying “No” to the whole gig when I had a sit-down with my teacher who added on about another 30 points of why this thing is probably not in my best interests at this stage of my career. I sent the National Gym Corp back a counter offer of a proper beginner yoga class for their clientele and it was soundly rejected within 2 hours.

One less thing to worry about and overall, I’m really glad the decision worked out the way it did because … it was a cosmically bad idea in the first place.

// Warning to my gentle readers: Irrational rant lies ahead.

Proceed with all due caution//

Why? And no, I’m not being an anti-gym snob. Yoga should be able to be taught in a gym as well as a treetop but it has to be yoga. Good grief, Gym Owners Everywhere, don’t come to me and say “I don’t know much about yoga but I’d like you to teach yoga at my facility” and proceed to lay out the conditions, etc etc etc on how I will teach it. If you were hiring me to teach sailing, would you argue with me about which knots we use to fix the sails? No. Would you buck when I said we needed to sail on water and no, the gym parking lot is not a good substitute? No.

Also, when I remind you about the part of “I don’t know much about yoga”– gym owners words, not mine — you might want to have the smarts to listen to the advice proffered instead of arguing with me because I’m telling you what you don’t want to hear. I didn’t offer the advice because I wanted to spend an hour of my life writing you an email. I sent it because what you were proposing was asking for someone – one of your clients – to get hurt.

//Okay, rant over.//

I feel better. Not that any gym owner anywhere is ever going to read that but I was having another Don Quixote moment.

There are lessons here to be gleaned and this would be about the Universe™ providing me with a case study on how not to do anything.

Rule 1: Kate, you need to read your own damned business plan. I spent a month writing that sucker. Nowhere in it did I ever mention working for a gym. It would have been so much simpler for everyone if I had just paid attention to what I had written three months ago. A lot of thought went into that plan – as in a lot more thought than trying to make a snap decision inside 24 hours.

It’s not that I won’t ever be presented with an opportunity that just works for me but if I take the time to look at the opportunity against the business plan, it’s more likely I’ll see where and if it fits into the overall scheme of things.

Rule 2: Factor in the opportunity costs. There’s a hundred and one ways why teaching at this gym would have been bad for me from a business perspective. I would have spent a lot of time and energy building up the gym’s brand while neglecting my own. I’m trying to establish myself as a yoga teacher and this project would have taken away from it. We all know a hour class is going to take several hours to prep, prepare and work with students.

Like everyone else, I have a time budget. I have only 24 hours a day to do all the things I need to do – including yoga. The hours I would have spent putting the gym practices together would be better spent working on my own business, even if those hours are “just” spent filing, getting my books caught up, doing the photocopying for my next class, answering emails.

So that’s where we are…one week away from the start of classes. It’s just a little reminder to myself that I need to get my butt out of park and into first gear.

Thanks for reading and Namaste,

Kate

Still alive and …uhhhhhhhh, breathing.

I don’t think I’ve sat down for 10 minutes anytime in the past 3 days. And I’m loving it. It’s the start to the new yoga teaching year and there’s a hundred things to do and another hundred things to think about.

I’m particularly proud of the development of the Atlantic Viniyoga Association. The website is beautiful and our advertising posters match it.

And good grief, speaking of advertising, public relations and marketing — it’s been a steep learning curve. I’m sure this is going to be a whole lot simpler in years to come but right now, it’s been a lot of “You want me to do what? When?”, quickly followed by “What the hell???” It helps that I’ve been largely pain free this past couple of weeks, in no small part due to the help of my osteopath, Adam Ridgewell.

Learning curve, learning curve, learning curve. I keep telling myself this is just another form of tuition payments. Some fees you pay in cash and other fees you pay in experience and time. And at some point in time, I’m actually going to have to figure out what/who/how I’m teaching!!!

On other news, I signed up for an intermediate yoga class with my teacher, Kathryn Downton. I’m not sure when my next installment of my advanced teacher’s training is going to start and I really miss having a class. Besides, it was hard to give it a pass. The theme of the class is Dharma Yoga. I took it as a sign.

On that note, it’s beddy-bye time. I need to get up at “oh-dark and stupid” as we used to say in the Army. This time it’s about my “real job”.

Thanks for reading and Namaste,

Kate

Welcome to the learning curve

This past week has been a lot about learning. One was figuring out how WordPress manages to post columns on a future schedule. For those of you who have checked this column over the past two days and expressly did not see the notice on Yoga at the Lighthouse with Kathryn Downton in it, well, that would be me not figuring out the instructions in time. It’s all fixed now. Sorry, I’ll do better next time.

It’s true of all our false starts. We try and err and try again until we figure out which buttons to press and which hoops need to be jumped through in which order. I’ve been working through the mechanics of opening a business. It’s been a lot of this form to this place and then that form to this other place – don’t mess up the order please. But so far, I’ve managed to get Dharma Yoga registered as a sole proprietorship, operating for business in the Province of New Brunswick and duly blessed by Corporate Services for the Province. And in another two hours, I’ll have finished all the jigs and wheels that come with having opened up banking services for Dharma Yoga.

Marketing has been a pain in the gluteus region. I completely and totally suck at marketing. I really hang back when it comes to tooting my own horn. Even my most modest efforts sound like boasting to my ears. That whole issue of “Who am I to teach yoga?” rises like a cobra. It’s probably a good thing for me that I teamed up with my own teacher, Kathryn, and some of my classmates to teach co-operatively this fall. Kathryn is a walking encyclopedia of “what to do, and when to do it”. She’s been at this for ten years now and would be the only yoga teacher in this region who has made her full-time living teaching yoga for a decade now. She’s very free and generous with her advice and has probably headed off more than a few blunders in the making.

Four of us have banded together to share teaching space and split the cost of advertising for the fall term. Poster design costs split 5 ways are very manageable. And it makes sense to bring together our energies. It really doesn’t matter to me that someone takes yoga from a different teacher. In the long run, taking the strategic approach to the issue, the more people who get involved in yoga, the better it is for my business. I firmly believe that a rising tide floats all boats.

But this co-operative bit raises a whole bunch of other issues for me. There’s no other way to say it delicately other than my inner control freak is completely freaked out. I don’t deal so well when I have to rely on other people to do things and so this week has been a constant struggle to NOT ask what’s the status on project X and has anyone followed up on Y and what’s the fall back position for Z? Details, details and more details are whirling through my head at the speed of thought.

I’m blessed with a work ethic that would flatten a workhorse. In my head, everything needs to be done now. As in “right bloody now”. In a perfect world, I’d rather have a task list as long as my arm than to cast my lot in on the productiveness of someone else’s efforts. Emotionally, it makes me feel very vulnerable to trust other people to do what they’ve agreed to do, in an appropriate and timely fashion. Now let’s be perfectly clear here, this is entirely my drunken monkey mind ramping up into overdrive.

If nothing else, yoga has given me the clarity of mind to understand that none of my “worst case scenarios” have come to pass. My “what if” catastrophizing exists only in the confines of my skull. I’m projecting all the fears and disappointments of the past into an imaginary future that will never exist because it exists only in my head. The key word here is an “imagined future”. My rising levels of anxiety are entirely self-induced because I’m the sole author of this mental and emotional drama.

So in many respects, this week has both been instructive and amusing. I’ve learned a lot just sitting back and watching myself freak out. Part of my brain is completely consumed with “to do” lists and project management. And the observer in my brain sits and watches as my brain metaphorically chases its own tail.

It’s the lesson of Abhyasa and Vairagya, taken off the mat. My job is to do my thing and let go of the results. I need to make sure I’ve dotted all the I’s I’m responsible for dotting and cross all the T’s I’m responsible for crossing and then just let the chips fall where they may. People will either do what they said they would do or they won’t but I need to wait until that’s a reality and not an imaginary figment.

Is any of this helping my inner control freak? Not in the bloody least. She’s ramped right up into full snit status. What’s different between now and every other time I’ve found myself in this situation, I better understand the mechanics of my mind. It’s the art and science of learning that I am not my thoughts and I am not my emotions. I observe both and understand that these too shall pass. Yoga has given me sufficient clarity to understand that about 95% of what I’m feeling right now is not based on reality but comes from my deep well of inner fear and insecurity. I’m willing to wait until I have facts to deal with instead of making ill-advised decisions based on fear and fantasies.

So, I think I’m mostly successful at walking away from the impulse to micro-manage. I’ve put my stuff out for the consideration of others and now it’s about letting the Universe unfold as it is going to anyway.

And for me, learning to let go of the results of my efforts has been the steepest learning curve of all.

Thanks for reading and Namaste,

Kate