Finding Inspiration and Bravery to Teach Yoga Online
This guest blog post is written by Laura Close. Laura is the Founder of Close Cohen and lives in Seattle, WA with her husband two tiny hooligan children.
In my consulting practice with emerging female leaders, I’ve spotted a bad strategy trend among clients: relying on your partner, best friend, a couple of work colleagues or even your parents and siblings for feedback and suggestions.
The point is this: You've gotten this far, achieved this much because this is as much as you and your inner circle have been able to imagine for you.
Growing your project or business is fundamentally a creative process-- it is more than just a business plan.
And if you are only ever exposed to the same inputs, your creative evolution stalls out.
The funny thing about the internet is that it holds such great promise for new, inspiring input, but that tool is not working. Most of us use it now to stay inside of our social groups and news silos. Your Facebook and Twitter feed are echo chambers.
You need inspiration, fresh voices, momentum building experiences, new frameworks for understanding yourself and the world around us.
How big have you dreamed so far? I’m always interested in the answer to this.
Most of my clients present to me their “audacious dream” and the dream is often quite achievable and somewhat humble.
Like: “I’d like to take my yoga studio online, and teach yoga to people who travel.” Or “I’d like to write a book” or “scale my career to the point where I’m getting the respect and pay that I’m interested in.”
I’m always interested in what early inputs we received through culture, society, family and religion that taught us to keep our dreams small.
It turns out that most of us have had some (or too much) exposure to “keeping your head down” or “staying in your place” through race, class, gender socialization and more.
So when you begin to inquire into your ability to build something big, what comes up for most folks is fear: the fear of whether or not you’ll be received well when you go public, whether its possible to expand your earning potential, whether you’ll make it at all.
Attempting to succeed flies in the face of the subtle and not so subtle messaging most of us received and it’s the fear that keeps us hunkered down.
These subtle fears keep us focused on the known -- the people we already know, the recipes for success that we know, the resources we know -- and reduce our capacity to question, to seek, to risk.
Each one of us is capable of building something remarkable, but in order to create your unique project -- you’ve got to integrate new people, new experiences and new ways of thinking that stoke out your fire to create.
After all the future (including the near-term future) is made by those who can envision it.
So my first question to you is: What is your audacious dream?
And my next question is: What is the directly next-level-up from there?
Let’s go there, together.
Next step: Sign up for Marvelous. Create that online yoga studio you’ve been dreaming of, teach or coach from anywhere on the planet, and know that we’ve got your back for any technical issues. You concentrate on creating transformative and impactful content and making an impact on people all over the globe.
