Ep 7: How to know if you’re getting in your own way Pt 3

This is an example of a fixed mindset. I always ask teachers to take what resonates and leave the rest, but be open to coming back to the information at a later date and see if it resonates then. I would never force a teacher to learn something new because oftentimes when we are presented with new information, We resisted. Or get defensive. Because it might go against the grain of what we already know.  

This episode dives into the physical and mental ways we get in our own way. Some you may recognize and others not so much. 

Listen and identify if you're getting in your own way!

Here's the links to:

• Ep 5 - What does the yoga teaching career typically look like? Pt 1
• Ep 6 How to design your yoga teaching career Pt 2

Transcript

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This is an example of a fixed mindset. I always ask teachers to take what resonates and leave the rest, but be open to coming back to the information at a later date and see if it resonates then. I would never force a teacher to learn something new because oftentimes when we are presented with new information, we resist it. or get defensive because it might go against the grain of what we already know. Welcome to the Essential Conversations for Yoga Teachers podcast with me. I'm Monica Bright, and I've been teaching yoga and running my yoga business for over a decade. This is the podcast for you if you're a yoga teacher, you're looking for support, you love to be in conversation, and you're a lifelong student. In this podcast, I'll share with you my life as a yoga teacher, the lessons I've learned, all the stuff that wasn't taught in teacher training, my process for building my business and helpful ideas, tools, strategies, and systems I use and you can use so that your business thrives. We'll cover a diverse range of topics that will help you whether you're just starting out or you've got years under your belt. And you want to dive deep and set yourself up for success. I'm so glad you're here. Listen, I don't take myself too seriously, so expect to hear some laughs along the way. Now let's do this together. Welcome to part three, how to know if you're getting in your own way. This is the final episode of a three part series discussing your yoga teaching career. In part one. Episode 5, I laid out for you the historical path that yoga took as it was being introduced to the States. What a typical teaching career looks like and what many yoga teachers experience during the lifespan of their teaching career. In part two, episode six, we talked about how to craft your teaching career. We started with a big picture goal and worked backwards. I walked you through my roadmap to help you uncover what you want to teach, where you want to teach, how you want to teach, and discover the steps to help you get there. I'll link those episodes in the show notes below. In this episode, I'll reveal a number of ways you may be getting in your own way, even if you don't think you are. Here's the thing. Sometimes you are aware when you aren't living up to your highest potential, and sometimes you don't even realize that you're getting in your own way. These roadblocks that get in the way, not only sabotage your progress, but also affect your entire life. Why? Because the way you approach your work and doing new, challenging and different things is how you approach everything in life. Say, for example, you just finished a training and you want to create an offering around something you learned in it, but you get in your own way thinking you don't know enough yet. So you think to yourself, I need to study more, or who's going to listen to me? Or, of course, the dreaded, I'm not good enough. Now, to be clear, it's important that you integrate this information that you're learning, but please also remember the best way to know whether you understand a concept or not is your ability to teach it to someone else. Teaching requires you to understand and explain a concept in multiple different ways to accommodate different learning styles and to provide different entry points to the information. This takes practice. How do you get practice? By going out there and doing the thing and sometimes you might have to force yourself to just go do it rather than Shying away from it. Now. I want you to think about a decision you had to make in your regular life outside of yoga Maybe a personal or family decision. How'd you handle it? Be honest with yourself. Did you get in your head? Did you talk yourself out of making a big decision? Did you spiral, overthink, or go down a never ending rabbit hole? The question here is, did you get in your own way? And can you identify how? Right now you might be thinking, I don't think I did, so let me ask you this. Did you do the thing that you wanted to do? If not, then maybe you got in your own way in order to stay in your comfort zone. So let's identify some of the ways that you just might be getting in your own way. First, we'll tackle some behavioral examples, and then we'll talk about some mental examples. I'll touch on what the behavior or mental process looks like and how each impacts your life. If you're distracted or doing something else, refocus, come back to me now because we're going to get into the meat of the episode here. So, first, let's look at some behavioral examples of getting in your own way. The first is procrastination. What this behavior looks like is putting off important tasks and decisions, or delaying or taking longer than you should to create change. What you want to pay attention to is if you find yourself constantly pushing things back. Delaying deadlines or waiting until the absolute last minute to get things done. Now I do think for some there is a healthy place where you might work better when you're up against a deadline, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about pushing things back because there's an unidentified reason why you don't want to do it now. So you procrastinate. So how does procrastination impact your life? Well, it results in missed opportunities and perpetuates the status quo. AKA, you keep doing the same things again and again without realizing that this behavior will not support. The next is comfort zone resistance. Here you avoid situations that challenge or push you outside of your comfort zone. This behavior appears in the example situation that I gave you earlier on in this episode. You want to create an offering after finishing a training. But you create all types of excuses to stay in a place where you feel safe. Think of the things you do that don't make your heart race. These are the safe spaces. The impact on your life here is that you perpetuate stagnation. And again, you miss out on opportunities for growth. Third is negative self talk, which shows up as you engaging in self critical thoughts and undermining your abilities. Think about how you talk to yourself. Think about the things you say to yourself. Are they overwhelmingly positive or negative? Now, if you think negatively about yourself, your abilities, and your decisions, these thoughts impact your next steps. Not only does negative self talk impact your next steps, it leads to low self esteem, lack of confidence, And a reluctance to take on new challenges. Fear of failure is number four. Do you avoid activities or opportunities due to the fear of not succeeding? How do you define success? Anyway, do you dwell on outcomes constantly? Do you want a specific outcome? And if you don't get that specific outcome, then you think you failed. What if you arrived at a different outcome that you hadn't even imagined? The fear of failure limits your personal and professional growth because you miss lessons and learning opportunities when you try a new thing. Here's the thing, and it may be an unpopular opinion, but everything is not for you. But the way you find out what is for you and what isn't is to try new things. Again and again and again. And kick your fear of failure to the curb. So what if you fail? What did you learn in the process? Finally, is self sabotage. Deliberately undermining your own success or progress. Are you turning down new opportunities just because you haven't experienced them before? Are you making yourself unavailable because then you can use that as an excuse? So listen, this is a no judgment zone. Plenty of us have sabotaged ourselves for a number of different reasons. The point is, can you identify when you are doing this? And can you identify the reasons why? Because the ability to be self aware will help you get out of this space and move forward. Self sabotaging behaviors hinder you achieving your goals and creates a never ending cycle of failure. Okay, take a breath. Let's recap the behavioral examples that help you identify if you're getting in your own way. There's procrastination, comfort zone resistance, negative self talk, fear of failure, and self sabotage. Any of those resonate with you? Okay. Take another breath, breathe in and just breathe out. Now let's talk about some mental examples of getting in your own way. The first is limiting beliefs. What are they? They're beliefs that constrain what you believe is possible. And when you hold on to them, you unconsciously make your, what I like to call circle of opportunity, smaller. Your circle of opportunity is just what it sounds like. A container of ideas. beliefs and opportunities that you can incorporate into your teaching. So if your container includes teaching weekly classes and that's all you have in your container, It is your belief around whether you can bring multiple additional offerings to fruition that typically holds you back or propels you forward. The impact of holding on to limiting beliefs restricts you from thinking big and prevents you from even considering new possibilities. Next is a fixed mindset. I want to share an example of this so that you can see how it shows up in the yoga world. So, a few years ago, I was facilitating an anatomy lecture for a teacher training. And in the lecture, we started to discuss weight bearing exercises and alignment. Teachers and students who know me know that from the trainings and studying I've done around exercise science, I realize that there's new research all the time. And one result of constant research and new information is that it may conflict with what we already know and believe. Now, as I was sharing this information around progressive overload and how we can use it to train the body to move in different ways than we had previously been taught, there was a trainee who was adamant that this information was not true. And it was not like, anything she had ever heard or learned before. This is an example of a fixed mindset. I always ask teachers to take what resonates and leave the rest, but be open to coming back to the information at a later date and see if it resonates then. I would never force a teacher to learn something new. because oftentimes when we are presented with new information, we resisted or get defensive because it goes against the grain of what we already know. Now the impact of having a fixed mindset leads you to becoming resistant to learning and growth. And it also gives you an excuse to avoid challenges because reorganizing your thoughts and beliefs probably feels like a challenge. that you don't want to take on. Next is overthinking. And overthinking is when you dwell excessively on potential outcomes or problems. and you get stuck in this space. All you do is think and think and think. Now, there's nothing wrong with thinking things through. In fact, I do recommend being very thoughtful and intentional about the offerings you want to create and how to go about it. But there's also a fine line between being mindful and overthinking. I know you've heard of analysis paralysis, right? It's where you get paralyzed from taking action because you have difficulty in making decisions and or taking action. So you sit in the thinking it over phase without taking steps to move to the action phase. Thinking sounds good until you find yourself stuck in overthinking mode. The fourth is cognitive biases. It means you cling on to biased or irrational thought patterns. Here are some examples of having a cognitive bias. See if any of them resonate with you. You only listen to opinions that are in line with your own, or you only look for information that backs up your opinion. You assume that someone's gender means something about them or their roles in society, or you bring your previous beliefs into situations and make decisions based on your initial beliefs. You'll realize that this leads to a distorted perception of reality and creates resistance to alternative perspectives. So you aren't open to new ideas, beliefs, opinions, research, and on and on. You're just not open to it because you operate from your own biases. Next is lack of self awareness. And as we continue to go through this list, I just want you to kind of feel it, if any of these resonate or hit home with you. And if you feel any level of defensiveness, just take note of that. Okay, so lack of self awareness is being unaware of your own patterns, strengths, and or weaknesses. Okay, I promise you this is an ongoing lesson, but I also believe that when you do become more self aware, there is no turning back from that. It's kind of like an awakening. Once you start to study yourself, realize who you are, and identify what makes you, you. Your quirks, your beliefs, your strengths, and your weaknesses. It's kind of hard to bury your head back in the sand. But when you remain unaware of yourself. It hinders the ability to identify and address obstacles that are in your way in order to make changes and thus grow and evolve. But I'll be honest, being self aware is hard work. It requires you to look at the good and the bad objectively. Number six is perfectionism. Perfectionism is when you do two things, set unrealistically high standards for yourself and fear imperfection. And those two coupled together prevent you from taking action. I think I want to do an episode on what I call the 80 percent rule because when you shift your thinking to this concept, it helps you tame your perfectionism so you can bring an idea to fruition and experience what it gives you. Feels like on the other side. So what does perfectionism look like? It looks like procrastination, putting things off, avoiding challenges because they make you feel uncomfortable. It looks like heightened or elevated anxiety, which. get you back in your head, and the loop starts all over again. And it also looks like constantly working on something, creating draft after draft after draft, without ever getting to a final draft, because It's just not good enough. The final example is dependency on external validation, which is seeking constant approval from others. Notice when you hesitate to make a decision, because you have to ask someone for their thoughts first. Not just that you have to ask someone, but you feel the need to get their approval before you make a decision. I'll tell you why this is a mistake. It's because no one has all of the information you do. No matter what you share, it will never be everything. So you're taking the advice from someone who doesn't have all the details. Consider this. You may also be taking advice from someone with their own limiting beliefs. With their own cognitive biases. with their own fear of failure or negative self talk. When you think of it this way, you'll understand why other people's opinions have to be taken with a grain of salt. The impact of this dependency hinders your own decision making and self expression due to the fear of disapproval. You've got to learn to trust yourself. And if you don't, then practice trusting yourself in small increments. Okay, let's recap the mental examples that help you identify if you're getting it in your own way. There's limiting beliefs, fixed mindset, overthinking, cognitive biases, lack of self awareness, perfectionism. and a dependency on external validation. Now, you could say that this list isn't solely for yoga teachers, and I would agree with you. Instead, it's a list that can help anyone develop self awareness, cultivate a growth mindset. and gradually challenge these patterns as their essential steps towards personal growth and transformation. But here's the thing. When you apply these to the way you approach your teaching career, you'll notice how things start to shift. You'll believe in yourself more. You're willing to take more chances. You aren't tied to any specific outcomes. You might feel lighter. and you just might experience some growth that you've been holding yourself back from for years. Okay, so what are you gonna do with all of this information? It might've sounded like a lot, and it may seem like a lot to process. My advice to you is that you take some time to sit and ponder. Ask yourself these questions. How do you show up? How do you respond when you get scared? How do you work through your fears, typically? And do you see any parallels between your mindset and your teaching career? These are your behaviors that I want you to become intimately aware of so that you know your strengths and weaknesses and see areas where you want to improve. Thank you so much for tuning in to part three, how to know if you're getting in your own way I hope you enjoyed this conversation. And my goal is for you to love the yoga teaching life you have. And remember, it takes some work to get there both physically and mentally. Like always, please leave a comment or a question because I truly enjoy being in conversation with you. And subscribe to the podcast so you're always in the know when a new episode drops and share it with another yoga teacher who you think would love to be in on these conversations. Thank you for helping to spread the word about this podcast and finally join my newsletter that's just for yoga teachers. I'll link it in the show notes below and I would love for you to join it so we can always stay connected. All right, that's it. Bye for now.