Ep 11: Are you being strategic?

Today we're continuing on with more business advice. I want to talk with you about the importance of being strategic about your career.  Initially I was taking continuing education for reasons other than really being strategic about them. But it was when I got clear on what and who I love teaching that it became clear to me what paths would benefit me the most. 

When I decided to focus my studies on injuries, pain management, recovery strategies, teaching aging and injured bodies it prepared me to sit on a panel discussion on Fitness & Pain Management.  As I was studying and falling in love with these subjects and teaching these types of bodies in classes, I also knew that I wanted to be able to share what I know in a bigger audience to more people who weren't necessarily already in my orbit. And that's what I want for you too. 

So have a listen & let's get strategic!

Transcript

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Today we're continuing on with more business advice. I wanna talk with you about the importance of being strategic about your career. Initially, I was taking continuing education for reasons other than really being strategic about them. But it was when I got clear on what and who I love teaching, that it became clear to me what paths would benefit me the most. It was because I decided to focus my studies on injuries, pain management, recovery strategies, teaching aging and injured bodies that prepared me to sit on this panel to discuss pain management in yoga. As I was studying and falling in love with these subjects and teaching these types of bodies in classes, I also knew that I wanted to be able to share what I know in a bigger audience to more people who weren't necessarily already in my orbit. And that's what I want for you to 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 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 back to the Essential Conversations for Yoga Teachers podcast. I'm Monica Bright, and today we're continuing on with more business advice. I want to talk with you about the importance of being strategic about your career. Before we get into today's episode, I want to share with you a recent accomplishment of mine. And the reason why I want to share, other than I want to tell you all about it, is because it goes right in line with this episode's topic. About a week ago, two of my neighborhood community and business organizations went Teamed up to provide a community health expo, which included about 30 health and wellness businesses in the surrounding neighborhoods. It was emceed by Val Warner, who's an Emmy award winning news host in Chicago. So, of course, I was honored to be a part of it. My business, Enhanced Body, was among the vendors, and I was a panelist on the topic of fitness and pain management. Now, you may be wondering why I'm sharing this with you. Because I don't typically go on and on about my personal life on this podcast. But this is important because it is my hope that it will give you a clear example of how Your strategizing efforts in your yoga teaching career come to fruition. As you'll hear in this episode, when I first began teaching, I wasn't too sure about the path that I wanted my career to take. But I did know that teaching yoga was my full time job. Initially, I was taking continuing education for reasons other than really being strategic about them. But it was when I got clear On what and who I love teaching, that it became clear to me what paths would benefit me the most. It was because I decided to focus my studies on injuries, pain management, recovery strategies, teaching aging and injured bodies that prepare me to sit on this panel to discuss pain management in yoga. As I was studying and falling in love with these subjects and teaching these types of bodies in classes, I also knew that I wanted to be able to share what I know in a bigger audience to more people who weren't necessarily already in my orbit. One of my long term goals is to join larger expos and reach larger audiences. And without that strategy, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I want to give a special shout out to the Beverly Area Planning Association and Mount Greenwood Community and Business Association for hosting this expo and bringing so many wonderful businesses and neighbors together for a special day of discussions on health, wellness, and self care. This was one big goal I've had for a few years, and I'm really excited that this first goal has come to fruition because it is a measurable marker for me. To know for sure that I'm working in the direction of my dream, and that's what I want for you, which is why we're going to talk about strategy and why you need to have one. So let's get to it now, real quick. I wonder if you can still hear it in my voice, I'm still a little nasally and trying to get over this cold that I have that's been just lingering around, but I think I'm on the tail end of it. So I'm going to try to speak as clearly as possible so that you can hear me with no problems. So putting a strategy in place for your career, especially as a yoga teacher, is super important. Because one, you can easily get caught up in the vicious cycle of your normal everyday routine, day after day, week after week, and you'll look up and it'll be a couple of years later and you'll still, let's say, stagnant. Teaching the same classes and you might be feeling like, where does this teaching road go? Or maybe you're asking, what's next for me, what's the next step, how do I elevate? And I don't want you getting stuck or feeling like your career is dormant. The second reason why you want to strategize is because it can help you to achieve some goals. It can help you diversify your offerings. And also increase your income. I'm always going to be talking about that with you. Because it's important, so just get used to it. So you gotta be asking yourself, what do you want your life to look like in 5 years? I'm always curious when I meet yoga teachers who have, or are teaching 15 to 20 classes per week. The questions I want to ask them are what does your body feel like right now? What do you think it's going to feel like six months from now? Do you have the energy to do things outside of work? What is your friend and family time look like? And do you have a social life? Do you have fun time set aside? In those 15 to 20 classes per week that you're teaching? How about time to veg out, relax, and do absolutely nothing? Do you have time for that? And how long do you want to keep this workload up? I also want to ask, how long do you think you'll be able to keep it up? And have you thought about when something changes in your life, for example, an injury that keeps you from working, or say your relationship status changes and you either get married or you get divorced, or say you start a family. And how these situations might have an impact on your life is what I'm really curious to ask. And to get, um, clarity on, so in this episode, I want to talk about strategy, why it's important and what you might experience when you don't have even just a loose strategy in place. So to keep things simple, we're going to discuss five areas that you should be strategic about. And I'll give you some questions to ask yourself after each one. So you know how to get on track and stay on track. So the first area is you lack direction. Okay, so likely when you first started teaching, we were all here in this place. You're just trying to get reps in, trying to teach as many classes as you can, to get more comfortable with all the things that go into teaching. And listen, even though it gets a little easier over time, there's always something. You're learning every single time you step in the room to teach, you know, that's true. I know you do. But here's the thing, when you don't have any measurable goals, you're kind of like flying in the wind. So it may look like you teach your classes, you sub as much as possible and teach more classes. You're taking a bunch of classes, maybe it's to get ideas or inspiration. You're looking on social media to see what other teachers are doing, all while losing direction of where you want to go. I'm the type of person that needs to sit in solitude, like real quiet and some meditation time. To quiet everything that's going on around me in order to really get clear on the direction I want to be moving in. So filling my time and space and head with a bunch of other things only begins to confuse me. Ask yourself What do you need to do or to see? To know the direction that you want to be moving in. Figure that out and do more of that so that you can get a clear idea of what you want. Goals are great, clear and measurable goals are even better. So here are two questions that I want you to ask yourself. If you're sitting down, uh, and you got a piece of paper, maybe you bring a piece of paper out and jot down. Some answers to these questions, if you're driving, absolutely do not do that. Keep your eyes on the road and come back to this episode and just come back to these questions. So the first question is when it pertains to lacking direction, ask yourself, what are my short term and long term goals? Kind of jot down, it could be bullet points, a few things, and you can always come back to this question. The second question is, do I feel a sense of purpose and fulfillment in what I'm doing? That's a really important question because if you are not feeling a purpose, or if you're not feeling fulfilled, you're going to feel burnt out really quickly, or you're just not going to really love. what you're doing. So I want you to find your purpose and what fulfills you when it comes to teaching. The next area that I want you to be strategic about is building on your income. Okay, so in previous episodes, we've talked about the necessity of building your student There is truth in the notion that students who know you are more warm and more willing to support your other offerings because they know you. When people know you, they trust you. At least that's what we're working towards here, right? Building trust. But it's also important to continue to widen your net. It's important to always be trying to increase your reach, increase the people you're talking to. and increase the amount of people in your corner of the yoga world. We'll talk about this in more detail in a future episode. But the students you have in your classes, or on your email list, or in your workshops, are at all different levels of spending more money with you. And the quote unquote warmest student to talk to is the one who already trusts you and is already buying your stuff. As you bring more and more people into your universe, they'll shift around and move closer to trusting you. and possibly buying your stuff. I just want to really be clear here. You could have a student on your mailing list or one who follows you on social media who doesn't buy from you for years or never buys anything at all. But at the same time, you could have someone who you just met who trusts you enough right away, or you have the solution to the problem that they have. And they buy from you in a shorter amount of time. There's no one way. It all varies for a number of different reasons. But without a strategy to grow your student base, it makes it difficult to sustain your teaching career long term because you need students, right? Okay, here are a few questions that I want you to be asking yourself. Number one. What are my current skills and expertise and what are students asking me for like the offerings? What do they want more from you? Number two, how will I manage my time and resources to support? multiple offering or different offering and number three What are the scalability and growth prospects for each? Offering so these are really important questions to be asking yourself because When we think about adding additional offerings for students, we want to make sure that one, they're interested in said offerings, right? And two, you have the time to develop them so that they're created well. And finally, like how Are these offerings going to be able to help you increase your income, right? Instead of just going out and making and producing and creating a whole bunch of things, how is this going to bring you more income? You have to be strategic about that. The third area that I would like for you to think about being strategic about is the difficulty in staying competitive. Now hear me out on this because I'll be very clear. I do not believe that yoga teachers should be in competition with each other at And I really did not enjoy it when I worked at studios and they implemented challenges that put yoga teachers in competition with one another. Typically it was to increase student attendance in classes, but it always felt slimy that I had to be in competition with another instructor to get more students to the studio. And trust me, it was a competition. Because, some people just naturally are more competitive than others. So what I mean with staying competitive is that when you don't think about your future, And what kinds of wishes and goals you want to work on, you're just kind of, again, floating in the wind. Think about being in competition with yourself. Competition with future versions of yourself. Competition with past versions of yourself. Not to offend anyone, but again, if teaching is what you want your career to be. You have to evolve, you have to elevate and offer something different, even if it's continuing to study sequencing so that your classes feel fresh, or you continue to advance your knowledge of prop usage so that students find new and novel ways to support their practice and connect to their bodies. Or maybe it's committing to studying how the body moves so that informs your teaching as opposed to what someone else told you you could do or you couldn't do when you're teaching in your classes. Whatever it is you choose, I want you to be able to look back at your teaching five years from now and really see the growth you've made. over the years. I want it to be so clear. You don't have to search around to try to see what kind of evolution you've made. It's clear and it's present. You can see it. So here are a couple of questions that I want you to ask yourself. Number one, am I regularly evaluating my progress? You got to be in constant evaluation, right? Don't just wait five years from now to look back, right? Be in constant evaluation. And number two, am I challenging myself enough to learn and grow or have I become complacent? And with this question, I want you to be really, really honest with yourself here, okay? Like nobody's seeing what you're jotting down on your paper. Nobody's in your head, listening to your thoughts. Get really, really honest with yourself about whether or not you've become complacent. And I would say this, like we've all been there, so just deal with it, right? It's okay. Okay. Heh. The point is, you just don't want to stay there, right? Okay. All right. The next area that I would like for you to think about being strategic in is, or ask yourself if you are limiting your professional development opportunities. Okay. I hope we all realize the importance of professional development and continuing education, right? Without a strategy or at least an idea of what kinds of roads you want your teaching to take, it becomes really difficult to make good and informed decisions about the professional development that you want to invest in. You might see a workshop or an advanced training and think you should sign up for it just because but if you know that that particular training doesn't align with your goals, you could be spending money unnecessarily. I want to share this example of me being in that exact situation. I took a SUP yoga teacher training, SUP being stand up paddleboard, um, yoga teacher training. And the reasons why I decided to take it was because I enjoyed I love the water being from the Caribbean, just being in water is just like part of my nature. I think I love the challenge of learning something new and I love summer and swimming and water sports, like all of that stuff I love. But what I realized Was that I do not love, and I didn't come to this realization until after I finished the training, but what I realized was that I don't like cold Lake Michigan. I don't enjoy dragging people out of the water. I really do not enjoy talking loud to get people's attention. I didn't like constantly checking the forecast. Including the lake water conditions, right? I didn't enjoy the inconsistency of the classes from something I couldn't control, which was the weather. And I did not enjoy rescuing people in frigid, to me, water. Now, frigid water, to me, may be different for you, but I don't like cold water and so the idea that I would have to jump into it to rescue people who couldn't get themselves back on their paddle board. I, I didn't, um, like that thought. So then I thought, well, I'll control the situation and just teach it in a pool at a club that I taught at, at the time. And surely they'd want sup yoga classes, right? But then I also realized that I wasn't in love with the idea of getting my hair wet with chlorine water one or two times a week. Anyway. I share this story to say, while it was a cool training to take, I could have saved my money because it wasn't a class that I wanted to teach weekly. But, when I did get clear on the fact that I love learning about human movement, and injury and how the body recovers from injuries that directed me to the proper trainings that I should be taking in order to advance my knowledge and career. I knew that a 300 hour advanced TT in biomechanics, injuries, and pain management was a perfect professional development for me. And I knew to some degree how I'd utilize it in my teaching and my offerings. So, I want you to think about, like, the workshops that you're taking, the advanced teacher trainings that you might be considering signing up for, and see if they really align with what your values are, your goals are. What you want your future teaching career to look like. So just ask yourself if they will benefit you in the long run. Here are a couple of questions for you. Number one, am I making decisions based on priorities or better yet? What am I making my decisions based on? Number two. Are there any emerging trends or technologies in my field that I need to stay updated? So that's fantastic because that would be awesome if you are interested in staying updated, right, with current information to be taking, uh, continuing education along those lines. And finally, how will I measure The impact of my professional development efforts. This is super important question because we're spending money, right? For professional development. But we want to know how you're going to be able to make this money back, right? Are you going to be able to integrate the information into future offerings? Ask yourself, how are these trainings going to help you in your development? Alright, I think this is the final area that I want you to be strategic about, and that is building network. Okay, again, I want to use myself as an example here to help explain this clearly. I just explained in the previous example, remember the professional development opportunities that once I realized I love learning about the human body, right? So when I think about building a network, I think about other professionals that either one, I can learn from, or two, I can refer students. Let's talk about the first instance, professionals that I can learn from. It's always important to learn from others in your industry. And I'm thinking fitness, wellness, health in general here. There are colleagues who teach other modalities and formats like spin, strength conditioning. acupuncturists, physical therapists, etc. who I can go to to ask certain questions or get some advice from when it comes to what I'm teaching in classes or with a private client or wherever, right? Those are people that I can go to. To just network with, but the second reason I love as well, having a network of people I can refer students to when they have questions that either I can't answer, or I believe they need to get a diagnosis or another practitioner to evaluate them. This has been super helpful for me and in my conversations with students. Now, I truly believe it's important to have a network of people who you admire and trust, but who you know have similar values that you. Here's an example. I used to refer students to one physio for a while until I realized that he hated yoga and would tell every student. to stop practicing yoga because it was the source of all their ailments. And while that might be the case in a client or two, it certainly wasn't the case in everyone. Also, he doesn't agree with one of my core beliefs, which is let people do the things they love, like yoga. Because they love it for a reason, but help them learn how to continue in a way that won't be bothersome to them. Now, that might look like modifying, or taking different types of classes, or incorporating other types of fitness classes. But still being able to practice yoga, because it's enjoyable for the student. Once I realized he was going to tell them to quit yoga and I knew that that student loved yoga, I stopped referring people to him because our values just weren't aligned. So I want you to think about the kind of network you would build. It might be different than mine. It probably is. But I want you to think outside of the box. Think about people other than or in addition to yoga teachers. There's so much you can learn from other people outside of yoga. So think about that. Now here are a couple of questions because I always like to give you some questions to ponder. The first is to ask yourself, what is my current network like? And how can I expand it to meet my goal? The second question, how can I contribute to my network and mentorship relationships in a mutually beneficial way? That's important. Okay, we talked about a lot in this episode. So just to remind you, there are five areas that I want you to really be strategic in, in your career. These are the areas where you will know you're teaching in alignment with your values, your goals, and how you want to shape your teaching career. So again, they are knowing your direction, building your income, being in competition with yourself, the right professional development, and reasons why you want to build your network. I asked you some questions also after each area. So if you weren't able to answer them, come back to this episode and listen again so that you have a concrete plan in place to get super strategic. My best advice to you is don't wing it. Be specific, get clarity, and set goals for yourself. Goals that you can measure. You got this. I know you do. It just takes a little bit of work, right? So if you want to learn step by step processes on how to get clarity and focus, Or if you're looking to save time and energy and not run around the internet to figure all of this stuff out. The Business of Yoga 2. 0, my four month coaching program for yoga teachers, opens for enrollment every April. And it's the big workshop that we never got on how to actually make I work with a small group of teachers each round, and to make sure we're a perfect fit, there's an application process so that I know for sure that you and I can make a difference in your career. I'll link the waiting list in the show notes. Don't you worry about it. So hop on it so we can stay in touch and you can learn more about creating the business that you love. Having a strategy. helps you stay deeply in love with teaching yoga and gives you clear direction on where you're headed. It's so important for us to have this conversation so that you remember that there are so many opportunities for you in the teaching world. You know that my goal is for you to love the yoga teaching life and allow it to be fulfilling and rewarding and as always, you know, it takes some work to get there. If you love this episode, let me know. I've heard from so many of you all, and it just warms my heart. Every single time I get a message from you 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. Now because teachers have asked for business related episodes, I'm excited to continue to bring you even more. Thank you for podcast and finally join my newsletter. That's just for yoga teachers. I'll link that in the show notes below as well, and I would love for you to join All right, that's it for now. Bye