Please Don't Do These Things
Please Don’t Do These Things if You Are a Yoga Teacher… or a Human.
Constantly compare yourself to other people in your field/industry.
Take advice from people who don’t understand you or your work.
Base the success of your entire career on a single class or project.
Stick with what you know.
Undervalue your expertise.
Remain silent on things that matter and affect inclusiveness.
Bow to societal (fitness culture) pressure.
Only do work your peers, studio manager would approve of.
Do whatever the studio asks.
Set unachievable goals to be accomplished by tomorrow.
I’ve found a lot of really good advice from outside the yoga world this year. I’m currently reading Austin Kleon’s book, Keep Going. In it he asks what do seemingly important metrics such as clicks, likes, website visits, shares and follower counts really mean? He goes on to say what I’ve experienced as an extremely online artist and teacher. “I’ve noticed a long time ago that there’s actually very little correlation between what I love to make and share and the number of likes, favorites and shares it gets […] If I let those metrics run my personal practice, I don’t think my heart could take it very long.” If you share work online, every once in a while try to ignore the analytics. Is your work good? Do you like it? No, not you inner critic. What’s your gut say? Focus on that. Keep going.
The above list was adapted from Josh Spector’s For The Interested newsletter.