Small Footprint, Big Impact

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working with our engaged, enthusiastic, incredibly supportive and dedicated 300 hour students. Spending time with them is truly life giving - they fill the cup! 

One of our conversations was about the idea of “success” and our ability (or perceived inability) to make a significant impact. What constitutes success as a teacher? Is it the teacher who has 10k+ followers, one who has a thriving private practice, or the studio owner? Is it the teacher who “quit their day job” and now teaches full time? 

Success is, of course, subjective. Not everyone wants the same thing. What is successful to me is not necessarily successful to someone else. But when we look at the prevailing narrative of what a “successful” teacher is, it generally boils down to, “the one who makes the most money is the most successful.” 

Now, I’ve been training yoga teachers for 23 years and I assure you, this is not true. I have always felt that any student who comes through a YTT wants to teach, they just don’t always want to do it in the same way. And while I do have students who teach full time, who’ve opened studios, who are “yoga famous,” I also have students who use their training to help them be better leaders, teachers, nurses, police officers, friends, parents, etc. I have students who don’t have a clear idea of what they want out of the training, and I have students who have no desire to teach at all. I even have a student whose only goal was to learn how to teach yoga to their mom. No one else, just their mom. Are any of these reasons less lofty, less worthy than the other? 

No, they are not. 

In a world where we are bombarded with messages that reaffirm success as one note, one image, one path, it is absolutely subversive to do things without traditional ambitions or goals. 

Take TSY for example; TSY is a “micro business,” meaning we are smaller than a small business. In the twelve years since we opened, we've trained less than a thousand students. By the “most, biggest, best” standards TSY would not be considered very successful. But I know we are impactful. I see how much the training means to people. 

I know my footprint is small, but my impact is big. 

Meaningful impact as a teacher happens when you get people to congregate and communicate, when you connect with another person and share. You can be intentional, devoted, good at what you do and be relatively unknown, uncelebrated and still be successful. The people in your orbit are important enough to care about and extend yourself for. It doesn’t need to be more than that. 

If you are interested in teaching, you should. You may have a small footprint, but that does not mean you cannot make a big impact. 

Hope

Recently I had an opportunity to walk with my 16 year old through Central Park. The day was perfect; mildly warm and sunny and it made us feel very “swoony” because we are both shamelessly in love with New York City.

Jack’s experience of the city is very different from mine. He is a teen growing up in the city under the protection of loving parents, while I am a mother trying to protect, provide for, and raise a young man. Nevertheless, a shared love, even when experienced differently, is still shared. Thus, we swooned. ;)

As we strolled along my son said, “I love seeing buildings under construction! Buildings are a testament of how much we can accomplish when we work together. Not one of these buildings is the work of one person. They are all products of people working together. They are like beacons of possibility. And they are everywhere! Sometimes I look at a building and the way the light hits, I dunno it makes me feel something.... It’s hard to explain.”

I felt like I knew what he was trying to articulate. He was talking about hope. The hope that a city like New York inspires.

I moved to the city when I was 18, limping into adulthood as a raw, wounded human who had been psychologically kneecapped by a traumatic childhood. New York’s roughness, the grime, the dirty messiness, the need to be vigilant and aware, the weirdos and the expense juxtaposed against all the beauty and possibilities felt so… validating. City life channeled my energy. It felt like my insides experience outside my body. It was liberating. And that freedom and autonomy was a wildly ecstatic, foreign feeling.

That feeling was hope.

Hope was something I was so deeply unaccustomed to I didn’t even know what it was. The odd sense of getting away with something, the longing mingled with happiness... it confused me. It took me decades to pin down that pining feeling that made my insides feel warm and a little giddy was in fact, hope.

I’ve been told hope is something we shouldn’t indulge in, that it makes us careless, keeps us from acting in the now. But for me, hope is a wildly wonderful indulgent gift. It is a source of comfort and joy. It buoys me up and propels me forward. It keeps me trying. Without it, I would be utterly lost.

Hope comes to us with a bouquet picked just for us. It is tuned to our specific needs and circumstances. Hope is New York City to me, but New York City isn’t necessarily a hopeful place because what makes it feel hopeful to me, will feel hopeless to someone else. But I think, now more than ever, we each need to find spaces where we can tap into hope. It may be a place, or an activity, or an internal space, but we need to have something that connects us to our creativity and our longing, something that gives us back a sense of wonder and possibilities.

I told Jack, “I think you are feeling hopeful. It’s a good feeling isn’t it?”

He said, “Yes, that’s it! That’s how I feel. You know, someone told me life is just misery punctuated by hits of dopamine and the dopamine is what we call happiness. But really all we are doing is chasing dopamine hits to keep the misery at bay. But why does that have to be it? Can’t it be the other way around? I think it can. I think life is happiness with hits of misery in between. That’s what I think.”

Kid, I hope you always feel that way.

Love you!

You Write Your Own Story

My son was picked on a lot at school last year which led to a lot of negative self talk. He had lists of all the things he was not and why these things made him less worthy, less lovable.

He was sure this was true, the die had been cast because someone else said it was so.

But here's the thing; no one gets to tell you who you are.

Your story is decided by you.

And the way you talk to yourself matters.

If you listen on others' assessments of you, if you adopt them as your own, they become "real" to you.

So listen my friends and listen well:

Unless the assessment of you is glowing, and supportive, and helpful, do not accept it. Do not believe someone else's story about you.

Write your own story.

And then rewrite your story.

And then make drafts, and more drafts.

And then rewrite it again, and again, and again.

You are a story left untold, an adventure waiting to unfold!

Don't let someone else write your story for you.

Love you!