I am a new yogi. At 42 years old I took my first yoga class.
Why? I'm really not sure.
My exercise practice has been ongoing, but I do tend to get bored, and I flit from one thing to another. I guess yoga's time had come.
Here's what yoga taught me about business...
Business is scary. Starting and continuing my business has been my greatest personal development journey (alongside parenting.)
If you want to have all your 'stuff' thrown at you, start your own business! It's tough. Even when you think you have it sorted, another challenge is just around the corner.
Why then do we do it?
I constantly ask that question to my fellow business owners, and overwhelmingly get the same answer, or a variation of it....
"Because I love it, and I can't imagine not doing my life's work.'
Then we are thrust into this constantly moving environment filled with exhilarating highs and stomach-churning lows. It's no wonder that rollercoaster is the term that many use to describe entrepreneurship.
Even the highs can leave us quivering in a corner, for fear of what comes next. Often our experience is that the high is followed by a crushing low.
And so we are conditioned to prepare for the worst so that we're not disappointed when the next challenge arrives.
But is the way that we are taught to manage that actually helping us to grow as business owners, and people?
I'm not sure that it is...
There is so much talk about 'leaning in', 'feel the fear', 'take action', 'toughening up', but after almost 10 years in business I finally get it.
Knowing isn't enough, you have to actually DO IT. And no-one teaches us how to feel into the negative feelings. Instead we are taught that they are a trigger to fight or flee.
Growing your business means becoming increasingly visible which leads to increased exposure. In fact, that's how we describe that desired visibility - media exposure.
Here are two definitions of exposure:
1. the act of exposing, laying open, or uncovering
2. an act or instance of revealing or unmasking, as an impostor, crime, or fraud
We simultaneously want to lay open our products, services and offers to a wider audience, and the very act that will deliver that result also tips us into impostor syndrome.
It seems like an impossible contradiction.
What on earth does yoga have to do with all this?
When I'm in my yoga class and we take a static pose, the first few breaths can be tough. They are generally conscious breaths and I'll get so far into the pose. But when you stay in the pose, and breathe longer, the body rewards you with giving you more.
With each exhale you get a sweet release and a further progression in your practice.
Truly feeling fear, or leaning in, is a very similar process. You have to actually go there, into the dark swamp, behind the closed door, and really experience it.
Breathe into it, feel it, cry if it feels right.
It's not about solving problems, which is what we use to not feel fear.
We use fear as a sign that we are in the wrong place, or that it is a signal of impending battle. It is our mechanism to fight or flee. But fighting or running away is at complete odds with what will give us more release, more understanding, more courage.
What if we took fear as a signal that we can move through this stage peacefully, towards a new opportunity?
After all, the vast majority of business decisions are not actually life or death.
After a decade of 'knowing' and thinking that was enough, I have begun to commit to 'doing', and that means feeling and owning my fear when it shows its face.
After all, that is what I help my clients with every single day.
I need to be brave too.
Torn between the safe, but not necessarily easy option, and where my heart was telling me to go, is where I found fear, vulnerability and surrender.
All words that I had made associations with being 'bad', 'wrong', or 'weak' growing up. And so I have 101 ways to avoid them, and a highly skilled unconscious mind that keeps me from going near experiences that might land me in fear, vulnerability or surrender!
But that is the first step - to feel.
No emotion is constant, they build and fade.
Feelings have a half-life. If we never let ourselves feel that, we make fear, vulnerability, shame, surrender and any other feeling that you have been avoiding all your life, much bigger than they actually are.
Feel what it feels like in your body, in your skin to be afraid. Just like in the yoga pose, breathe into the discomfort of being afraid.
And stay there for longer than you have before. Wait for the sensation to reach its crescendo, and then notice that it dissipates and floats away like a wave.
When you allow yourself to feel and stay past the discomfort, you will find it dissipate. And when it does, your head clears and you can see that the other side is not so scary after all.
Lorraine practices yoga with EnSoul on the Kapiti Coast. You can learn more here www.ensoul.co.nz
Lorraine Hamilton is an award-winning entrepreneur and international coach who loves nothing more than diving deep into the mindset of the entrepreneurial journey.