THIS IS A 30-MINUTE LISTEN AND WORTH EVERY SECOND. INSPIRING!
I absolutely love this time of year! The leaves are stunning, the air is crisp, and it reminds me that change is both inevitable and can be beautiful.
What kind of changes are happening for you right now? Drop me a line and let me know, cuz I love to hear from you and I read every email I get.
There are a lot of exciting changes happening for me I want to discuss today.
First, my family and I got our long-stay visas to live in France and we will be arriving there in the beginning of November with plans to return back to the States soon for some workshops and trainings. I love Europe: the art, architecture, culture, language, food, and the pace of life. I gotta say, I’m so grateful to have created a global audience with my work of teaching yoga, meditation, and Yoga Nidra in a way that allows me the freedom to live anywhere in the world.
I want you to join me! Sure, come visit us in France—the French Riviera is a dream— but specifically, I want to invite you to join me in learning how to leverage your mad skills, talents, and passions into a job that you create for yourself and which you can do from anywhere.
I love to mentor others to manifest their dreams. This is exactly the subject I’ll be discussing with Carrie Ann Robson on Thursday, October 28th at 1 pm MDT on her Money and Miracles Love Virtual Mastermind. I’m super excited to have been invited to discuss this topic with her and you can register to join this conversation for free by clicking here.
What I also REALLY want to tell you about is my 3-hour workshop that I’ll be hosting in a week where I will share with you 5 straight-forward, actionable, and simple things you can do right away to create or improve your own conscious business. You’ll learn how to share your own unique gifts, talents, and personality with the world that will make a global impact for good. This workshop is designed both for people who want to uplevel their business or who are starting from scratch and whether you want this business to be your side-hustle or your main-hustle. This interactive and informative workshop is for conscious entrepreneurs who want to make a positive difference for the world while empowering themselves to create the life they desire for themselves.
This happens on Saturday, October 30th from 9 am to12 pm MDT and will be a powerful investment for your satisfaction, happiness, and your future.
Today, I want to share my story about how I got here …
I started my yoga career in Salt Lake City, Utah in the early 2000’s. At first, I was struggling to make a living as a yoga instructor and stretching just to pay the bills. Eventually, I’d had enough of struggling to make ends meet. Discouraged, I took a hard look at my situation and decided that it was time to go and get a “real” job.
One night, I announced to my class that while I love teaching yoga, I’d unfortunately have to give it up so I could spend my time pursuing a more “traditional” career. After class, one of my students, Cristy, approached me with tears in her eyes, and pleaded with me, “Scott! You CAN’T give up teaching this class. I have 4 kids at home UNDER the age of 4 and this class is my sanity! You do what you do so I can do what I do! YOU’VE GOT TO KEEP TEACHING YOGA!!”
I was floored. As a relatively new teacher, I didn’t realize that I’d made such an impact on someone’s life. Cristy’s plea inspired me to dig deeper and work even harder to find out how to make a living teaching yoga. I began teaching more and more classes and after about a year, I was regularly teaching on average 27 (I pause for effect) yoga classes a week. I rarely had a day off and could forget about vacations and even sick days. I didn’t even have the time to PRACTICE yoga. But after a lot of hard work, eventually I started earning enough so that at least I could leave the stretching to the yoga mat and less so to my finances.
For the next 15 years, I continued to work my ass off building a yoga community and my career. I opened and closed yoga studios, worked for other studios, and developed my own personal yoga teaching business. Through hard work and much trial and error, eventually I found myself with so many wonderful teaching opportunities that I could pass many of them onto other teachers and still have as much work as I wanted. I was working less and earning more. I also figured out how to turn my European yoga retreats into vacations with my family and dreamed of living there one day. Also—and this is huge—I was so blessed to have a dedicated yoga community, many of whom had been in my classes regularly for 15 years or more and who had become family to me.
But just like in many jobs, I hit a ceiling in my earning potential. I was constantly growing as a teacher but my career had plateaued.
Then, everything changed. My wife, who has a PhD in nursing informatics and worked in global health, was essentially offered her dream job… in New York. I was thrilled for her and wanted to support her, even if that meant leaving my yoga community that had taken me so long to build. Somehow, I knew that this was exactly the next step I needed to take for MY career as well. Still, I worried whether or not the career that I’d built in Salt Lake City over the past 15 years or so would translate there. I mean, some of the best names in all of Yoga are teaching in New York! Armed with hopeless faith, I gave away all my teaching gigs, said goodbye to my students in Salt Lake City, and moved with the hopes of starting… all… over. In hindsight, I’d say that one of the best things I ever did for my business was to move. And here’s why…
New York was both wonderful and very, very difficult. I loved the vibrancy of the city and fell into teaching and practicing and at a few world-class studios, including with Nikki Vilella at Kula Yoga. Still, I knew that it would take a while to get established as a teacher. Also, my wife was working 50–60 hours a week and our son, who was only 2 years old at the time, needed childcare. Child care is ghastly expensive in NYC so I spent my days caring for him and teaching yoga mainly in evenings and on weekends. I found myself back to stretching my dollars more than my hamstrings and getting increasingly stressed and worried about it.
If you have kids, you may know how sensitive they are to emotions and energy. Well there was a time when my toddler would regularly ask me out of the blue, “Papa, are you happy?” to which I’d respond, “Uh– (long pause). Yeah…I’m happy. Uh…just curious… why do you ask?” He was only two, but he wasn’t a dummy. He could tell that I was stressed.
While in New York, I’d be at home watching Teletubbies, pushing the stroller through our Brooklyn neighborhood, or tearing it up at the playgrounds with my inexhaustible—and apparently very intuitive— toddler, and the thought kept nagging me, “Why should I be dependent upon teaching for local studios and private clients and corporate gigs to make a living? I mean, this is 2017, for Ganesh sake! There’s this incredible thing now called ‘The Internet’ that could potentially allow people to access my yoga teachings from all over the world.”
I built a simple website and decided to take some online courses about how to share my message and teachings online and create a global audience. What if I could start teaching yoga to people all over the world? It wouldn’t matter where I lived. What if I could even learn to make some passive income while chasing the kid around the playground and eating a Nagel’s Bagel?
So, I started by developing and selling a few digital (downloadable) products like Guided Meditations for Sleep and a few Yoga Nidra courses, including a Yoga Nidra Zoom class. This was in 2017–2018, mind you, before Zoom became more important than oxygen (man, where was I for the IPO on that one?!). None of those first offerings made very much money but they did give me the experience I needed to plant the seeds for something that would eventually become essential to my career. It began the steep learning curve toward understanding how to share my work with people all over the world as well as how to use my website to gain more visibility.
After struggling in NYC for about a year, suddenly my wife’s company decided to lay off a huge portion of their entire global workforce. Unfortunately, that included my wife. While this was a huge blow, it was also a blessing in disguise. In truth we weren’t thriving in NYC and were looking to leave anyway.
So, we went back to Salt Lake City to regroup. Meanwhile, my online sales were just starting to germinate. I was pleased to be able to return to Salt Lake City and teach some classes, trainings, workshops, and retreats to many of my former students. In fact, because I’d been living in NYC, when I came back to Salt Lake, my students and I were thrilled to be reconnected.
I’ll forever be a student of yoga and of life and I thought that in this time of regrouping, it would be the perfect time to take some additional training for myself. I attended a 4-day workshop about writing and flow with Steven Kotler in hopes that one day I would publish a book. I also attended a 75-hour training at the world-class Wanderlust Hollywood yoga studio with the inimitable Schuyler Grant and Matt Phippen to learn the Wanderlust style, an alignment-based vinyasa style that really speaks to me. It’s both fun and intelligent.
We even toyed with moving to L.A. and while we were there testing it out, one day I was at lunch during my Wanderlust training and got a text from Seneca that said simply, “How would you like to move to Nice, France?” We’d always dreamed about one day living in Europe and the idea totally lit me up. I responded with only two essential words: “Hell” and “Yes!”
So, we gave up the Pacific Ocean, sun-kissed beaches, and endless freeways and hopped on a plane for the French Riviera. We’d always wanted to live in Europe but never thought we could make a living doing so. I mean what self-respecting romantic hasn’t thought of moving to the South of France at some point in their life? Well, my online sales, especially my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training, were starting to grow just enough to allow us to dare to hope that we might survive if we went to live in Europe. So off we went, hoping that it would all pan out.
It did.
In France, something remarkable started to happen: all those online courses I’d taken while I lived in New York really started to pay off and my monthly sales started growing slowly more and more each month. Soon, people from all over the world were downloading my yoga classes, trainings, and recordings. I was absolutely thrilled to be getting digital downloads from China, Australia, Argentina, the UK, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Antarctica, the States, India, Africa, Egypt, and even Mecca. Finally, my online sales were sprouting little legs that were strong enough to start carrying us financially!!!
And wouldn’t you know it, because of how I was using my website to be more visible, a publisher even found me and asked if I would write a book about Yoga Nidra which I was absolutely overjoyed to do. My book-writing workshop had trained me how to essentially beg on hands and knees to a publisher to even look at a book I might write. I didn’t think they’d be the ones asking ME to write the thing. Turns out my weekend workshop only 9 months previous had prepared me perfectly for this opportunity. Crazy how life works! And if you’ve been following me, you know that I just published my SECOND book. I swear, sometimes I feel like I can’t even make this stuff up!
Of course, living in France wasn’t 100% smooth sailing all the time but still, on several occasions we found ourselves on the beach with a bottle of champagne as we looked out over the emerald-green Côte d'Azur celebrating reaching our financial goals for the month. We LOVED living in France! We came closer together as a family and had a truly remarkable year, full of growth, culture, and beauty. Sometimes I’d be sitting at a cafe, sipping an espresso or glass of wine while writing and thinking, “How did I get to live this life!” Oh, and did I mention that I was still spending TONS of time with my family?! I felt so blessed!!!
Well, during this time, my wife decided to make a right turn from her career in global health and took several trainings to become a women’s transformational coach and facilitator. By the end of 2019, we’d had a great year in France and Seneca was eager to start working with clients back in the States, so we decided to move back to Utah. Something life-changing was about to happen ….
We came back to Salt Lake City in January of 2020. Upon our return, I really wanted to start teaching some more live yoga classes and reconnect to my yoga family. Mind you that this was before COVID had changed the world. In the first two weeks at home, I agreed to substitute a metric TON of yoga classes at my old home studio for other teachers — about 20 classes in two weeks. It was a far cry from the 27 classes a week I was pulling off in the early 2000’s but was much more than I had been teaching while I was in France. I don’t mind saying that it kicked my butt.
Listen to this, cuz this is huge…
One morning I woke up and was thrilled to see some emails showing that a few people had purchased some of my online products while I was asleep. I gotta tell you, there’s no greater feeling than making money while you sleep! And wouldn’t you know it, that same day I was eager to open my check from the yoga studio because I was going to get paid for all those 20 classes I’d taught. Well, when I opened my check from the yoga studio, something happened that would change my life. I saw that I had earned more money in passive income while sleeping in ONE night than I did in two weeks of busting my asana at the studio. When I realized that truth, a huge smile broke across my face. This was an arrival moment for me. At that moment I realized that from now on, I get to teach live, studio classes for the sheer joy of teaching and connecting with my students and the practice and not worry about the money. That realization changed my entire relationship to teaching yoga.
Hear this: I am absolutely passionate about teaching yoga. Many yoga teachers can teach enough to make a living and be comfortable. However, I’ve discovered that if I am overextending myself teaching, I’m a much less effective teacher. If I’m overtaxed, I can’t give my all to my students, it doesn’t honor the practice, and the balance is skewed between energy exchange. Exhausting myself teaching yoga doesn’t serve me nor does it serve my students.
Then COVID hit.
In a matter of weeks, the yoga industry essentially shut down. Yoga teachers across the globe were reeling. Yoga studios went dormant. My home studio closed its doors for good. Yet, while I could have never predicted it, I actually found myself perfectly prepared for this COVID iceberg. I had already been teaching on Zoom since 2017. I was already regularly writing and creating content for my website, publishing articles, and working on another book, etc. (easy to do while socially distancing), and my online business was doing better than ever. I offer an online Yoga Nidra training and other yoga teachers suddenly had the time to take it because it was affordable and they weren’t teaching their own 27 classes a week.
Other yoga teachers reached out to me and asked me to coach them how to do what I was doing so they could keep working during the pandemic. One of my students I mentored is now earning on average an extra $6,000 a month, all due to what she learned with me.
During COVID a few things have become very clear to me: more than ever it’s a time to be generous. So, I developed several products on my website that I could give away for free, including a free Tranquility Tool Kit and Gratitude Challenge that help people cope with these trying times. I even offered pricing plans for my online Yoga Nidra training. One thing I learned was that the more generous I am to others the more generous people are back to me.
I’m earning more money now than ever before in my career. I’ve got tons of time to spend with family. I even have time to practice yoga and meditation— Imagine that. Plus, being more financially stable helps me have the mental and emotional freedom to be more creative and therefore helps me to have the energy to share even more ways to share my talents with the world.
And the best part is that I feel like I’m just doing me. I’m offering the world that which I’m most passionate about and people who are pickin’ up what I’m putin’ down find me organically and easily. A few weeks ago, I was talking via Zoom to a woman in the Philippines who has a great teaching career but at the cost of teaching 25 classes a week much to the detriment of her own wellness. She was interested in doing my mentor program which is a personalized 1:1 approach to learning how to do what I’m doing which is to use skills to both make a greater global impact and also make a great living. “Working smarter rather than harder,” I told her, “Is just mostly learning how to organize what you already have and put it out there to impact people’s lives. People desperately need what you have to offer.” She told me repeatedly, “Wow, I feel like the Universe led me right to you.” I told her that “It’s no wonder that we were having that conversation because as I committed to simply do what I do, and not trying to be all things to all people, I attract the exact kind of person who is interested in what I’m offering. So easy. So effective.”
I strongly believe that we all gotta share what we have, and for me that means sharing yoga and Yoga Nidra with the world. It also means sharing what I have learned about turning my passions into my paycheck. It means helping anybody who is interested in learning how to make a positive impact on the world while also making a living doing it.
I believe that you have something to share with the world. The world needs your mad skills, passions, and interests and will be a better place as you step up and share them with the world. I don’t believe in scarcity so stop being stingy and share a little bit of your awesomeness with the world by making something you can put out there for everyone to learn from!
Are you a teacher, and that doesn’t have to be only yoga or meditation? Do you have a mad life-skill or talent you could share with the world? What’s your unique expertise that could make the world a better place if more people knew about it? Are you an artist? A therapist? Come on already and share it with the world!
Learn how you become a conscious entrepreneur, including the systems, mindset, and skills, to share your unique talents with the world in a way that feeds you back. Let me teach you the skills to make a living doing what you love while living anywhere in the world.
Come on! Let’s do this!
On Saturday, October 30th from 9 am–12 pm MDT I’m offering a 3-hour Zoom workshop on how to become a conscious entrepreneur. In it, I’ll share with you 5 essential steps to getting your conscious business up and running so you can start to organically attract those from all over the world who need exactly what you have to offer.
These steps will be easy to understand, organized, and actionable so you can start right away. In this live Zoom workshop, I’ll take questions, offer examples, and even give you a behind-the-scenes look at how I run my business.
You’ll learn about:
Simple Websites: creating a hub, spreading the word, and delivering actionable solutions to your clients’ problems
Creating your message and how to put it out there to get noticed
How to turn your message and mad skills into digital products. Make money while you sleep or are on vacation!
Simple systems and tools to automate things like event registration, newsletter service, and digital products
Creating/maintaining relationships with your clients
Let me teach you what has taken me many years, dollars, trial-and-error, and hard work to learn. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s really not that complicated, it just takes a little know-how and a little work. Let me show you what to do. I’ve tested it and I can tell you from experience that it does work.
I’ll be recording the class so you can watch it later if you can’t join live but you’ll want to join live because it will be more impactful that way. Plus, I’ll be giving away 2 free 30-minute consultations to two different people who are in the live session.
At the end of the day, a few years ago, I took a bit of a gamble and invested in learning how to put myself online to first supplement my income and then to be my monthly income. The gamble paid off, and it’s been a complete game-changer for me and my family and I want to share with you some of what’s working for me.
Now is the time to make an impact on the world by sharing your talents, and make money in the process.
Please join me! Also, do you know anybody who could use this skill? Please pass this along.
Feel free to reach out with questions and I hope to see you at this workshop.
Also, don’t forget to join me for Carrie Ann Robson’s Money and Miracles Love Virtual Mastermind on Thursday, October 28th at 1 pm MDT. You can register for free by clicking here.
