In the beginning, I did what most yoga teachers do …
Hustle.
At one point, I was regularly teaching 27 classes a week, any class I could get, including the 6 am classes that nobody else wanted to teach, including private yoga clients who would sometimes cancel at the last minute.
Ironic, isn’t it—running around like a mad person all day so you can rush into a yoga studio and preach to people about chilling out?
It was both unsustainable and exhausting. I mean, a person can only teach so many classes a day. I’d plateaued in my career.
Something had to change.
Career Plateau
I’d spent 15 years developing a loyal client base in Salt Lake City but when my wife got a job offer in New York, I knew that leaving my home base was the right thing to do for my career, that there was something in NYC that would help me to move past this career plateau.
My intuition was SPOT ON but change would come in the form of something I did NOT expect.
Life in NYC was great in many ways but it was also really stressful.
At first, I started the yoga hustle all over again in NYC. Our son was 2 at the time and my wife and I would often exchange the kid on the sidewalk as she was coming home from work and I was walking to teach.
NYC was also expensive, especially childcare, so hiring someone to watch the kid while I was down dogging around town, making less money than I would be paying a nanny, was nuts.
So, rather than teaching 27 classes a week, I spent most of my time caring for our son. And while pushing the stroller around to different construction sites in Brooklyn (Elio was enamored with all things construction at the time), or trekking out to Nagel’s Bagels, I kept thinking that there just had to be a better way to do this.
I mean, I’d logged around 20,000 hours of yoga and Yoga Nidra teaching at that point of my career. I had skills, things I wanted to share with people! I needed to find a way to reach more people than who came to my local yoga studio on the few nights a week I had the time to teach. And what about my clients in Salt Lake City, how was I going to stay connected to them?
So I began making digital products—recording yoga classes and meditations and hosting online classes. BTW, I’ve been using Zoom since 2017, before Zoom became more important than oxygen (I wish I wouldda got in on the IPO of that thing!). The family would go to sleep and I’d stay up late working on my pre-recorded projects, eager to get them out into the world.
When these early products launched, most of them didn’t do so well financially. I realize now that the payout for these early products was simply learning to do something that would eventually change my career.
But gradually, after a little tweaking, my products started selling. It was beginning to work! People from all over the world were downloading my classes and meditations and would often write back to tell me what a difference my teaching was making in their lives. Last I checked, I have clients and students in at least 43 different countries. It’s both humbling and thrilling.
Right about as my digital products started to gain some traction, my wife’s company laid off about half of their workforce, including her. We wondered what we were going to do? We’d already started to feel that we’d had enough of NYC but where to go next?
When my wife lost her job, I became our family’s sole provider, literally overnight. The home we owned in Salt Lake City was being rented, most of our stuff was in storage, and since my income was not based on living anywhere in particular, it gave us the freedom to go anywhere.
So we figured, if you can live anywhere, why not live on the French Riviera?
So we moved to the French Riviera. (Cheaper than New York OR Salt Lake City, I might add.)
We absolutely loved France and stayed for over a year and my online sales continued to rise and supported our family.
When our renter decided to leave our house in Salt Lake City, we chose to move back to Utah for a bit to take care of that as well as tend to some other business.
Now get this …
To offset the cost of moving back to the states, I jumped right back into the yoga hustle and offered to sub as many classes as I could at my local yoga studio. After two weeks of busting my asana teaching classes, I was excited to finally go and pick up my paycheck at the studio. Before going to the studio, I was thrilled to see that I’d had a few online sales while I was sleeping.
THERE’S NOTHING BETTER THAN MAKING MONEY IN YOUR SLEEP!!!
I drove to the studio and when I opened my check I realized something life-changing:
I’d earned more money sleeping the night before than I had teaching a metric-ton of yoga classes at the studio over the previous two weeks.
I was elated!
This. Changed. Everything.
Not only had I more than DOUBLED my earning capacity thanks to the addition of my online sales, more importantly what this told me is that I get to teach in-person classes more because I love it than because I need the money. This massively changed the quality of all my teaching, not just in-person classes. Suddenly, I only agreed to teach the in-person classes I really wanted to teach. No more 6 am yoga class. No more 27 classes a week. No more flakey private clients.
No more hustle!
Plus, my hourly rate went up because my time became more valuable. After all, I could be at home making a recording that could be viewed dozens or hundreds of times instead of only once.
Then Covid hit.
Suddenly all yoga studios got mothballed. But lucky for me, I was ahead of the curve and had already moved my business online. Even though I missed the in-person classes, Covid didn’t hurt my revenue one bit.
In fact, during Covid I had the best financial year of my career up to that point.
I also increased my mentor program substantially so I could show other yoga and meditation teachers as well as conscious entrepreneurs how to escape the hustle—how to work smarter not harder, how to make better money, and most importantly, how to reach more people with their skills, passions, and talents.
I taught them skills that would endure longer than Covid would.
So, does offering digital products stop me from teaching in-person?
Like I said, I will always love teaching in-person and my digital products only help me to teach more in-person events. Thanks to the organic outreach of my digital products, I am more noticed in my field and around the world which results in invitations to teach in-person trainings, workshops, and retreats all over the place. Plus, of those who attend my in-person retreats in beautiful places like France, Italy, Greece, Hawaii, and Spain, many are people who discovered me online through my digital products.
I love it when I’m leading a retreat and I come back from teaching our morning meditation on the terrace of the villa overlooking the bucolic rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside, only to see that someone just purchased one of my online products while I was teaching. Truly, this is the art of being two places at once … and making money while doing it.
After the stringent Covid restrictions were lifted and we could go back to Europe again, we moved back to France and have been here for about 18 months. I LOVE the freedom to live anywhere knowing that wherever I am, I can still share my passion with students all over the world no matter where they live.
I believe in abundance. I believe that there’s more than enough energy, love, and money to go around.
That said, there’s only one YOU and there are people out there who need what only you can offer or only in the way you can offer it.
I’ve learned a few things about making and selling digital products to share your passions with the world. It’s been a total game-changer for my teaching and career. I would love to show you how to make some easy and attractive digital products so you can put your talents out into the world and make the kind of global impact that you are meant to make.
I’m teaching an online digital products workshop on Sunday, May 21st, and I’d love for you to be there. It is an investment that could pay for itself after your very first sale and go on to continue to pay you for years to come.
It’s going to be fun!
Plus, you don’t have to be a tech or design wizard to do this stuff.
I’ll be recording it so you don’t even have to be there live (but you want to cuz it will be cool and you can ask questions) and also so you can watch the replay as often as you’d like.
Come on, learn to work smarter, not harder.
I hope to see you there!