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!”