Male Announcer: You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

Welcome and welcome back. With this episode, I’m so glad that you’re here because it’s the start of a new mini-series. Now, I’ve done mini-series in the past where I’ve focused on a specific area, like exploring your breathing or a concept around getting out of pain. And they’ve always been a multi-series set of episodes really to help you dig in and dive in and explore.

And this mini-series is no different, except I’m taking it a little bit broader. And there’s a reason for this, because what I really want to help, especially health professionals and yoga teachers who are wanting to become skilled, like really skilled at helping their clients get out of pain and have a lot of fun doing it and cultivate a client base that they really love.

And I realize people say this stuff all of the time. Like get really good at what you do, love what you do and enjoy the people that you work with, I know, it’s said all over the place. And I’m serious, even though it’s said all over the place, I’m serious.

And so I’ve kind of divided the series into three segments. And these three segments are what I feel are the most important when it comes to applying therapeutic aspects of yoga to scenarios where people have persistent pain and you’re working with them to help them get out of pain, and enabling you to have a sustainable business.

So here are these three. The first one is to understand anatomy in a way that really helps you apply yoga to reducing and eradicating physical pain. And the second is, knowing that anatomy, then helping your clients grow both interoceptive and proprioceptive capabilities so that they can sense or inwardly feel the anatomical concepts in their body, now just intellectually thinking about them. And by the way, that goes for you as the health professional too, right? It’s your ability to feel the anatomical concepts, not simply just intellectually talking about them.

And then the third one is to connect with clients that you really want to connect with and you are skilled with working with them so that you don’t need to convince anyone or cajole anyone to join you, because nobody wants to be sold to, no one really likes to sell, sell. It’s kind of icky, right? We want to be able to engage with people who resonate with our services, we resonate with their situation and there’s sort of this match made in heaven and it works really, really well.

So my hope is that through this mini-series I can show you ways of applying these skills, both separately and more importantly to recognize when we start to apply them well, there’s actually a thread that connects them all. So many people think that learning the skill, the technical skill of helping someone get out of pain is separate from the business skill. And yes, there are skills that are separate in those camps, but there’s this underlying thread that actually joins them.

And my hope is through this series that I’m able to illustrate that because you start to see that the sustainability that we’re teaching our clients in terms of helping them get out of pain is very similar, if not the same, to the sustainability that we’re building in our businesses. And if we don’t have that happening in both arenas, we’re not going to be super successful. It’s so easy to burn out and drain and get depleted.

And really, if we’re helping someone nourish themselves in a way that supports them in reducing and eradicating pain, we’re doing the same with our businesses, we want to build businesses in a way that is nourishing. And when we are in a nourishing space, people can feel that. That’s kind of what I’m going after here, it’s we’re eating our own cooking and we’re not throwing up.

So another way I can say this is it’s not anatomy in one corner, interoception and proprioception in another corner, and cultivating it and caring for clients in yet another corner.

I’m going to tell a story to highlight this. So the story is that when I first began teaching, I was working at a local yoga studio where the way that the programs worked was it was a registered series. And the registered series were eight weeks or 12 weeks, depending on the calendar year.

And my classes were quite popular. So people were being referred and were coming into the classes, but they were being registered for the next series. So once one series began, people couldn’t come into it because it was full, so then they would register for the next series.

Well, what ended up happening is the people who were in the first series couldn’t get into the next series because other people had already enrolled, and they were kind of bummed because they couldn’t continue to work with me.

So when I started to open up a space in a small Pilates studio early on in my career, one of the sort of founding principles was that people who are my clients and my students get first dibs on the next series. Like I kept running my classes as registered series, I didn’t run them as drop-in.

And so I made sure that if someone called me and said, “Hey, I want to get into your class,” I would go back to my original enrollees and say, “Hey, guess what? I’ve got someone who wants to come into the class, the class is full. Is there anyone who’s thinking of not re-enrolling in the next series? And if so, just let me know. And then I can let the person know and then we can kind of carry on.”

So where that was coming from was because it really bugged me in my previous place of teaching that people didn’t get that first go. And I wanted to give them sort of the first opportunity to say, no, I’m done. I’m good onward I go.

But unbeknownst to me, what that actually also did was for the person who had called me, they said, “Oh my goodness, she’s full.” And then the people who were in the class, they said, “Oh my gosh, she’s got a wait list.” So I didn’t go out of my way to plan for that, but inadvertently because I was coming from a place of deeply caring, because I wanted to give my current students the first go at the next series, that is what ultimately got cultivated.

And interestingly, I’d opened up that small space, it was just one room inside of a Pilates studio where I was teaching four days a week, four classes a day rather. So I was teaching anywhere between 13 and 15 classes over that course of the week, Monday to Thursday or Monday to Wednesday, depending on the week.

And what was interesting is that I developed a full caseload with a wait list within four months of running them. And the wait list grew. So it ended up like if someone left a class, it would take them six to eight months to get back in. So it was really quite interesting that that’s what started to happen, but it came from this place of really deeply caring.

Now I can hear someone saying, Susi, that was 25 years ago, things are entirely different now. And yeah, they are. I would agree to that. But there are some principles that do remain very similar. And the reason that I did, if I can look at it from a business perspective, why it worked was for three big reasons. That I deeply, deeply, deeply care. I love, love, love, love, love, love to teach. And I know, and I even knew back then, that I could absolutely help people.

So I want to ask you those questions. Do you deeply care? Do you love to teach? And do you know that you can absolutely help people? And if the answer is no to any of these, then what do you need to do to make them a yes? Because when you can come from this place and space of deeply caring, loving to teach, and absolutely knowing you can help someone, there’s no need to convince anybody to join you. There’s no tactics or tricks needed.

You know that you’re capable. You have this energy of having the person’s best interests in mind. And you love the act of teaching someone the skills and tools, in this case, to help them get out of pain, right?

So when you can learn to teach and become really good at teaching people the how, the skills and tools of how they can reduce and eradicate pain, and not just rambling off anatomical concepts that don’t make sense, but in a way that they understand and is meaningful for them, people will feel the commitment. They’ll feel you’re speaking to them, with them, for them. They’ll know that you are here to help.

Okay, so can you see or sense how these business aspects can come much more naturally because of where or how you’re speaking? Like where you are speaking from, the energy or the vibe or the drive, from where your language and where your connection is coming from. It becomes less of this thoughtful, not thoughtful like intellectual space, but it comes from an interoceptive space. Do you see that?

See, that’s how we start to blend this. When we can feel, there’s that word again, and tune in and deeply know, it just starts to work. We don’t have to get all finagling, right? How you are speaking and how you are relating with the clients who really could benefit from your work because not everyone benefits from my work. I am clear on that. And then there are also a good chunk of people who do benefit.

So as we get more clear on what that resonance is for us, we will attract those folks. I kind of sighed there because I realized that’s going to sound all woo-y. But the reality is I got some woo in me. I got a good dose of woo and a solid dose of science. I got a good amount of intellectual skills and tools and gosh darn it, I’m a woo girl through and through.

So when I’m blending those things together, don’t you see that I then attract those folks who are very similar in mind? They get that there’s a bigger picture to all of this. Not everything whittles down to a black and white solution, right? It just doesn’t work that way. Not with the people who I work with. It’s not the way that I see the world, right?

So then when I’m speaking this way and how I’m relating will attract that kind of person. So this is what I want to be addressing in this mini series. So in addition to teaching you some core yoga-informed anatomical concepts and how they apply very specifically to the practice of applying yoga therapeutically to help people reduce and eradicate physical pain, right, that integrates interoceptive and proprioceptive qualities.

And you’ll start to see as you feel into this stuff, the business pieces start to come a little bit more online a bit more easily. It feels a little bit less than oil and water.

So here we go. I want you to ask yourself, do you deeply, deeply care about your students or clients? And if you’re kind of hemming and hawing, then I’ll offer you this. Are there some of them that you deeply care? Like, are there ones that you just absolutely love? And can you list out the qualities of those folks? What makes those folks the ones that you just deeply resonate with? And write it down. What makes them so much fun, that has the connection being strong? What is that there?

Then do you love, love, love, love, love, love, love to teach? Is that what lights you up? Because part of the process that I see of helping people reduce and eradicate physical pain is it’s a process of my teaching them the skills and tools so that they can do this and feel this in their own bodies. And I will provide you with different ideas around teaching through the course of this mini-series.

And then do you absolutely know that you can help them? And if you’re sort of doubtful there, if you’re unsure of whether you can or not, or you want to up-level your skill, then where this might lead you to is looking at the therapeutic yoga intensive, and I’m running it in April.

And that’s the foundational training program where we work for six days hands-on online, where we work with your body as well as working with other people in the group. And you really start to hone in your capacity to see clearly, to feel inwardly, to recognize compensatory patterns, breathing patterns, and not only come into what I like to call the granular movements to help improve joint function and tissue responsivity.

But also then how to rebuild that back up into more activities of daily living. Whether those activities of daily living have to do with child care and child raising or grocery shopping and errand running or other activities like pickleball or golf or skiing or biking or swimming, or you name it. And being able to go from how do you help someone reduce and eradicate and then how do you help them rebuild?

We cover that at a foundational level in a very effective way in April from the 20th to the 25th. And I’m going to put in the show notes episodes where I have connected with graduates from the therapeutic yoga intensive and they’ve shared their experiences of what they were able to do right after that intensive. How they were able to help right after that intensive and the gains that their clients made with just those six days of training.

So again, if you’re looking for really supporting your clients that you deeply, deeply, deeply care about, and you want to cultivate more of those people in your world and you want to build up this love of your teaching and cultivate that skill and know that you can grow your skill and absolutely help the people that you’re working with, you’ll really enjoy this mini-series.

And I would love for you to check out and perhaps join the therapeutic yoga intensive. And you can read all about it over at functionalsynergy.com/intensive. And if you’ve got specific questions for us, you can email us directly at [email protected]. Take great care and we’ll see you on the next episode.