I’ve already talked about how empathy, curiosity and perseverance are three of the key qualities that make a great strategist. Another quality that I’ve found to be very important is the ability to trust yourself and listen to your instinct. There is so much information and data out there, so many directions in which any company or brand could go, that trusting your instinct on what matters, how far to push and when to stop and say “this is it” is a huge part of succeeding as a strategist with your sanity intact.
Yoga has myriad benefits – stress relief, improved strength and flexibility and a deeper connection to our physical selves. However it also provides a huge amount of value in other areas of life – there are so many lessons from yoga that can be applied in business and work.
When I started as a strategist, I didn’t trust myself at all; I explored every avenue exhaustively and found it incredibly hard to make decisions and simplify things, which is at the heart of strategy. Learning to trust myself has been an important part of my development.
But beyond simply practice and having others telling you that your instincts are good, how can we actively learn to better trust ourselves?
One, somewhat surprising, way is by practising yoga. This is because there’s an incredibly strong link between body and mind, and by training ourselves to trust our bodies, we learn to trust our brains too. Before I started practising yoga I had no real connection to or trust of my body. I saw it as something that regularly betrayed me by getting ill, fat or tired and I saw exercise as a way to force it to do things. Yoga has completely changed all that.
There are three key ways in which yoga can help us learn to trust ourselves:
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Yoga helps you tune in to the limits and potential of your mind and body. Whether it’s realising you can hold a pose for longer just by breathing or learning that one side of your body is stronger than the other, we can learn a lot about ourselves through physical practice.
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Yoga gives you no choice but to trust yourself: if you don’t you may get injured. Understanding when to back off and learning how to recognise good effort from bad pain (and therefore resisting the urge to show off) is one of the first things you learn to do in yoga.
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A lot of yoga can only be done if you trust yourself. No matter how strong you are, a lot of poses are unattainable without a lot of self-trust, particularly balancing postures. Developing this level of trust in our own abilities is highly empowering and translates off the mat.
Yoga has myriad benefits – stress relief, improved strength and flexibility and a deeper connection to our physical selves. However it also provides a huge amount of value in other areas of life – there are so many lessons from yoga that can be applied in business and work.
We integrate simple yoga-inspired movement into all our sessions to help participants tune into their own instincts, and we highly recommend that anyone who attends our training gives it a try. If you’re interested in learning more about our unique approach, get in touch with our resident yoga teacher Sarah by emailing her at sarah@wellandtrulyworkshops.co.uk.
