What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why it’s important to understand who your avatar is and what platform your avatar is using.
• How to balance sharing and selling.
• How to get organized and create boundaries around social media.
• Why narrowing your focus is smarter than casting a wide net.

Links Mentioned in Episode:

• Mary’s Website
• Pixabay
• Canva
• Be a coach
• Have a conversation
• Discover more about Body Thrive 
• Yogahealer Live Experience

Favorite Quotes:

• “When you look at social media, it can be the enemy of ease. So you can just fritter away all this time and not really benefit.” — Mary Sullivan
• “For me, it’s a balance . . . I don’t want to overwhelm. So I look at what I can deliver that engenders me as an expert that is supportive to my community, that potentially invites them to seek me as an expert and develop and schedule posts based on that.” — Mary Sullivan
• “I’m trying to communicate, in my sharing, the nature of who I am and how I can help without too much hard selling.” — Mary Sullivan
• “It’s better to be a consistent presence on two outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, so that people who follow that get a real sense of who you are and what you offer, than this haphazard presence on multiple channels.” — Mary Sullivan

Guest BIO:

Mary Sullivan MS, KRM, AYS is a writer teacher and researcher by education and experience. Mary is a long time member of the Yoga Healer Community. Mary helps people identify and implement daily practices, habits and paradigms that build their wellness and resiliency. She writes and teaches classes on lifestyle medicine for people with Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. Mary began Dare to Self Care in 2013, as an outlet to help others.

Cindy is a mom to two girls. She and her husband own and operate a brick oven pizzeria. She spent the first five years of the business ownership in “survival mode,” getting very little sleep. Her mental health was suffering and she went on a quest to help herself naturally.

She started practicing many of the Body Thrive habits on her own and a friend subsequently told her about the program. Through Body Thrive, Cindy was able to fine tune those habits and improve her health even more.

A lot of the work we do in Yoga Health Coaching revolves around time management and schedule integrity. Cindy has also found that technology skills she has learned such as online calendaring, online schedulers, and web design have streamlined her days and made her life so much easier. Learning the science behind habit-building gave Cindy the “why”s she needed to stick to the changes she was making. Knowing, for example, that neuroplasticity peaks during the hours that we are waking and going to sleep helps Cindy set herself up for successful, positive days.

With Yoga Health Coaching, Cindy is inspired and excited to help other people find their way to natural health.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How Yoga Health Coaching teaches us how to set ourselves up for success.
• How Yoga Health Coaching combines personal thrive with professional thrive.
• How structures and systems lead to massive evolution.

Links Mentioned in Episode:

• Body Thrive
• Yoga Health Coaching

Show Highlights:

• 0:00 – Cindy is a mom to two girls. She and her husband own and operate a brick oven pizzeria. She spent the first five years of the business ownership in “survival mode,” getting very little sleep. Her mental health was suffering and she went on a quest to help herself naturally. She started practicing many of the Body Thrive habits on her own and a friend subsequently told her about the program. Through Body Thrive, Cindy was able to fine tune those habits and improve her health even more. With Yoga Health Coaching, Cindy is inspired and excited to help other people find their way to natural health.
• 9:00 – A lot of the work we do in Yoga Health Coaching revolves around time management and schedule integrity. Cindy has also found that technology skills she has learned such as online calendaring, online schedulers, and web design have streamlined her days and made her life so much easier.
• 16:45 – Cindy also learned how to set up her environment for who she wants to become next. Moving her workspace from the kitchen table to a proper desk changed her identity. She also learned other tips and tricks for keeping herself organized and on task.
• 23:25 – Learning the science behind habit-building gave Cindy the “why”s she needed to stick to the changes she was making. Knowing, for example, that neuroplasticity peaks during the hours that we are waking and going to sleep helps Cindy set herself up for successful, positive days.
• 28:00 – Cindy’s self awareness has also increased thanks to the habits of Body Thrive. She now feels responsive rather than reactive.

Your Favorite Quotes:

• “We commonly have people who are already ayurvedic practitioners and yogis coming into this program and learning the ten habits of Body Thrive and going, oh my gosh, it’s the structure that precedes the massive evolution.” — Carly Banks
• “When you learn to automate, then you simplify your life.” — Carly Banks
• “We think we can do it with willpower alone, but we need systems.” — Cindy Marshall
• “I don’t want to be reactive; I want to respond, not react.” — Cindy Marshall

Guest BIO:

As an owner of a family restaurant, with experience teaching art for the Art Museum and community art center, Program Director of The Boys and Girls Club, youth development coordinator for a middle school, co-founder and teacher of Girls Rock Camps (teaching girls how to play instruments, write songs then perform to large audiences!) and recently, a teacher to disabled seniors, yoga health coach in training Cindy Marshall gives a lot to her community, her 2 kids, her husband and her siblings.

Through her constant effort over the last few years, she learned the hard way that self care had to move up in the list of priorities if she was going to avoid burnout. She needed to create structures around her time, and her focus on self, that would allow her to do the work she wants to do in the world without losing steam. The habits of Body Thrive have brought her ease in her full days, and she is excited to say that the tools learned in Yoga Health Coaching are really so simple. All you need to do is start. Connect with Cindy on her Facebook page.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How do the Body Thrive habits help us to thrive?
• How to find more time in your day.
• How working in a group helps growth.

Links Mentioned in Episode:

• Body Thrive Book
• YHC Have a conversation
• Davina Clauer’s website
• Davina’s Facebook
• Watch the Masterclass NOW

Show Highlights:

• 1:20 – Davina talks to us a bit about her Yoga Health coaching background, how she found Cate and Yogahealer, and where it has led her.
• 6:00 – The addiction to saying ‘I don’t have enough time.’ In reality, with the BT habits we are opening up so much time and space for ourselves and we have the capacity to handle more.
• 12:00- The importance of group dynamics and how accountability helps our exponential growth in life. We don’t have to do it alone!

Favorite Quotes:

• “Your day now flows around the habits instead of being another thing that you have to find time for.” -Davina Clauer
• “The most successful people start before they’re ready.” – Davina Clauer
• “Sometimes we compare ourselves to people who are in chapter 20, or they are in a different book, and we forget that they were on chapter 1 at one point.” -Davina Clauer

Guest Bio:

Davina Clauer is the proud mother of two amazing girls and is really into practicing & teaching Vinyasa Yoga. Her specialized practices are focused on supporting mothers, babies and children through significant moments of life. The techniques used in prenatal and children’s yoga can provide countless benefits for the overall well-being for the entire family. Davina took her first yoga class with her then 6-month-old in 2013 and her life changed forever. This led her to start teaching yoga in 2015 after completing my RYT-200 certification. Towards the end of 2015 Davina’s life was shattered when she suffered a devastating loss of a pregnancy at 11 weeks. She was searching for anything to feel better and decided to turn back to her yoga practice. She was pulled toward the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda to heal herself emotionally and address the physiological cause of her miscarriage. She found Yogahealer and entered into her first Body Thrive during this time, which then lead her on to Yogahealers’ Yoga Health Coaching Course, that she is currently enrolled in.

Davina is now happy to report that after some major changes in lifestyle, she conceived and carried a healthy baby girl who graced us with her presence in Feb. 2017. Since giving birth Davina has been bound and determined to continue down her wellness path and decided that she wants to help others on theirs; she hopes to help people design the healthy life that they deserve to live! Conect with Clauer on her Website and Facebook.

I love talking to different members of this program about how you get through the day, and how you make all the pieces fit together. So tune in for some brief and helpful tips on how to make the most of the time you have in your day!

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why getting enough sleep may be the next step for upleveling your business
• How to gain better calendar integrity
• Why you should block self-care into your calendar

Links:

• The 12 Week Year
• Plan Your 2018 with Cate Stillman
• Have a Career Conversation with Grace Edison
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• Best Self Journal
• Google Calendar 
• The Art of Self-Care 
• Get your Kira Grace’s the NEW Romance Strut Collection

Show Highlights:

• 6:30 – Sometimes it simply comes down to getting enough sleep! Sleep can help improve decision-making and mental clarity, and decrease anxiety, overwhelm, and being swayed by negative outside influences.
• 9:15 – Having a set routine makes decision-making much easier: by establishing a routine to do without thinking about it, you can leave the rest of your decision-making energy for problem-solving in your business.
• 15:00 – Make sure you only plan the things you know you’ll be able to get done in a day. If you always plan too many things than you can get done, you may fall into a cycle of breaking commitments.
• 19:00 – Use your calendar to create work-life balance: include time for you and create boundaries that protect yourself and your life. You, your family, your friends, and your clients will thank you for it.

Favorite Quotes:

• “Our ability to make good decisions is limited throughout the day.” – Marcia Wilson
• “That which gets scheduled gets completed.” – Carly Banks
• “You don’t want to create a cycle where you’re not doing the things you’re committing to.” – Carly Banks
• “If I can see what the week is going to be like already, then I start to make better self-care decisions.” – Marcia Wilson

When our work inspires us, time is our most valuable commodity. New ideas, established projects and evolving priorities compete for attention. In an odd paradox, we can spend a lot of time trying to save time looking into the latest time and priority management tools.

Surprisingly, my studies in yoga and Ayurveda have revealed a new time management secret: Hacking my home life is my best tool for freeing time and focus for my work life.“Hacking” is a way to describe looking for new ways of doing things to increase efficiency. At home, this could mean cleaning in a different way or shopping for groceries online. For me it means getting smart about my self care.

Decision Making Fatigue- Getting Lost in the Mundane

Every day we navigate choices at home and work. Some of them impact our family and relationships, others our health, and some have a ripple effect on our career. Good decisions can have positive effects on our income and career trajectory. At the same time, on any given day we have limited capacity to focus, assess, and make well thought-out decisions.

One of my recent reads- “The One Thing”-  illustrates this brilliantly by describing a review of decisions made by Judges within the Israeli court system. The study showed that the judges made drastically different decisions depending on what time of day they made the ruling and how recently they had eaten. Little, seemingly inconsequential things, seem to matter. When we run out of staying power we turn towards our defaults decisions- the behaviours and choices we are familiar with but which may not result in the desired outcomes. The success of our work is then determined less by our knowledge, skill and experience and more by how much mental energy our day has already consumed. Our daily habits matter.

Making “Default” Behaviour Work for Us

Knowing we have limited capacity each day, what could happen if we re-designed the time we spend AT HOME to create greater capacity at work?  What if we eliminated decisions about our most mundane daily tasks- exercise, eating, and other self care- so all our mental stamina was reserved for solving our most important challenges?

Introducing Routine

Routine. “A sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program.” (Dictionary.com)

One of the reasons I was drawn to learn more about Ayurveda was Dinacharya-  a simple routine of daily self-care habits.   This seems ironic given most of my life I have instinctively resisted routine-  I rarely committed to doing anything consistently at the same time or on the same day. I went to the gym when I was motivated. I wrote when I was inspired. Ayurveda taught me to understand this tendency through the lens of the doshas. My airy vata nature leads me to move like the wind between passions, projects and even emails in my inbox without rhyme or reason.

Why Routine Matters

In Ayurveda the element of air reflects movement, change, and diversity. Those of us who are more air element than earth element naturally gravitate to a lack of routine.  We can be in a constant state of re-assessing what we are doing and what we need to do next, creating a lot of inefficiencies as we navigate our decisions for the day.

So what does this have to do with work?

Vata imbalances are exacerbated by use of electronics, movement through space, and a life of complexity and “doing more.”  Many of us work with computers in knowledge-based careers, exacerbating our potential for vata imbalance and making it even harder to focus and make decisions. The very nature of our very work puts us at risk for being less successful in our work day.  One remedy? Take every-day activities like our morning self care and turn it into an automatic routine so that our brain power can be used at the office.

The Challenge of Creating Routine

Changing behavior – initiating new ways of doing things – can be hard to implement and even harder to sustain. I’ve learned that the key to changing behaviour and creating routine is making use of habit changing tools to implement and sustain these rhythms.

My Favorite Tips For Hacking Your Home Life

• Find A Community

The biggest gains I see in my self- care courses happen when the people I am helping connect into a bigger group. By tapping into the wisdom of our own local thrive-oriented community, as well as the books, podcasts and online resources offered by the larger Yoga Healer community, we become much more capable of evolving and changing our habits.  One-to-one connection also helps. I encourage students to form accountability partnerships with other students.  This can work at work too- move into conversation with a friend or colleague who is on a similar path. Turn that into a weekly accountability conversation in the same way that you touch base with your project team.  By using the same kind of muscle you would for an important work project it can give you both more leverage to create shift.

• Start small

Start small- very, very small- so that it is nearly impossible to resist the next step.  David Allen of Getting Things Done teaches us how to start with the smallest “next action” (or kaizen).  If we can’t get moving on a goal, the action we are resisting may be too big. Working out at the gym for an hour every day before you head to the office is daunting.  Doing 5 minutes of sun salutations on your yoga mat at home- less so. We experiment with one small change.  And then another. And learn that a day-by-day 1% improvement effectively creates the shift we want.

Acknowledge Resistance

Resistance is ubiquitous. We know we should be doing more self care, but we spend critical time and energy weighing the pros and cons of our daily workout. Get clear and notice when you are in that debate. Close off the chatter and do the self care. Recognize the impulse to move ahead, name the negative chatter as resistance, and DO IT ANYWAYS. Eliminate the debate at home so your can think clearly at work.

I love my work.  Finding enough time to be the inspiring, focussed and visionary leader I want to be has been a challenge. Time management systems, business coaching and a strong team have given me some traction. Who would have guessed that creating a solid, replicable morning and bedtime routine was what I really needed to uplevel my work life. Hacking my home life is my new secret weapon.

• Make time to do the things that really “light you up”
• Get into a state of flow where you can use your unique talents to boost your business
• Prioritize and use the 80/20 rule for time management to learn where to direct your focus
• Give yourself permission to take time when you’re in a funk—progress will still happen!

In this episode I rap with Dana Skoglund about

Tips on the transformative power of YHC and how it can help you:

• Manage life now and in the future when things get overwhelming
• Make and follow an organized plan to use time wisely and guide yourself to your goals
• Get out of your own way and feel less emotionally involved to become more productive
• Prioritize!

Show Highlights

• 2:45 — The capacities we build at YHC are totally transformative and lead to better alignment, impact, income, support, and collaboration.
• 5:10 — YHC leads to differences in the realities of our lives. One key way is that we understand the power of delegation in freeing up our time.
• 11:00 — Building your business will always require effort but also offer continued growth. There are things you can do now and in the future to better manage your time and prepare for this growth.
• 13:13 — When you need to slow things down, this is still a great time for planning, prioritizing, and setting goals.
• 19:00 — We need to always be on the lookout for leaders, especially as we shift into new phases of growth.
• 25:40 — Clear communication opens up pathways for and commitment to your and your students’ journeys ahead.
• 31:05 — The support Dana receives in Continuity is completely invaluable.

Link from the Conversation

• Dana’s Website

Favorite Quotes from the Conversation

• “I feel like I’ve gotten so much more clear around my niche and my style and my values.”
• “Perfectionism was really what held me back. Part of delegating is being okay with things not being done the way you would exactly do them. But it’s better than not having that support!”
• “It took me a while to be okay with reaching out and investing in support.”
• “There’s always a big long list, but by creating organization within that list…I’m only working on one or two things at a time. And that feels totally doable.”

Coach Bio

Dana Skoglund is a Certified Yoga Health Coach, Yoga teacher, and mother of two rambunctious young boys. She’s been studying Yoga since 2000 and teaching since 2004, and she has over 1,000 hours of training in the styles of Jivamukti, Anusara, and Sridaiva. Her desires to take her health and well-being into her own hands and to learn how to keep her family healthy led her to Ayurveda in 2011.

After implementing daily routines from Ayurveda and noticing the profound impacts they had on her energy and happiness, she began coaching clients into these better body habits in 2013. She aims to inspire others about the importance of health habits in crafting the lives of their dreams. Dana is also deeply passionate about travel, adventure, learning, movement of any kind, and the arts.

In this episode, Annie Barrett speaks to Dana Skoglund — Yoga Health Coach to Yoga Health Coach — and learns how Dana has mastered the Yogi superpower of bending time. Dana shares her best strategies and tips for being productive and effective as a Yoga teacher, Yoga Health Coach, mother, and entrepreneur.

Annie raps with Dana about Mastering + Bending Time:

• Understand Yogi superpowers and why, as householder Yogis, learning to bend time (a.k.a. become a master of your time) is better than walking on water
• Dana’s struggles with time management and stress as a solopreneur and new mom
• Why women haven’t been getting good self-care and time-management models, and how Yoga Health Coaches can change that
• Dana’s strategies to help Yoga Health Coaches get organized and get in integrity with time via quarterly planning, time-blocking, and daily check-ins
• How Dana helps coaching clients learn time management

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How to balance your own self-care and take care of your business
• How structure enables presence and flow, and how they’re the keys to easeful living
• Learn strategies for getting organized using time-management tools
• Learn Dana’s favorite books and resources on task-management and time-bending

Links:

• Dana’s Productivity Resources
• The ONE Thing
• 12-Week Year
• James Clear on Productivity

Show Highlights:

• 3:30 — Here’s a quick rundown of Yogi superpowers you can nurture and develop. Dana has mastered the superpower of time-bending.
• 5:30 — It’s a common feeling among people that they simply don’t have enough time during the day to get done what they want to do. It leads to an experience of chronic stress. Dana and Annie agree it’s an issue in a culture that expects too much.
• 9:00 — Yoga Health Coaches teach people how to take care of themselves first. It’s an important skill that people aren’t doing, and it’s depleting their immune systems. We can’t be effective coaches if we aren’t taking care of ourselves, either.
• 16:15 — Learning new ways we can organize ourselves and our time, especially as we become Yoga Health Coaches, helps us and our clients.
• 19:00 — There are so many different habits and realms of learning within Yoga Health Coaching, and this highlights the importance of goal setting. What’s important for you to create next? Dana explains how to focus your attention and efforts here with quarterly, weekly, and daily planning.
• 23:30 — Dana expands on her explanation of time-blocking and creating a schedule that supports her. How can you make clear boundaries around self, work, and family time?
• 28:00 — Dana explains how she teaches the art of time-bending to her clients with meal planning, journaling, and turning the action of making better choices into a habit.

Favorite Quotes:

• “These habits we develop are kind of like Yoga superpowers.”
• “Women put too much pressure on themselves to do it all.”
• “We need to learn the skill of taking care of ourselves first. It doesn’t come naturally, and we don’t really know how to do it.”
• “There was no choice. I had to learn how to use my time differently and to be able to figure out ways to get all these new systems into place.”
• “There’s always room for improvement and ways to refine, and it’s continually expanding. But we do get to a point where we feel like we’re in charge of our time.”

BIO:

Dana Skoglund is a Certified Yoga Health Coach, Yoga teacher, and mother of two rambunctious young boys. She’s been studying Yoga since 2000 and teaching since 2004, and she has over 1,000 hours of training in the styles of Jivamukti, Anusara, and Sridaiva. Her desires to take her health and well-being into her own hands and to learn how to keep her family healthy led her to Ayurveda in 2011. After implementing daily routines from Ayurveda and noticing the profound impacts they had on her energy and happiness, she began coaching clients into these better body habits in 2013. She aims to inspire others about the importance of health habits in crafting the lives of their dreams. Dana is also deeply passionate about travel, adventure, learning, movement of any kind, and the arts.

Structure vs. Flow

For many of us when we make the switch from a corporate job to working full time as a yogi or Yoga Health Coach we are looking for less structure and more creative time. What we often don’t realize is that creating structure in our day is what allows us that time to be creative. Without structure and routine we are always stuck jumping from task to task that needs our attention and we never get to enjoy those creative moments that really help us get to the next level of teaching and coaching.

Another bonus of structuring your day and getting organized is that when we sit to do one thing – just like in meditation – we will find that time tends to stand still. We end up getting far more accomplished than we ever dreamed possible when we are able to shut out the distractions around us.
Rachel, our Coaching Team Leader shares her top 3 tips for a YHC Mentor to structure their time to experience more creativity, fluidity and an expansion of time.

Top 3 Tips to Structure Your Time for More Creativity

Structuring your time and your resources will reduce the possibility for role creep or overwhelm whether you are applying these tips in a YHC Mentor role or in your own business. They are a boon to the flow of your week and feeling like a rockstar!

1. Use your bookmarks and get your browser aligned with your priorities
2. Use an online scheduling tool
3. Carve out time for office hours

Schedule Regular Time to Get Organized

Carve out 10 minutes today to update your bookmarks and tag the most important documents and guides you are using for your work. Then put a note in your calendar to update your bookmarks once a quarter with your new priorities and goals, because as we know, priorities and projects shift. Get on it – you will be so psyched you did, and will save much time down the road.

Share in the comments below your number one tip to structure YOUR time.