How Yoga Boosts Confidence
I've been teaching twice-weekly yoga classes for a group of students in Round Rock ISD since the start of this school year. This week we changed up our routine and had a class just for the girls, and we had a really interesting discussion that I'd like to share with you. My intention for the class was to show the girls how consistent yoga practice can help them find their self-confidence, self-worth, and self-respect. We started with a journaling exercise where I asked them to draw or write about their favorite activity.
They journaled about how they enjoy spending time with friends and family, pets, their love of dancing, music, etc. I asked them to reflect on how they FEEL when they do this favorite activity, and in their own ways they communicated that they feel self-assured, confident, content, and they don't worry about what anyone else thinks about them.
I told them that THAT feeling is how I'd like for them to feel ALL the time. And that same feeling of confidence, self-assuredness, and contentedness can be practiced and cultivated in our yoga classes.
I was about to mentally pat myself on the back for a job well done, when one of the staff members (who herself practices yoga regularly) asked me HOW yoga does that. She explained that she had felt that shift to being more tuned in to herself and more self-confident, but she didn't really know HOW it happened.
Well, good question. And off the top of my head, I really didn't have a good answer. Here's what I came up with...
When we first start practicing yoga, we're "in our heads." We worry that our yoga poses look dorky. We worry that everyone else in class is mentally making fun of our sorry attempts at the yoga poses. Of course, in reality everyone is so focused on their own practice that they don't notice what anyone else is doing.
And then after some period of consistent practice (with a good teacher who regularly cues the students to tune into the details of how their bodies are feeling), how our poses LOOK suddenly becomes irrelevant. We don't care what anybody thinks of our poses because we're confident about how our poses FEEL.
We let go of what we THINK we know in our minds because we are confident about what we FEEL in our bodies.
And somehow, this confidence in what we feel, this inner knowledge, translates off our mats and into our regular lives. Suddenly our preoccupation with image and what everybody thinks just falls away. We honor ourselves and our truths, and we honor our friends and acquaintances and their truths. We're less fearful. We're more confident.
That's my best explanation. I'm sure there must be a more scientific reason for this magical shift that happens when people practice yoga regularly. You may even have a better explanation than mine.
I would really love to hear from you on this. Have you experienced this kind of transformation since you began practicing yoga? What exactly have you noticed? Can you put your finger on how it happened? Please post your thoughts where ever it's most convenient for you - in the Comments section below or on our Facebook post.
Big hugs, Zelinda
P.S. We'd be more than happy to bring yoga to your work, club, school, or event! For more information please visit our Yoga at Work page or contact us via email or phone (512-944-0426).
And if you enjoyed this post please share it with your friends via the links below. :)
4 Weeks to Great Self Care!
These days everyone seems to be doing a cleanse, a detox, a bootcamp, or some sort of intense program to improve their health. I think that's wonderful, and I wish I had the time to invest in such a thing, but the fact is that I just don't. Between running the studio, teaching classes, and caring for my family, I really don't have any extra time left over to prepare special foods for myself or drive someplace to work out every day.
So I came up with the idea of this 4 Weeks to Great Self Care program that's a simple way to slowly and gently ramp up my wellness. And yours too, if you'd like!
Here's the plan. Each of the four weeks I'll send you a Self-Care Tracking Sheet. The first week we'll focus on getting adequate, good quality sleep. The reason we'll focus on sleep first is that it affects so many areas of our lives. Inadequate sleep causes low energy, foggy brain, cravings, poor management of stress, weight gain, etc. The list really goes on and on. Sleep is non-negotiable. So our first week we'll focus only on getting good sleep.
We'll share our little victories and also our short-comings and provide encouragement to each other in a private Facebook Group. And the Group also serves as a built-in accountability, which is key in developing new healthy self-care habits.
In the second week I'll send you a Tracker Sheet for water consumption. Everyone knows we need at least 8 glasses of water per day for proper hydration, circulation, and elimination of wastes and toxins from the body. So in Week 2 we'll continue focusing on good sleep and add water as our next self-care goal.
Once you set up healthy habits of sleep and water, you'll feel energized enough to commit to daily activity and we'll focus on making that a new healthy habit. Week 3's Tracking Sheet will help you monitor your level of activity, in addition to sleep and water consumption.
In Week 4 we'll take the first baby step in improving our eating habits, each person deciding for him or herself what aspect of nutrition to focus on first.
When the four weeks are complete, we will all be feeling better and probably looking better, too! You can continue using your Tracking Sheets to maintain your self-care goals and I'll provide the framework for you to create new self-care habits for yourself.
Does this sound like a helpful program for you? Do you want to join me in slow-playing your way to consistent self-care?
Week 1 will kick off on Monday, April 21st. Click here if you're interested in joining our 4 Self Care Facebook Group. I'll post the Week 1 Self-Care Tracker on Sunday, April 20th so that you can print it out and get started!
If you're interested in doing the program on your own (without Facebook), just email us and we'll send you the tracking sheets each of the four Sundays starting April 20th.
Feel free to invite your friends to join using the share links below! We're looking forward to getting started!
XO, Zelinda