If you’re a yoga aficionado, you may wonder how you could possibly enhance your career with yoga. After all, aren’t they two completely separate things?
Well, yes and no.
Whatever job you have certainly asks of you specific duties that yoga most likely doesn’t. But the thing with yoga is, it goes with you everywhere. And that includes your job.
How You Enhance Your Career with Yoga
Maybe you’re a little baffled now. Unless you have yoga classes available at your job either through a mobile yoga provider or in your company’s gym, you might disagree that yoga goes with you to work.
But here’s the thing.
Whatever stressors present themselves at work – and there seems to never be a shortage – yoga can help you deal with them. Whether it’s breathing your way through anxiety during a stressful meeting or incorporating some of the extensive philosophy in dealing with day-to-day challenges, you’ve maybe never considered just how much yoga can enhance your career.
We’ll take a look at five ways that yoga helps you in your job.
1. Improves Self-Confidence
Unless you came from a strong dance or gymnastics background, you probably remember your first yoga class. You may have felt like a fish out of water.
The poses, the language, the other practitioners. It’s not unusual for many yoga students to talk about the terror of their first class. But there was something about it that brought you back. And over time, you began to understand the practice. As you increased your strength and became familiar with the poses, you built confidence. And soon enough, you were incorporating the breath and philosophy to take obstacles and turn them into opportunities. You built self-awareness that enabled you to look at negative patterns and learned how to respond (vs. react) to situations.
These are invaluable skills in building confidence and believing in yourself. They’re also key to finding success in the workplace as you handle struggles and face the challenges of advancing in your career.
2. Embraces Limitations
We hate to break it to you, but if you’ve ever been told you can do and/or be anything you want, you’ve been misled.
Each of us has limitations. And this is not a bad thing. It’s just reality. Yoga teaches us to recognize and honor these limitations. It doesn’t teach this by telling you to give up and just forget about them. But it does help you to see where your ‘edges’ are and to proceed carefully and modify as needed.
It’s not something you beat yourself up over or try to deny or push away. Instead, you gently embrace that you can’t be the best at everything. And once you understand your limitations, you can more clearly see your strengths and build upon those.
3. Increases Self-Discipline
You’ll often hear yoga instructors say that the hardest part of doing the practice is simply getting to your mat. And it’s often true. You have to find a certain amount of discipline to just show up. But once you do, you quickly remember why you came to the mat.
Staying engaged with the yoga practice requires a physical and mental commitment. This same level of commitment is required to excel in your job. You need to be able to focus on goal-setting, but not lose yourself in the process. You have to be able to strike that balance between effort and ease. And yoga teaches precisely that.
4. Shifts Perspective
Sometimes the chaos of work takes over. Your massive to-do list isn’t going to do itself. You may end up skipping lunch, working late, and spending valuable time in commuting to and from work.
But pausing for even just a few minutes to focus on deep breathing or perhaps getting down on the floor to stretch and breathe can be an amazing antidote to the tension and stress. It helps you to zoom out and change your perspective.
5. Cultivate Patience
Although we mentioned limitations above, it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for growth. Nor are we recommending you don’t embrace possibility and potential.
If you’ve ever had the experience of finally getting a bind in a pose, balancing in a headstand, or even just touching your toes when you never thought you could, you know the importance of patience and honoring your edge. Yoga teaches us that through small steps, perseverance, and patience, you can safely land at your edge and achieve your goals. Even if they don’t look exactly like you’d envisioned.
And this is of tremendous value at your job too.
Ready to Find More Peace at Work Through Yoga?
Yoga helps you understand who you are and how you operate. As such, you just naturally enhance your career with yoga when you take it off the mat and into the workplace.
But if your job keeps you so busy that you can’t find time for yoga, then contact us today. We will bring yoga right to you with our specialized mobile mindfulness services.
Let our trained instructors infuse some peace into your workplace. And get ready to see what a difference it can make in every aspect of your life.
