Left Brain vs. Right Brain

I attended the Business intensive at the conference on Thursday. All of the speakers had something pretty interesting to say about their topic - from marketing advice, to developing a budget, to creating alternative revenue streams. The most interesting part of the day, however, was witnessing the dynamic between the left and right brain perspectives on running a Yoga business.

The day started out with a left brain presentation by Brandon Hartsell, one of the founding members of Sunstone Yoga. Sunstone is a franchise which aims to bring yoga to the masses. Their approach is very business-based. They strive for consistency in classes and consistency in the yoga students' experience when they go to a Sunstone studio. All of the studios teach the same set of classes, each of which has a script with specific poses and specific alignment instructions. Teachers are allowed to bring their personal experience and style to their teaching, but, like a coloring book, they have to "color inside the lines." The idea is that this makes the student's experience about the yoga, and not about the specific teacher from whom they are taking a class. The analogy that Brandon kept coming back to was Starbucks. He asked if every time you went to a Starbucks and got a latte it was made differently, would you keep coming back, and would they be as successful as they are?

This really got some of the right brainers in the room in a twist. "Where is the Yoga in this model", someone asked. The idea put forth was that students come to classes to learn from the teacher's unique and creative style of teaching. They also come for spiritual reasons and will not find it in a "corporate" yoga setting.

All week long I have seen a tension between the "hard core" yoga practiotioners and the folks who came to yoga or do yoga for reasons other than enlightenment. In my opinion we need to get as many people as possible exposed to the benefits of Yoga. If their first taste of yoga is in a studio witout incense or tapestries, then that's OK. Yoga should be about maximizing the inidividual's experience and not the teacher's ego.

The Sunstone folks made it clear that they are not going after the 10% of the population who have already found Yoga. They are after the 90% who are looking for new modalities of fitness and wellness and who may not walk through the doors of a traditional yoga studio. Since they opened their first studio in 2002, they have taught 25,000 different students. Wow.

The day ended with a presentation by Shannon Paige, owner of OmTime. Her business started as retail for Yoga and has grown exponentially in the five years she has been open. She was one of the most passionate and down to earth speakers I have ever seen. What is interesting is that she is definitely a right-brainer but has also built a very successful business. How did she do it? She did enough self-analysis to know her strengths and surrounded herself with talented people who have the strengths she is missing. The trick is that she defers to these people to help make decisions and does not make all of the business decisions based on her creative instincts.

Hmmm..... so who has the right approach? Well I think that depends on one's personality and goals as a studio owner. A Sunstone studio may not ever feed the part of one's soul that is pushing a person towards studio ownership. If that is the case, then even the pre-packaged business knowledge they provide to francise owners will be lost on that person. Since running a Yoga business is hard work and typically has very low margins, studio owners need to be both logical and passionate about what they are doing, whichever approach they take.

Since part of Yoga is about cultivating balance, finding that balance between the left and right side of the brain should be our work in this practice.