Dear Homegrown Yogis:
Each month I send out this email blast, and with it a short letter about what’s happening at the studio, in my life or a small story about yoga and its connection to day-to-day moments. However I skipped writing a letter last month because things were too busy and I had too much needing my attention right then. For the past few months, I’ve also skipped calling my parents as often as I want to talk to them. I’ve skipped reading at night. I’ve skipped going into the studio when no one is there and doing my practice. I’ve skipped washing my hair – but honestly I’ve been skipping that one for years so maybe it’s not fair to include here =) This past Saturday morning though as I was getting started with our teacher training class, I got an email asking me to do something right then. I was about to pause teacher training to go take care of it when I caught myself and stopped. Leading teacher training at that moment was the most important thing to me. That email – it felt urgent because it made my phone bing but really, it wasn’t all that important.
Several years ago I read Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – you know, back when I didn’t skip reading =) In it, he describes a grid of our daily activities: some are important + urgent, some not important but urgent, some not urgent + not important, and some not urgent but important. Check out the graph of it above. He concludes that “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” In that moment when I was about to run out of teacher training, I was about to sacrifice something important for something that was simply urgent.
Writing a letter each month to you is important to me. Not because it creates revenue or because without it, you won’t know what’s happening at the studio. It’s important to me because I want each of you to know something about Homegrown Yoga and the practice of yoga beyond what our schedule is and what events we are planning. Personally, it’s also important to me because it makes me accountable to sit down at least once a month and reflect on what I’m doing and where I’m going with my teaching, my leadership and my life. But it’s not an urgent task – I’ll most definitely hear from people if I don’t update our schedule or if we are out of supplies at the studio. Sitting down and writing… nobody is urging me to do that.
So if I can urge you to do something, here it is: Remember what is important to you and create your own sense of urgency around those things. What I’ve realized over the last few months is that if I leave it to external forces, I stay really really busy handling one urgent matter after another. At the end of the day, though, that’s not what I want: I want to have done something important too.
With love,
Rachel