Reflection: One Year of Formation
Hi! My goodness. The last time I penned one of these was the morning we decided to close for Covid. And here we are… a year since we opened and ohmigosh what! a! year! Before I dig into what this year has looked like for me on a personal level, I want to first encourage you to get a cuppa something because this is a long one.
Firstly, I wanna holla out to you as our community and to our bad-ass team because it’s you all who have made this journey what it is and worth every hard moment.
Thank you for your support. For buying classes. For posting on IG. For writing that five star Google review. For subscribing to our digital platform just to support even though I know some of you hate working out at home (ha!) For bringing your friends. For telling people who doubt themselves that they can do it. Thank you.
To Dan, Hanna May, Hannah, Lyle, Maddi, Mikaela, Shae, Shai, Steph, you’re all the bomb dot com and you have added so much richness and beauty to this journey. To my number one, Roman, I know we mostly say you couldn’t do this without me but you know I couldn’t do this without you.
Are you caffeinating / hydrating? Ok, read on.
When I think back to this time last year I was a ball of excitement and stress. Roman and I put all of ourselves into Formation. It was an intense year of reviewing documents and budgets, brainstorming over dinner, washing my hair extra just because I get good shower ideas and all of our effort coming to life the day we opened. At 1PM the afternoon of our first class, the lockers were still in the middle of the Living Room unassembled and the furniture wasn’t placed (third photo above). Our construction company (the worst and yes I’m salty) was so disorganized that they had people SAWING wood for the door frames in the bathroom as minutes before clients were going to arrive. My mother is a sweet, sweet angel and was literally following this guy with a vacuum and cleaning up sawdust as clients were walking in for their first class! A friend caught my eye as I briskly walked out of the bathroom and she probably saw that I was pissed (I couldn’t get the sawdust out from the edges of the freshly unwrapped mirror frame. I could feel her communicating “it’ll be ok” with her smile. It was a freakin’ whirlwind.
But here we are, eight-ish months in operation. A whole lotta lessons and a whole lotta growth for both the business and for me as a person.
There’s lots of practical things I learned from this year of entrepreneurship, like white hand towels are a bad idea because even though they’re cheaper, they stain with makeup. And that our ideal studio temperature is between 17.5 and 19.5 degrees — that sounds chilly but one song into class you are sweating. But what I want to share with you today are a few of the biggest lessons this year of business has brought my attention to… and I don’t think any of these are checked off my list, I think I’ll always have to be actively working on them.
The Basics of Health
Ironically, my first five months of Formation we’re probably the hardest on my physical wellbeing. I was still working my full-time office job with Tourism Vancouver, traveling for business trips and hosting client dinners all while balancing the 6:30AM opens and then spending almost every evening at the studio. I don’t think Roman and I took an actual day off until the holidays (yup that’s him napping on the couch above). I was sick with the flu literally every month. These days society does not accept a runny nose out in public but at the time I was wearing myself out real hard. While I love a suck-it-up mentality, it really took a toll on my headspace in addition to my body. One of the blessings of the first few weeks of our Covid lockdown was I was able to recover from this burnout and it wasn’t until this time that I could see the damage I was doing to myself. It’s easy to get caught up but now that I’ve had space from that moment, I hope to never put myself in that physical state again.
A Scarcity Vs. Abundance Mindset
The physical element really played into my mindset as I mentioned above. When I was sick and a slave to my intense schedule, I was consumed with a scarcity mindset. I remember feeling stressed about going to sleep every night because I never felt like I would be able to get enough. And while many of us don’t have the same intensity of go-go-go these days, a scarcity mindset popped up for me again in June when we were back to operations. I was always worried about class numbers and financials. But the thing I learned, and the element that I think I will need to continue to work on, is accepting the situation. Whether I feel like there is enough this, or enough that, it is what it is. And my decisions can either come from a place of fear and scarcity or I can accept exactly where we’re at and make a decision from a place of faith, creativity and abundance. This is hard for me to do, because I can easily spiral into worry in my own head, but Roman is so good at being neutral and can help me to reframe situations that put me down an unproductive mental path. If you don’t have a Roman in your life to do that for you, Ekhart Tolle discusses this concept in his book A New Earth and I loved how it was delivered there too.
Blinders Up + Make My Own Path
Sometimes I look at someone else or another business in my industry and I feel good about myself and other times it makes me feel like shit. But really, even if I have a temporary moment of satisfaction, doing either is useless. I have to remind myself that looking at how others are doing makes no difference to my path. It doesn’t change where I am or where I’m going. I try my best to cut out the IG creeping, silence the noise and know that I’m on my own path. And that’s what’s right for me. I think this is something a lot of people struggle with — especially with social media and meaningless vanity metrics. I invite you to join me in saying eff it to whatever other people are doing. Send them love and cheer them on from your own lane then put your blinders on, keep your head down and put in the work so you can walk as far down the path you’re destined to. Maybe I’m saying that to you, maybe I’m saying it to remind myself.
Here’s to one year. Thousands of new clients through our doors, many dollars donated to local charities, our business surviving a pandemic, launching a new digital studio, making a ton of mistakes, learning valuable lessons, dripping many, many beads of sweat, personal growth, so many high-fives, and now so many air hugs.
LOTS OF LOVE AND GRATITUDE
Saschie