Episode 125: How to make a change in your business with Laura Kupperman

Major Points:                     1) Making a change in your business is needed if the business is not providing the level of satisfaction that you want.

                                                2) It can be scary to change because it is hard to learn new things, fear of scarcity is common, and/or giving up something that you have invested a lot of time, money, etc. can feel like failing.

                                                3) Following others can be satisfactory or not; it is important to explore what is important for you, what are looking to achieve, and what are your goals.

00:00                                     Hello and welcome to Changing the Face of Yoga - teaching toddlers through golden oldies and very excited to be talking to lots of yoga teachers who will explain their passion for teaching yoga to students with different ages, physical fitness levels, wellness levels, and different goals. They will explain the benefits of yoga for these students and we'll be including teacher tips and pose modifications. I am Stephanie Cunningham of Yoga lightness and I've been teaching over 50s for 10 years. So this area is my passion and the passion of many other yoga teachers that you will be listening to in this series. Thank you so much for listening and let's get started.

00:45                                     This is episode 125 of Changing the Face of Yoga and my guest today is Laura Kupperman. Laura is a long-time career and business coach as well as a certified yoga therapist and she is on the Faculty of Inner Peace Yoga Therapy. Through her coaching, she helps yoga, health and wellness professionals make a bigger impact and grow their income. Laura also runs the popular yoga therapy Facebook group and lives in Boulder, Colorado, where I grew up, where she enjoys just about any outdoor activity. Welcome, Laura. I'm really glad that you were able to come on. To make everything very transparent, Laura was my business coach for a long time. She's really spectacularly good at it.

01:39                                     Oh, thank you. Stephanie. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm really, really happy to be here in talking with you today.

                                                Oh, great. Thanks. Is there anything you want to add to that particular introduction?

01:54                                     Oh, that was just fine. Yeah, thanks.

01:59                                     Laura has agreed to be part of the Yogi support month theme and it is kind of in the businessy arena. But basically it's also just about how you are supporting yourself in life. And the thing I want to talk to Laura about today is, as I said, Laura was my business coach and then she started the Impact group, which was a kind of a mastermind on Facebook and it was for a Yogis, and others who, wanted more in depth discussion and community around making our businesses, financially and personally rewarding. However, Laura decided not to go forward with that, after about a year or so. Laura and I just want to talk about that because I have done that too, where I took a total different view of things. And how do you come to that point where you think, hmm, I think this is not what I should be doing. So if you could start off Laura with your own experience about the Impact Circle or anything else really. I just happened to know about that one just to talk people through how you make a change.

03:27                                     Sure., I'm really glad that this is something you wanted to talk about today because I don't think we talk about it enough. How we course correct or how we change course completely or even leap onto another path when we've invested a certain amount of our energy and resources, you know, our time or blood or sweat or tears or money. so let's see. So the impact circle, right? I had it for about a year and it was a membership community, which I really was excited about and I put a lot of effort into it.

                                                It's still kind of trickling out, so there's still some people in there, but basically there were a few different components. There was a really super supportive small Facebook community. There was a bunch of online resources that people had access to. And then people could reach out to me by email if they had a business question and I would respond to them. And I put a lot of energy into thinking this through on the front end, making sure that you know, the interface looked great and everything was really user friendly on my website and I even experimented with not having the community group in Facebook with using a different platform. I played around with it and I got some Beta testers in there. You may have been one of those early Beta testers, I think too Steph. I put a lot of energy into this and it was really interesting because I was super excited about it.

                                                By the time I launched I almost felt like I had some fatigue because that pre- launch phase was significant. And so you know that that's one thing for people who are listening to kind of think about. So many of us when we put something out into the world wanting it to be perfect, we want it to be of the highest quality and sometimes that's merited and it's justified and you really want everything to reflect really highly. You want it to be at a certain quality and so you wait, you wait until you feel like it's perfected. But more often it makes more sense to put it out there before you're comfortable, before you feel like it's perfected so that you can start to get feedback.

                                                 And I did go ahead and get some Beta testers in there to get feedback on it. However I should have put it out even sooner. Yeah. If you're putting out an online course program, you need to imagine like you're a software company where you know you're going to be putting it out there with some bugs and you just know that, you know, on the fly you will adapt and you'll upgrade and you'll refine. So that was, that was the first part. Like by the time I got to the starting line, it felt like it had been a year. It wasn't quite that long, but it was a long time sort of germinating in my head. It was a long time trying to figure out the best way to do it.

                                                And I had been putting out so much energy without getting anything in return. And I don't even just mean financially, but the reward of seeing the people in the group, I'm benefiting from it. It was kind of working in isolation. That was one piece of it. and the other piece that goes along with that is that this whole perfection thing is like what is the price point. If someone is spending $10,000 on something, you do want the quality to be insanely high, right? Like if someone is buying something that's a really big investment, you want it to be an amazing experience for them. The Impact Circle lesson, that thing in terms of the price point, the price point, depending on whether or not you're doing a six month membership or a year membership, like the most someone would have paid was between 450 and $500.

08:17                                     That would have been for a full year.

08:19                                     For a full year. Yep. And so, you know, in order for me to, to justify the amount of energy and work I was putting into it, I probably should have charged more. That was all the front loading that I did and then the group started. And the group was really lovely. I mean, there were super supportive people in the Facebook group. There were people reaching out to me with business questions by email, which is what I had envisioned.

                                                At a certain point. I came to this huge realization, which was people were not getting the type of results and benefits that I wanted and they may have gotten the type of results and benefits that they wanted. A really interesting conundrum because it's like, you know what, if you're doing some good in the world but you have a bigger vision for yourself or a different scope or level of impact that you want to be making . While there were people who were engaged and who were benefiting. I think especially from the one-on-one email coaching conversations, I wanted to see people making huge leaps in their business. I know because I do work with people one on one, I know that when I work with someone one on one, that's the kind of experience someone typically gets and people just weren't getting it in this structure hardly. I think it's because they weren't as invested. You know, my one on one coaching is definitely a higher price point and if you're paying a couple hundred dollars for something, your level of commitment is not the same as if you're paying thousands of dollars for something.

10:31                                     Correct.

10:33                                     And that's related to everyone who's listening. I hope people remember that as they evaluate how much they're charging for something. If you're not charging enough, people aren't going to be as committed. I think many of us have this, soft spot in our hearts. Like I want to serve everybody, so therefore I should make the price low. So it's accessible to everybody. And then what you get are people who are totally fine missing a session with you or missing a group class or never even watching your online program because there's no pain associated with not participating. They lost $100, not $1,000 or $10,000. Right?

                                                So that was the other piece of it for me. I know from experience I can help people, transform their business, have a different relationship with it, reach more people, reach people more deeply, refine their business model. All these things that people weren't getting, even though there was great camaraderie, and I think they were grateful for the support I could give them. It just wasn't going to happen in this structure. Those were, I think the two big factors that ultimately made this less of an appealing offering for me. I already felt a little drained by the time I started and then I wasn't getting the kind of upside I needed in terms of the impact I wanted to make and in terms of the financial gain for me.

                                                What my business mentor said: he's like, you really need like 500 people in a membership site that's sort of your minimum that you want to shoot for. And I think I had, I don't even remember - 50 something. It was a very sweet group of people in there. Everyone in there was just phenomenal, really sort of lovely, high calibre, bright, engaged, supportive person. But it wasn't doing what I had imagined in my mind and I wasn't prepared to do what it would take to get 500 people in there.

13:11                                     Yeah, that's a lot. It's a lot to manage. I mean that's a huge undertaking. I would just add my own, experience. I was a yoga teacher (I still am a yoga teacher, but I'm not teaching) for about 10 years and I was in the over 50s arena. And although I love yoga and I loved working with the students, I never felt very good at it. And I'm probably am an okay Yoga teacher, I'm not horrid and I'm very well trained in safety and that kind of thing for that age group. I did the thing where I had an online course and Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. So I did the whole thing, but I never felt personally successful.

                                                And this is probably when I came to Laura and talked about a business coach. I don't think that she really knew she was supposed to make me feel successful. I'd been with her, I don't know, eight, nine, 10 months and all of a sudden she said why don't you do podcasts because what you want is more people to know about you. Tthat's interesting. And so I did and I just got this tremendous, in comparison to my yoga classes, response to what I was trying to do.

                                                 And that's when I knew that given my kind of background and outlook on life, I need to be working on a more general basis instead of a very specific basis with individual students. And I miss my students. I really do. I still am in contact with some of them, but I can't tell you how much the podcast is different to me and how I feel about it. And that's why I changed because quite frankly, the finances are not on the side of the podcast. I made a lot more money teaching and I know that other people don't have that opportunity. But I can do that because I have other sources of income. But I just wanted to say sometimes, even if you really love what you think you should be doing, but it just simply isn't giving you what you need, that's maybe another reason to change.

15:58                                     I loved that you brought that up. And it's funny because right before we spoke I was working on some copy for an email I'm sending out and I was using this metaphor about how when our business model doesn't suit us anymore. It's like wearing a pair of shoes that are a size too small and they might be gorgeous shoes and maybe you paid a lot of money for those shoes so you feel very invested. No, I couldn't possibly get rid of them. But ultimately it feels like we're forcing it. Eventually it can literally cause pain and distress. You know, minimally we start to feel a little burnt out or we're not as enthusiastic about meeting our clients or whatever the endeavour is. and it can even lead to, depending on how deep you are into this, like it can lead to physical disease or illness.

                                                And what is so lovely about the courage that you showed in making a really big course correction with your business Stephanie, is that faith that the well is infinite. It's not like we live in a world where we are allocated a really small amount of resources and we have to hold onto them for dear life because we fear that if we don't hold onto this opportunity, there will never be more opportunities for us.

17:44                                     I think that's subconsciously where some of us can come from. I know I certainly been in that place where you feel like I've worked so hard to (whatever it might be) get this teacher training up and running, get this course up and running at the hospital. I'm being really well compensated for doing certain endeavours. We all need to have faith that if something doesn't suit us anymore, if it's like the shoes we have outgrown. Then you know, we need to just trust in our own capacity and skills and know that there's going to be more opportunities than the opportunities we're letting go of. There's probably someone much better suited in our community or in the world to pick up the mantle and that we will find a whole new way to serve, to be happy to prosper if we really just trust that there's more available for us out there.

18:52                                     I think that's important because it's scary I think to change. I did this for 10 years and I can't tell you the money I've spent on training to do it. But it just wasn't right for me. I think that so many of us love yoga for what it does for ourselves and what we've seen in other people. I'm not sure that we all should go into the yoga teaching, yoga therapy road and that there may be other ways that you can serve the Yoga community. And I feel that I am serving a niche of the yoga community in a way. It seems like we just kind of follow the crowd and maybe you just aren't (you in the generic, not you, Laura) maybe you just need to think about what am I like, what do I love, how can I take my skills, my passion, my purpose into this arena? What is the best way for me? To be a little creative about that, I think

20:12                                     I mean, you know, there are enough people in the world, you know, teaching the five-thirty power Vinyasa class at the most popular studio in town. I no longer teach group classes and feel like my focus within the world of yoga therapy is for people who've been diagnosed with cancer. And after I had trained a certain number of people, I felt like, great, they can teach those classes in my community or in other cities.

                                                And really what I noticed, because part of my teacher training, there was a business mentoring component. So people wouldn't just learn how to safely work with people who had cancer, but they knew how to go talk to people at their cancer center and get a class started. They knew how to market the class. And what I realized was, oh, this is what people need even more than the yoga skills is the business skills. And I had already been coaching for so long that I just decided, you know what, I'm just going to go all in with helping other health and wellness professionals with their business and narrow down the scope of my coaching practice. A lot of times we might feel like when we narrow down, we're going to be closing off opportunities or shutting down that funnel of potential income. And I think if you follow your heart, like what you are saying and get focus, usually the opposite is true. We get more opportunities and we're so much happier.

22:04                                     Yes. I think that's important too.

22:07                                     It is the most important. It is. I've changed my tune on this too over the years. Life is too short to finish reading a book you don't love. So there's like two kinds of people in the world, those who finish what they started no matter what. I used to be one of those, and in fact there'll be people out there who will not agree with what I'm saying. But my husband and I went to go see the movie, called Captain Marvel along with Brie Larson that had gotten great reviews and so many people are raving about, and you know, we have some younger nieces who live in Boulder and they were raving about it. We went to see this movie. In literally 10 minutes in, we both looked at each other- you want to leave now. Because I mean life isn't a dress rehearsal. We all know this, but like our life is now, your businesses is now. If you're not feeling it anymore, it is a relief to shed whatever's no longer serving you and bringing you joy.

23:24                                     I was very torn about not teaching anymore, but there was such a tremendous relief because I felt like such a failure. I didn't feel successful doing it. And it was just a relief not to put that mantle on me any longer. And to then go to the podcast and have people saying, Oh, you know, this, I really love hearing about this and it made me feel connected and all kinds of really, really positive things. And I thought, Whoa, this is where I need to be.

24:04                                     I love that. Also it can become a big part of our identity. I had coaching clients who really have spent years ruminating over should I give up this particular class, or should I stop working with this particular student or let go of this opportunity because there's such a heart connection with our students. And that's a totally a real reason why we might drag our feet. and it also can be a really big part of our identity.

                                                I know for me, for a really long time here in Boulder, I was the yoga for cancer person. I also specialize in yoga for fertility enhancement and just got and had a really great partnership with our local fertility center, which is like an offshoot of a huge fertility center in Denver and south of Denver. That's really the number one fertility center in the country, if not the world. And that can be kind of an ego boost, not necessarily in a positive way, but like all these people contacting you and seeking you out and you're helping them and it becomes a part of your identity. That's hard to let go of. It feels like, oh, I belong. People trust me. They come to me as a reliable resource.

                                                There might be other things that I'm not too proud to say like, oh, people like me. It's something like that that seems really silly. That can be just below the surface of who would I be if I wasn't doing this anymore? Which can be heavy sometimes and it can take you months to make peace with that. Like, who am I if I'm not doing my yoga for seniors training anymore and who you are is this amazing podcast host.

26:15                                     I was lucky that way because I was doing both. And it was a very stark comparison about, and I'm not saying that my students didn't say, Gee, thanks. That was a great class. I really loved it. They were, they were saying that, but it was inside me not thinking that I was doing a good job. Actually, you know what, I wasn't, because with all of my podcasts and people talking about what they do, I realized that I had some serious deficits looking back on my teaching. And so I was right to think I wasn't. I'm probably not as successful at podcasting as I think I am. But it certainly is more satisfying to me to do that. And that I think maybe that's the key. Are you really satisfied with it? And if you're not, what do you do with that?

27:19                                     Yes. And that's something I always encourage my coaching clients to have. And maybe we even did this when we worked together,? Like what is your litmus test for saying yes to an opportunity and you know, satisfaction is sort of, that's like an intuitive feeling. Like yes, I know I'm totally satisfied, but sometimes when you're evaluating opportunities in advance, you're not sure if you'll be satisfied . And we each have to know - is there an opportunity here for me too?

                                                Whatever it might be, to learn something, to have fun, to make some good connections, to make some good money, whatever those things are for you. Just know what they are. And a lot of times I think people will be shocked once they have this litmus test in place. If you go back and review some of the things you've said yes to that you wish you had said no to, it'll be so clear , oh my gosh, why in the world would I have said yes to that? That was such a clear no, or why did I hang onto it for so long? It was such a clear no.

28:36                                     I think really the purpose of this podcast is to say it's okay to change. It is scary. It is hard, I can't tell you how the technology has defeated me on many occasions. But if there's just a basic unease there for whatever reason, I think that needs to be delved into.

29:14                                     I agree. Absolutely. And if, you know, and if you resist that, that needs to be dealt with too. My experience is that a lot of times it is coming from a place of scarcity. Like I can't even entertain the possibility of making a change because, you know, I have something now. If I let go of this, I might have nothing.

29:45                                     I'm so glad you wanted to talk about this stuff. I think, I hope it gives people that sense of permission or at least permission to explore and evaluate if they're satisfied, if they're happy and are they making the best contribution, the contribution they want to be making, whatever that means to them. and if not to just really trust that there's someone else out there to pick up the mantle and make that contribution while you step into the next chapter.

30:25                                     And I'd like to say it's not going to be easy and it's going to be hard. Anything new is hard because you don't know the rules yet. You don't know where your boundaries. But, yeah, I think though that it is important and I think some ways the yoga industry, not the individual yoga person, but the yoga industry is very much about churning out lots and lots of yoga teachers and having them all do pretty much the same thing. And that might be fine. That might be something you really love

30:25                                     Sorry, we had technical difficulties at the very end of this podcast. So added a clip thanking Laura for her contribution to this podcast. Laura gave some very valuable information for making changes and I am very grateful for her participation in this podcast. Hope you enjoyed it.

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