5 Reasons to Join our Let's Grow Yoga Challenge
Newsflash! Fall is a time of transition. For many, it is a change of pace. We move from the slow and lazy Summer days to the frenetic busy-ness of parent soccer practice chauffeuring and traffic jams.
Many in the Northeast love the Fall: pumpkin spice everything, football three days/week, cute sweaters and boots, Halloween.
However, with Fall also comes this shadow-like figure looming in the corner… let’s hear it Game of Thrones lovers: Winter. Is. Coming.
What’s one way to beat the impending Winter blues? Move your body. What’s another? Congregate with people you love. Another? Nip your snoozing and isolation habits in the bud before they have time to fully bloom.
There are 18,500 posts on Instagram tagged #fallchallenge.
What’s the deal? Why do so many people do them? Why should you join one? More specifically, why should you join ours?
Built-in Accountability
To join our yoga challenge, you just have to write your name on our board and choose one quality you want to grow through your yoga practice. Seems easy, but it may also seem scary. The moment you announce your intentions for following through, the harder it is to not. This is also a huge motivator for success! A study by Dominican Universityshowed that when you share your goals with others, you are twice as likely to achieve them. Invite accountability into your life. Write your name on our board. You are committing to take as many yoga classes as you can in October for the sake of creating growth in yourself through your yoga practice.
Supportive Yoga Community
The best thing about our yoga studio is the community. Community and accountability go hand-in-hand. In yoga philosophy, a “kula” is a sacred community of people willing to hold each other accountable to what they truly desire. In this challenge, you aren’t competing against each other. We are all on the same team. You’re competing against yourself and the thoughts in your head and the habits you’ve formed throughout a lifetime that keep you stuck. In his book “Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions” John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton says that one major step to achieving your goals is to recruit people who support you in reaching them. He calls these people your “change team”. Look no further. You’ve got us. We are all part of a Change Team looking to grow through yoga.
Form New Habits
There is a lot of research that dictates how many days it takes to form a new habit, ranging from 21 to 254 days. According to Psychology Today, however long it truly takes to form a new habit, the first few days are the most important. Allow us to help you gain some traction. One thing yoga teacher Coby Kozlowskiasks is, do you want to be happy now or later? Sure, snoozing for an extra 9 minutes might make you happier in the moment. But will it actually make you Happy with a capital H?
Positive Reinforcement
Entrepreneur.comsays another asset to accountability is to reward your accomplishments. Celebrate the small steps you are taking for your growth. The Let’s Grow Yoga Challenge is filled with positive reinforcement. Friends cheering you on, collecting points, winning prizes, and perhaps most exciting: fun stickers to track your progress. Who wouldn’t feel satisfied finishing a class and getting to choose between a cupcake, owl, or happy apple sticker to put next to their name?
Learning new skills
There are an infinite amount of lessons you can learn from your yoga practice. The more obvious, like balancing in Crow or getting into a full bind for the first time. But consider these as well:
Learning to go with the flow. Life goes up and down, takes sharp turns and unexpected detours. You can steadily ride all of these with the same steadiness of breath you learn to keep no matter what posture your body is taking.
Learning to truly listen to your body. Let the 60 minutes you are on your mat be a break for your mind and an invitation for your body to speak to you. What does it need?
Learning balance. You need steadiness, intention and focus to maintain balance in tree pose, and in life.
Learning that you have choice. You can choose to move to child’s pose when you’re tired. You can skip Chaturanga when your wrists ache. You have choice, and when you have choice, you have power.
By design, The Let’s Grow Yoga Challenge is meant to help you succeed in making choices now to be Happier later. We’ve built in the accountability, community, and positive reinforcement to help the first 31 days of your new habit be the most influential. And what you can learn from the yoga? Well that’s better than any cupcake sticker I can offer you. Let’s Grow Yoga, together.