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Planning 101: A good plan can be flexible and may need to change.   Lord knows mine did.  My plan was to work at Brooks Brothers the summer after college to make a little money and buy enough suits and dress pants to drive out to San Francisco and get a job and then after a year go to graduate school for planning.

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I ended up landing an amazing job in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, skipped graduate school, and lived in my Brooks Brother no-iron button down shirts for years.  Then the housing crisis hit, the market crashed, and banks started closing their doors.  I was fortunate and did not lose my job.  But life was stressful and I wasn't always handling it in the healthiest way.  My stress management tools were xanax, ambien, chardonnay, Body Pump® and zoning out to reruns of The Office.  While I never abused the substances or used them in excess, I realized this was NOT how I wanted to manage my stress and my emotions.  Or in language I know now, this is not a healthy way to self regulate.  

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A major ah-ha moment for me came when Garth Brooks came out of retirement.  A girlfriend and I flew down to Vegas to see him in concert and I distinctly recall the line in one of his songs "I'm much too young to feel this damn old".  Immediately I thought "Oh my God, that's me.  I'm too young to feel this old."  I was 28 years old, my hair was turning gray, I relied on Netflix to lull me to sleep at night and when I did finally succumb to sleep I dreamt of placing trades and excel spreadsheets.  Something had to give and so I began to set a new plan in motion.  

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When people ask how you got from here to there, from banking to teaching yoga, they like the short, sweet, exciting story.  The 'I had a great and promising job in finance but left it all behind to go to India to study yoga' story.  And that's true - but its never that simple.  Big and dramatic life changes are never made quickly.  The actual pulling of the band-aid may appear to be done fast and on a whim but what we don't usually talk about is the months or years of building up to that point.  I went through all the normal stages of change; pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action.  The story I tell is 15% preparation and 85% action.  Real life is way more time in pre-contemplation and contemplation.  And some folks never leave these stages.  Know anyone that has been TALKING about how they're THINKING about DOING that thing for YEARS??

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In 2012 I'd just moved to NYC and was starting to put down new roots when suddenly I realized that was NOT my plan.  I uprooted, went to India, studied yoga, moved back to Cincinnati and started a business bringing yoga, movement, mindfulness and meditation to the workplace.  I wanted to help folks deal with and manage the stresses of life and work in a healthy way, not the happy hour after work or zone out on the couch at night way.  

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Yoga was my primary tool.  My hammer.  And when all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.  

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Then I encountered a situation all the sun salutations and meditation in the world couldn't fix.  A few years ago I found myself weighted under a pile of stressors that put my body and my nervous system into a deep functional freeze state, a shut down.  I'd describe it as feeling like my plate got smaller and it was over flowing.  Sure, I was functioning just fine.  You may never have guessed anything was wrong with me.  But I was merely surviving - I wasn't thriving.  

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I needed more than a hammer - I needed a well stocked tool box.  That is what I set out to acquire.  The tools to self regulate and become self aware.  The tools to identify and release unhealthy patterns.  The tools and to bring more ease, joy, and connection into my life. 

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