How to Support Change & Build Habits
When I stepped onto my mat, I didn’t stress about making yoga classes a part of the kids’ curriculum, nor about training a local yoga practitioner to take over for the rest of the school year. When I sat down that Sunday evening before the start of the school year to prepare my first class, besides feeling extremely nervous, I tried to answer this question from the perspective of our sweet future yogis: “What will we need to experience during the classes so that our practice becomes a habit?” What follows is a personal experience where I applied 3 steps to support habit building during my 2-month volunteering experience with Project Somos
Simplify – I taught the same yoga class, twice a day, for about 7 weeks. Now don’t get me wrong, it was never boring and everyone, including myself, always learnt something new. Why did I choose to teach the same class over and over? So that the kids could experience mastery as well as feeling challenged to learn something new. I even sat in the same spot all the time, on the same mat. Towards the end, the younger ones would sit on my mat saying “I am Corina today” and start taking turns to teach the class themselves.
Consciously engage with the new habit – I was not the authority in the classical term, I was a guide and the kids were the creators of their own yoga classes. Create was the theme of our classes for a long time. It was a nice theme because we first had to really dive into the different meanings of the word create and the sense of power that comes with it. “After five full belly breaths, open your eyes and quietly observe the world you are creating around you”.
Ensure continuity and step away – There was an adult yoga practitioner who attended all of the classes. Though not formally trained in yoga, she had attended a retreat and was regularly practicing on her own. Towards the end of the 7 weeks, we started co-teaching and in the last week she taught alone and I would give her feedback afterwards. You guessed it – she also sat in the same spot, on the same yoga mat when she was guiding the class. She ended up formally teaching yoga for the rest of the school year.
What has been your experience with managing change and building healthy habits?