Before You Sign Up for Another Breathwork Training
Number eight on my list of things a decade of running my own business taught me was this. You need focus to work for yourself. There are a great many shiny objects out there and every one of them is dressed up as being a busy professional.
Our field is certainly not short of it.
There is always another modality. Another weekend. Another lineage with a slightly different name for the same thing, taught by someone who posts beautifully. And because we are curious people by nature, and because training feels like progress in a way that sitting with your existing clients does not, the certificates stack up.
I am not going to tell you to stop learning. I would be a hypocrite twice over.
What I will offer you is the question I use.
I talk about Just One Thing a lot. It started as a tool for overwhelm, which is where most people meet it. When everything is urgent, pick one thing. Do that. The rest keeps.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that it answers a completely different problem as well.
You are getting on with whatever was on your list. Something appears in your inbox or in your feed. An hour goes by. You have lost the thread of what you were doing and gained forty new items for your list, every one of them generated by the shiny object rather than by your actual work.
So before you click, before you book, before you put the deposit down, hold it up against your Just One Thing.
Does this take forward the thing I have decided to get good at?
That is it. That is the whole test.
Here is how to run it properly, because there is a step people skip.
One. Are you actually clear what your Just One Thing is? Not your list of interests. The one you are building mastery in. If you cannot say it in a sentence, the test will not work, because everything passes a vague test.
Two. Look back over the last month. Can you see how what you did connects to it? Be honest with yourself here, because this is the step that stings.
Two and a half. If the answer is no, is there something you can do about that? Sometimes there genuinely is not, for a season. Knowing that is still worth having.
Three. From now on, hold every new opportunity up against the same question before you say yes.
Focus is not a personality trait. It is a habit built out of asking those questions often enough that they become automatic.
I am not saying close yourself off. Every initiative I have launched started with being open to something new. But all of them stood up to the test when I asked.
The ones that did not stand up to it are the ones I did not do, and I could not now tell you what they were, which is rather the point.
One honest caveat. Sometimes the shiny object is the right call and the test will tell you no. A training that takes you sideways can be exactly what a practice needs after a few years in the same groove. The test is not there to make the decision for you. It is there to make sure you made one, rather than drifting into a weekend in Devon because the photographs were nice.
So. Are you willing to ask yourself the question before the next one comes along?
