Have you ever fallen into this trap? I know you’ve heard me talk about how as healers we have a hard time charging for our services, but there is another trap we easily fall into similar to this: OVERGIVING. Meaning, you are offering way more than you’re potentially charging for. This often comes from a place of insecurity, which is why showing up as your authentic self is so important.
Let’s explore:
🔹Overgiving can lead to feelings of resentment, depletion, and burnout.
🔹Setting boundaries and stating pure desires can help prevent over-giving.
🔹Focusing on quality over quantity is important in all areas of life.
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#327 – How to Earn Your First $$$ Teaching Yoga with Matilde Wergeland
#323 – Creating a Niche Brand as a Yoga Teacher with Yogi Bryan
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Transcript:
Brett:
Are you over giving? If you’re a yoga teacher, are you over giving to your students? If you’re a part of a family or caretaking others are in a partnership or a marriage, like, are you over giving in that situation? Friends, this is so easy actually to figure out. If you feel resentful or depleted or unhappy,
after doing something, then yes, you are over giving. Our goal is that we want you to be in what I call in Yoga for Self Mastery, your goddess of fun and light energy. Meaning your cup runneth over with joy, not that you feel depleted and resentful and burned out. And over giving is just such a common
that we can slip into that it actually just feels normal. Like it feels like our life is full of these have to’s. Like I have to do this. I have to, you know, cook dinner for everyone. I have to do everyone’s laundry. I have to, you know, have a totally new yoga sequence every week to razzle dazzle all my students with. And what I wanted to do in today’s episode is just unpack and shine the light on some of the ways that I see people in our community, and myself included, overgiving. So whether you’re a yoga teacher or yoga student, I think you’re going to resonate with all the different things that I weave in here. Let’s start with social media. I know so many yoga teachers feel this pressure to be constantly posting on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and Pinterest and all the different social channels. And they give so much free content because they think…
that that’s what a good yoga teacher does in order to gain a devoted following and to have a successful business. Now, do not get me wrong, in order for people to buy from you, they need to know you a little bit. You’re gonna need to have a video, a resource, some way that they can connect with you and get to know you before they buy, especially if you have an online business, because they probably don’t know you in person. But this treadmill,
that you or we put ourselves on to constantly be creating new things is not necessary. It’s not because well, there’s a lot of reasons why and there’s a lot of ideas I can give you on how to kind of counteract this. But first of all, I want you to just breathe a huge sigh of relief because I think so much of the yoga, this is going to turn into a business podcast, so much of
where business is headed is more towards paid traffic these days, meaning that you’re going to have to pay to run an ad to attract your ideal yoga student rather than them happening to find you through some sort of social platform or algorithm. Why? Because all of the social landscapes are extremely oversaturated. And you know, when I started in this industry 10, 12 years ago, they weren’t.
So it was actually much easier to grow by the consistency approach of like, I’m gonna post consistently and I’m gonna give consistent value. And these are still good pillars to have in your business, give value. But I see so many people doing way more than is necessary and not thinking strategically about like easier ways that you could acquire your ideal client or your ideal student. For example, running a Facebook ad on $5 a day.
that goes to one video of you, so you only have to create one video of you talking about what’s unique about you and your methodology and what you happen to sell, and then having them book a call from there, for example.
This is so much more direct, this is so much more efficient, and it saves you so much time. Now your time’s gonna be spent a little bit differently. You might have to make a bunch of different ad copy variations. You might have to make some different ad images. You might have to experiment with the ideal thing to send people to. Maybe you try three different videos, or you have a PDF download, or something like that. But you could create all of that in a span of a couple weeks. And what I see so many yoga teachers do instead,
Instead of tinkering and tweaking with those few assets that you need for a really great paid customer acquisition experience, they end up on this hamster wheel, nonstop treadmill of creating all this stuff for social media that’s just throwaway content that they use once and then never use again. And it’s just this never -ending treadmill of, instead of just creating five really interesting ad images and tweaking and experimenting with that,
for three or four months, they’re creating six pieces of content every week that just immediately get lost in the feed. So I really invite you to work smarter, not harder. And then, of course, if you want to pick one platform to create content on so people can get to know you if they want to check you out there, or, I mean, so controversial, you can just not be on social media. You can just have a website.
or a landing page and have people check you out that way.
Bottom line, stop over giving with free content. Just give your client or your students or your ideal prospects the content they need, which could be very minimal, to make a decision about whether they want to take the next step with you. So that content should be very high quality. It should be very impressive. But you don’t need a lot of it. And the thing here, too, that I want you to realize is this is actually doing a huge favor to your students. We live in the information age.
People are so busy, we are bombarded with more information than our great -great grandparents were in their entire lifetime each day. Your students are like seeing so much on YouTube, so much on Instagram. They kind of have, you know, like that all over the place brain where they really just need the right teacher who can take them deep and to discern who that is. And that you can do through powerful branding, messaging, and marketing, not by creating a zillion pieces of content that are just gonna get buried in the algorithm.
Anyway, especially if you’re not that large an account.
So do you need free content as part of your business? Absolutely. But you only need, you know, maybe less than five pieces of strategic free content. And to use paid ads, you do not need like this entire, you know, I just see people so tired of the YouTube, the Instagram, all the things. Now, if one of these platforms brings you joy and you enjoy spending time on it, you know, for sure, you can, I’m not saying you can’t make content, but I would also really recommend reposting your content.
So, you know, at least half of your account or at least half of what you’re posting should be reposts, meaning taking things that performed well, that you posted in the past and using them again. Again, try to reduce your output by 50 % or more. This is going to free up time when you stop over giving and being on the treadmill. It opens up time and space for you to think more creatively and strategically about what you want to offer, what you want to give.
and how you can really communicate more effectively with your ideal student or client.
Let’s leave yoga teacher world for a moment. We’ll come back, but just for any more like students who are listening and talk about ways that you may be over giving in your home. Are you a perfectionist when it comes to how your house needs to be or look and it’s keeping you on this constant treadmill of cleaning or looking after, you know, other things or other people. Have you stated a pure desire for help?
recently. This is something we work on a lot in Yoga for Self Mastery. Asking for help, not in the form of complaining, like I’m the one who always does this, can you do this? But actually being in your goddess of fun and light energy, so you’re lit up and your cup is overflowing with joy and happiness and contentment. This is what people around you who love you crave the most from you is to see you in that lit up, like you in your authentic frequency, you as unique you, vibrant and beautiful, 10 out of 10.
Be in that state, which requires a lot of self care, and then say what you desire. Like, I would love a clean kitchen, or I would love four hours to do yoga this weekend. And just put it out there, and you’re gonna be surprised. It might take some time, but your family’s gonna start responding to you differently when you state a pure desire. I talk about this in my book, Yoga Life.
Chapter two, you want to go there in that book if this is something you’re interested in because I talk about these three skills. And like a classic example I use and it’s written in the book is with my kids, I don’t say, you know, clean up, clean your table, you know, put your, put your plate on the counter. Sometimes I do. But what I try to do is I’d say, I try to be in my goddess of fun and light energy, feeling good, feeling embodied, feeling juicy, smiling and telling them I.
would love this table to be cleared. I would love this table to have nothing on it. And then my boys get excited. They’re like, OK, OK. And sometimes they don’t. But most of the time, they sense that I’m not trying to control them, but that I’m expressing up your desire. And the more you can just get in the habit of expressing desires for things to get done that you don’t want to do, I don’t want to clean up the table. I maybe sometimes don’t want to clean the kitchen.
I don’t want to look after everyone on Sunday afternoon and entertain them. I want time alone to maybe do somatic yoga or conscious grieving ritual or who knows what. To express that, you know, if you don’t express it, the need is not going to get met and you’re going to keep over giving and feeling depleted. So I invite you to think about where are you over giving or doing things, to put it another way, doing things you don’t want to be doing in your home. Like maybe you hate the laundry. This was true with one of my YSM.
you know, participants slash coaching clients. She was doing her adult children’s laundry. And I was like, have you expressed the pure desire to your family? Like I would love, you know, for the laundry room to just be empty and clean or, you know, for, for, for like to not be a part of this. Sometimes you never know. Like other people in your family might have creative solutions. Like your partner might be like, I saw like there’s this laundry service we use at work. Like they also do home calls. Maybe they could come pick up the laundry, right?
And maybe that won’t happen, in which case you can just let the balls drop. You can just stop doing the laundry and see what will happen, right? You can just stop, stop doing the laundry, see what will happen. Probably no one will pitch in and help and your laundry room will slowly start overflowing and overflowing and overflowing more. And you’ll need it, it will be uncomfortable in your body to watch this happen because you want your laundry room clean if you’re like me and you want things put away and you want things in its place.
But this is where your yoga practice is so relevant and comes in, because it’s like, can you expand your nervous system capacity to be with the discomfort of a really messy laundry room? And can you expand your nervous system capacity to be in the uncertainty of how this laundry is going to get done and relinquish control, which is the third skill in yoga for self -mastery, relinquish control? And sometimes, for other people in your household, things just really need to be an eyesore.
or like they need to wake up and realize they have no clean underwear at all before they then are like, wow, I guess I better do go some laundry and walk into like the Niagara Falls of laundry that is your laundry room overflowing and do it themselves. There needs to be some natural consequences. The problem is most of us over givers, we never allow those natural consequences to take shape around us because we just compulsively over give.
or because our nervous system capacity is actually not strong enough or wide enough or big enough to handle the uncertainty of like how something’s going to get done or to just let some balls drop. But in order for patterns to start happening differently or to wake up other people in your home, you need to let the balls drop and then soothe yourself, right? When you see that laundry room overflowing, soothe yourself, put your hands on your body again.
A lot of you listening to this podcast know how to do this in a Kundalini Kriya, know how to do this on the yoga mat, but you don’t know how to do it in your life, like out in the wild. And that’s exactly what the Yoga for Self -Mastery course is designed for. So I just want you to think about like what balls can you let drop and see what natural consequences emerge. And yes, it’s going to be difficult. Yes, you’re going to need to use like all your, you know,
breathing regulations bag of tricks to not jump in and fix, right? And where can you start stating more pure desires from your goddess of fun and light, happy energy, right? When you state desires from like bad energy, it doesn’t work. You have to be happy and radiant and unattached to the outcome of what’s gonna happen, but just state a pure desire. And people can tell.
when you have an attachment to an outcome and when they don’t, even if you think my family’s not energetic or my roommates aren’t woo -woo and into this stuff, people can tell we are all energetic beings. When I say to desire it, but I’m unattached to the outcome within me, my husband can tell the difference than when I’m clenching and have this vice grip control over what I’m expressing and I really, really want it to be done.
and he responds so much better because intimacy and control are opposites. That’s another key part of the YSM course. He responds so much better when he can tell that I’m unattached, right? Because that inspires him to want to be my hero and step in and help. Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about the home life. Let’s shift back to yoga teacher world now.
and talk about membership sites and over giving to your clients in your programs and products. And this came up because I had an absolutely amazing 200 hour graduate come on the show. And I don’t know if her episode will have aired at the time you’re listening to this one, but she, from the sound of it, she’s very successful, but she was telling me about her membership site.
And it sounded like she was exhausted creating so much content. And to back up a step, I would really advise all of you to not create a membership site until you’ve sold out or sold a couple yoga courses and are really familiar with like how to do that whole selling cycle and are really intimate with what your ideal student or client wants from you before.
putting together a membership site because a membership site, my friends, is like a marriage. It’s like once you’re committed and doing it and in it, you can’t back away from it. Again, it’s like talk about a hamster wheel. You’re creating a hamster wheel that’s perpetual. And for most of you, especially if you’re early in business, this is really not a good idea because in early business, you want to be agile. You want to be able to change directions quickly. You want to be able to fail fast.
You want to be refining your selling skills, your marketing skills, figuring out how to talk about things in a way that your ideal client or student really resonates with. And I think you need to really prove to yourself that I can sell out, run, and lead a group program a couple times before I roll it into a membership. Because honestly, you don’t know what your members are going to want unless you have that level of intimacy with your clients and students, like the intimacy of having put them through.
a group program a couple times. And what I always say, once you’ve run a couple group programs, you know the common FAQ. Once you’ve answered that same question six times, maybe after a year of leading the same group program, you’re like, OK, this needs to be a module in the membership site. I understand my client and student very well now. And I’m willing to make something for the long haul.
And the thing about membership sites besides like there’s no finite end the way there is with the course where you get to reset and decide if you want to do it or not. The membership site is perpetual but not only that it’s it’s often sets up the expectation that you’re like constantly creating more and more content to razzle dazzle your members. Now do we want to give people value. Yes. If you’re in this community like I have no doubt that you’re a healer and a leader and you.
naturally are just the kindest, most generous person and want to make sure that anyone who is working with you receives tremendous value. That is different from you putting yourself on a hamster wheel and creating tons and tons of content that’s stemming from your own insecurities about what you’re charging or about whether your rates are worth it, quote unquote.
I see so many yoga teachers in our community start a membership, regret it, get burned out and get on this hamster wheel of in addition to all the content that they’re creating potentially for social media and YouTube and all these free platforms that we talked about earlier, which isn’t really necessary. They’re also creating tons of new content each month for their members. And here’s the thing, like we talked about before, most people are often joining a membership. I mean, of course they want access to new content, but
Usually it’s like you’re hardcore fans who want to go deeper with you. So think depth, not breath, right? Think about how could you take them deeper rather than just like churn out tons and tons of stuff. There’s a membership site that I’m a part of and I actually wish that this guy’s membership site had way less content because they kind of throw everything in the kitchen sink in there. And some of them are like recordings of live trainings he’s done and the quality is terrible and
Some of the stuff has music and some of it doesn’t. And there’s just so much content that it’s really hard to figure out like what’s good and like for me, like I want high quality audio. I want music like that’s my jam. So it’s really hard for me to kind of figure out every time I click on something in this membership, like is this going to be something I’m going to want to meditate to and practice with or is it not going to be? So I actually wish that there was a lot less content. So think about quality over quantity, depth.
over breadth. When someone’s joining, they want to go deeper with you. You don’t necessarily have to razzle dazzle them constantly with new flashy things because this is not in service of them. Right? If they want new, if they want flashy, if they want to be distracted every five seconds, we have the whole internet. Your membership site can be much more structured and take them through, you know, lessons in an organized way.
or it can be really deep, profound teaching. And then kind of like we just talked about with social media where you should be reposting 50 % of your content, you should be recycling your content in your membership. I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but I run the same challenges each year. I don’t feel this pressure to constantly make new challenges. Now, I actually am making a kind of new one this year, but I have run, let’s say, the Chakra Challenge or the Kali Yoga Challenge, like seven times. I set up the infrastructure. I set up the videos.
And I actually have students reach out and say, I love that I get to do this every year with you, right? They’re not bummed that I’m not like changing it constantly and razzle dazzling them with new information. They actually say, I’m so glad I get to revisit this. I’m so glad I get to go deeper with this. I’m so glad I get to see this again. So for those of you that are doing membership sites, I want you to think about like, what are the seasonal things that maybe you create content for once?
but then you recycle and reuse those. Like for example, maybe you have a summer solstice ritual or yoga class. Like you can use that and promote that within the membership every summer solstice for forevermore, right? You don’t have to constantly make new things because also people are coming and leaving, churning out and new people who’ve never seen that before are coming in. And even the people who’ve been there forever might’ve missed it the first time or might really appreciate seeing it again.
So a core theme here, which is relevant for everyone, is like, are you over giving from a place of insecurity, as opposed to, you know, feeling full and your cup runneth overing with abundance and joy.
brett (22:21.294)
This is so, so important because you do not want to resent your students. You do not want to resent your membership site and your products and have them feel like burdens. You are not going to create your best creative work from that energetic space. And the last thing I’ll say about this is the way most people consume memberships. And I know this from my own usage patterns and also from looking at data is that most people…
join a membership and they’re really into like two or three things, two or three videos. Like there is literally a membership that I pay for just because I don’t want to lose access to this one like breath work practice that I do all the time, like almost every day. And I’ve taught a version of it myself, but I just, I don’t know, there’s something about doing it with this particular teacher. I like it. And so I pay for his membership.
just to do this one class. And I notice on my own Uplifted app, it’s often similar. Like students find those two or three, maybe five routines that are like their soulmate routines, just like we talk about soulmate poses in my book. They love those, they wanna keep access to those. And so they’re just constantly doing those. And the usage of the Uplifted Yoga app gets built into their lifestyle, right? Maybe they’re listening to the…
philosophy lectures while they fold laundry or listening to the affirmations that we have like as they fall asleep or you know just doing that class as their morning practice a couple times a week and that justifies the the cost for them.
brett (24:02.286)
So even if you create a bunch of things, it’s like human nature. Like think about your wardrobe. You probably have a lot of clothes. How many do you actually wear? There’s also data around this. It’s like people wear like 10 % of their wardrobe or something like that, right? We just gravitate to like that most comfortable bra or favorite yoga pants, like whatever it is. And it’s the same in your, in memberships. People gravitate towards like that thing that they love, that’s familiar, and that’s why they’re there.
brett (24:31.758)
There is definitely a sub -personality type who like constantly, you know, wants new things, but it’s like a very, very, very small percentage of the population. The average person is consuming content like that. They find what they like and they come back and they do that video over and over and over again.
brett (24:56.238)
So this should take so much pressure off of you.
brett (25:28.142)
Another place I see people over give and over complicate their offers is by throwing in like tons of extra content, tons of bonuses. And while this can be fun and like a good sales strategy, and I’m so guilty of this, I also often get feedback from students that is like, I don’t want more. I just want to focus on like the 200 hour training. Like, thank you for offering me all these bonus courses, but like, I just want to get 200 hours certified and focus on that. And it’s actually changed.
how I do some of my marketing because the 200 hour training is amazing and it is enough and you don’t need, you know, I don’t need to razzle dazzle people with all these extra things because the core uplifted yoga alignment and the myofascial release material and the way we look at bodies and the anatomy in that training stands on its own. It’s top notch. But again, when we’re when we’re trying to throw in everything in the kitchen sink, it’s often not helping our ideal student or client stay focused and it’s often devaluing the
maybe the core thing that we really have to offer. So in sum, whether it’s in your personal life or your business, I want you to start to really discern, and somatic work is great for figuring this out, because you need to figure this out in your body. Am I giving from a full cup or am I giving from a sense of insecurity?
and over delivering because I’m insecure about how much I’m charging. Like, my gosh, my price feels like a stretch. Your price should always feel like a stretch, by the way. My price feels like a stretch. It feels like a little bit uncomfortable for me. It’s too expensive. I need to like throw in all these extra things to impress people or get, you know, offer all this bonus one -on -one time with me or always on access to me if I’m a coach or whatever it is. Instead of just thinking about what would make my lifestyle rock.
so that I could have great self -care, so I could show up as the best coach and teacher possible, and really firmly setting my boundaries around that, and then I’m gonna be able to give to people from my fullest self and get them such better results, such faster results.
brett (27:33.998)
in your home life and personal life, what this looks like is like, if I do this, am I going to feel resentful? If I help, you know, my husband moved the barbecue from the garage to the backyard, which I was asked to do the other day, am I going to feel resentful? Because I was in the middle of meditating or I was in like the best part of my book and I was so happy and warm by the fireplace. And, you know, so sometimes saying no is the nicest thing we can do or just saying not right now.
There’s an entire video I have about this in YSM where you can just say no for no reason. Just because you’re comfortable or just because you’re warm by the fire or just because you’re filling your self -care cup. A lot of times we think, if I were a good wife or a good girlfriend, I would go help. And then we do it and our self -care gets depleted and we end up feeling resentful because I end up moving the barbecue and then I stub my toe and then it hurts. And then I throw up my back because we’re lifting it and I shouldn’t be. And then my whole week’s ruined.
because my back hurts or whatever, right? I’m just trying to give like practical examples. So part of this is staying with yourself, staying in your own body instead of thinking of like, what are the societal expectations of like good or bad behavior or what would like a good girl or a good wife do in this scenario and staying true to your North Star, which should be filling yourself up so that then you can give from a wholehearted place, you know, maybe later in the day, I’m able to.
come up to my husband and help him or like cook him an amazing dinner because I have an overflow of energy and be in a really good mood, which believe it or not, the people who love you most, that’s what they want. They want you in a good mood. That’s when they’re attracted to you. That’s what they want from you. So I really invite you this week to just think about like, where am I over giving? Where am I over giving in the home, potentially with chores I’m doing or just things I really dislike that like really deplete my energy, like drain my cup.
How can I start either letting the ball drop on those, remember we talked about that, just like not doing it and let the pieces fall where they may, knowing that it’s gonna be uncomfortable for you, or express a desire around it, a pure desire, when I’m in a high frequency space. And in my business, am I potentially putting myself on a hamster wheel for no reason when I could be more strategic?
brett (30:00.59)
Am I over giving from a place of insecurity? Friends, I would love your thoughts on today’s episode. You can find me at Larkin Yoga TV on Instagram. I always appreciate reviews here on the podcast as well. I mentioned my book, I think today, Yoga Life. You can find it anywhere books are sold.
brett (30:47.086)
Always expand the show notes because I link up really interesting resources for you in there. And if you liked today’s episode, a lot of the energetic pieces I talked about are from the Yoga for Self Mastery course. I think everyone can benefit from this course. Literally, it has saved my marriage. It’s saved people who’s gone through it, marriages. It’s just absolutely incredible for bringing yoga off the mat into your relationships and into your daily life.
brett (31:16.686)
There’s pleasure and somatic practices in there as well, so you can really start filling your own cup.
brett (31:25.87)
Remember, what we are talking about is not selfish. If everyone took care of themselves and showed up, like as a whole human being, having taken care of their own needs and tended to their own nervous system, like think about the kind of planet we would live in. Think about the interactions, how happy are your family members would be, right? Instead, we do what we think is good that leads us to feeling extremely depleted. And from there, all hell breaks loose. We’re not able to find that intimacy and authentic connection that we crave.
So over giving is actually like the most selfish thing we can do because once we’re depleted, things do not tend to go well. All right. I love you so much and I’ll talk to you next week. Namaste.
