The Importance of Perseverance (and a Little Faith)

This blog post is part of The Business Yogi series – inspiration and thoughts for business based on the philosophy, principles and practices of yoga. Look out for the book of the same name in early 2012.

Running your own business can be challenging at the best of times. Being solely reliant on yourself and your ideas to generate a pay check can cause sleepless nights, especially if others rely on you to bring home the bacon.

This week I am interviewing the women who applied for my Digital Assistant Academy pilot project which will enable six low income women in East London to generate additional, flexible income for themselves and their family around their existing commitments. Over an eight week period, the six women in the pilot will learn the necessary skills to become freelance Digital Assistants working from their own home with a laptop computer and broadband.

The women who have applied for the opportunity are diverse. Some of these women have not worked for a long time and have lost their confidence; others are single mums who want more flexible work to fit around their children; others are young women desperately trying to get on the job ladder in a terrible job market. However, they are were really positive about the project. One of the women wrote about the opportunity:

“I am keen to take part in the academy as I want to begin the rest of my life. I aim to become independent of state benefits and support my family whilst being a strong, positive role model for my children. I feel that I will be better equipped to do this if I am working and building a career.”

But I can see some sleepless nights ahead for me. No work is guaranteed, especially for freelancers. Am I setting these women up to fail by encouraging them to work for themselves? I have to admit that at least twice a year I consider packing it all in and getting a ‘real’ job – one where someone else can worry about how to pay my salary.

In these moments of self-doubt and fear, the yogic concept of tapas is a useful one to meditate on. Tapas is translated literally as ‘fire’ or ‘heat’ but it is taken to mean in this context sacrifice, discipline and perseverance.

In our asana practice some of the more challenging poses can create a lot of heat and fire in our body. The immediate reaction is to resist this and move back to a place of comfort. Tapas invites us to go through the heat and accept it. Feel the fear and do it anyway, if you like.

Through asana practice, meditation and self-study, yoga asks us to feel our discomfort and stretch beyond our perceived limitations. Only by going through our fear, not around it, can we begin to transcend it.

We have good and bad days in our yoga practice. Some days the postures come easily; we deeply connect to our breath and the world off the mat melts away. Other days, we cannot concentrate on anything and the simplest of postures frustrate us. This is normal.