You don’t have to monetise all your hobbies
I trained as a yoga teacher in 2017 and spent a wonderful couple of years teaching. But then I had another baby, got a hip injury, went freelance full time and the pandemic happened, so I decided to stop teaching because it didn’t feel right.
And I didn’t just stop teaching. I stopped doing much yoga at all. But I’ve been back to yoga this month for the first time in ages and I’ve remembered how much I love it. I’ve realised, it's true, you don’t have to monetise all your hobbies.
There’s such a pressure to have a portfolio career and diversify your income streams. But not everything has to pay the bills, it can just be for fun and for you. And for me, yoga is that. I loved going to a class and not thinking about the sequencing or what I might teach next.
I was also thinking about beginner’s mind - I leaned about this on my yoga teacher training course. It’s the idea that when you approach things as a beginner you let go of expectations and the need to be good, perfect or competent.
Often when we do something professionally, we think we have to be great at it. But if we approach things with a beginner’s mind, we can accept we don’t know it all. Expertise, skill or talent might make us more capable but by knowing that we don’t know it all, things become more fun and there’s less risk of pride coming before a fall.
I’ve questioned if doing that yoga teaching course was a good idea since I don’t teach anymore. I don’t think it was a mistake because it taught me so much and led me towards the work I do now. And even if it was, to live a creative life you have to be okay with making mistakes. You can’t create if you never take risks - it literally impossible.
If you are running a creative business in any form, you have to take a punt on what you think might work and what people might need. And naturally that’s not always going to be right all the time. But part of being creative is trying to give words and expression to your experience, hoping that it resonates with other people.
That’s the risk, being vulnerable and saying, this is how I feel, do you feel it too? And sometimes, you might miss the mark, but often the answer is yes. And when it is a yes, then it sparks more creativity, more joy and more fun for everyone.
Which is sort of what hobbies can feel like too, when you keep them for you, rather than feeling like everything has to be a hustle.