This is going to be the tiniest email I ever sent you. It’s Sunday night, and I did not get any work done this entire weekend. And I want to make YouTube yoga videos tomorrow, for two accounts! But I also have a deadline tomorrow afternoon, which will require about four hours of work.
So that’s why I think this email will be smaller than usual.
.
The weekend went awol because I finally broke down when a week-long mostly one-on-one birthday fest, was finally punished with a headache on top of the Oh-God-I-Feel-Awfulness that seems to have become my standard Good morning.
And Saturday’s grogginess did not go away either. It usually clears up after a few hours.
.
I wasn’t feeling sick with migraine, it was not that bad. Just a mild headache and tired like when you have a hangover. I quit drinking about six weeks ago. To no avail, except that I now know with certainty the grogginess never had anything to do with alcohol, but is my response to pandemic stress. As is the sensitivity to headaches I ve had since spring 2020.
.
Either way, Saturday was written off, and I started going through my old archives. Something I had been meaning to do for a very long time, mainly because there is a lot of double stuff on there. This Saturday the repetition of going through the files and deleting things and moving them, had a numbing yet satisfying effect. The task was appealing, and I was not bothered by my headache at all.
But when sorting it out, which I spent like 1.5 days on!, something interesting happened; I discovered a whole new personality, which belonged to something I was going to start doing this week. Which was teach yoga on YouTube in Dutch.
.
And next to this Dutch yoga teacher personality, which was discovered by finding a photo of myself in 2008, I discovered a fourth personality. Because today, I started drawing up a circle within circles scheme of the three personalities I had found so far.
. The first two you know, I ve written about them frequently:
. Catherine Tramell played by Sharon Stone, Basic instinct (1992)
1. Lauren Harteveld
. My alterego under this name, writer, publisher, Catherine Tramell-fan (Basic Instinct). Signature era: The 90s! Lauren96, the diary I keep as the 24 year old me, is one example of what I write under this name.
. 2. Rock Star Suzy
. The English speaking alterego under my real name, who ties everything she does to Bon Jovi. Her identity matches Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. Decade: The 80s!
. And then the third, as mentioned sparked by both my plan to start teaching Dutch yoga on YouTube, as well as by the photo of 2008 me from when I was in my 15+ years of teaching yoga professionally.
. 3. Suzanne Yoga Teacher NL 2021 (YouTube only) . This was a really cool find, because although I knew I wanted to pick up teaching Dutch yoga on YouTube, it didn’t really have a vibe yet. But the moment I found that picture, I connected back to the zeros 2000-2010, when yoga in America (I read Yoga Journal) was so damn cool. With all the yoga studios, being super contemporary and having that happy brightly colored vibe! .
And suddenly I also tapped back into the business coaching for yoga studios, but also the business coaching from Denise Duffield Thomas (I always kept following her, just far less actively than I used to); And I rekindled the love for my first business coach that I really vibed with, which was Amanda Daley who taught marketing to health coaches.
.
I never made all the business training for yoga teachers/ local businesses “work” and in retrospect I SO understand why! Because the whole niche thing, and find your tribe thing, is very hard to pull off when you work locally. Or at least: You have to be better at marketing/ finding your voice than I was!
.
I got stuck because I/ my yoga never got past being selected for “what time are your classes” and “where do you teach”. I was selected on location and service, not on niche or who matched with my personality. They chose yoga, not me.
.
And that doesn’t mean I regret it, in particular the final years were awesome and I had students I really liked. And they me. But at the same time, if I had known how to really attract people who vibed with me, instead of “ending” with people who vibed with me, but being unable to move further into authentically being me and calling in my truest of clients? Oh, well, then maybe I would still be a yoga teacher.
.
Or maybe it is simply impossible to do the niche thing, and someone should go tell the yoga teachers that market is simply not suitable to select your soul tribe unless you’re a marketing genius. Which I, in that case, was clearly not.
.
But I loved the marketing around the studio, and I have marketing books about how to market your yoga studio. And like I said Denise Duffield Thomas and Amanda Daley, they were around 2015 really my go-to for inspiration. .
After finding that yoga picture of 2008, and starting to see myself as a Dutch yoga teacher again, I connected with their study materials again as well. They were the perfect marketing coaches to give me the feel of the Dutch online yoga teacher I wanted to be.
.
Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan
So Suzanne yoga teacher (2008) was the third personality which I discovered, on top of the other two (Lauren Harteveld and Rock Star Suzy) I wrote to you before. And as I was drawing all these circles, about which personality did what, created what, and what coaches did they have and so on; I also drew a circle of activities that did not seem to have any meaning, yet every now and then they took A LOT of time!
It were the activities you called my “happy place”. Sorting my notebooks and diaries of decades and decades and lining them up on the shelves next to my desk. Making a visionboard card deck, and every now and then spend a day making new cards. And I always laminate them. And now the activity of going through my digital archives and spending the weekend there.
.
I didn’t quite know what the purpose was of this strange inner circle that had such luxurious concepts of time dedicated to whatever the f it wanted to; But then it struck me! Of course I knew who was in there!
4. the baby koala
.
It was the little baby koala. The me who only wants to do cute things, and it makes drawings from love duckie, and takes photos of little bear Puux.
.
It was the little baby koala who was in the inner-circle at the truest core of who I was. And who was absorbed in archiving and loved playing with stationary. It could bind and unbind anything and had hole punchers for three different types of ring binders.
. And then around this koala, so the personality who I thought was the most “me”; I had drawn the circle from Lauren Harteveld! How fitting! Of course, she was the perfect person to protect the little koala there.
.
And around that came Rock Star Suzy. Whose main relationships are with other Bon Jovi fans (I forgot to put that in my final schedule I will post in a second)
.
And around that came Suzanne the new yoga teacher 2.0: She had the most interaction with the real world. Her main relationships were with not so much clients, because I do not have a business and also do not aspire to get one; But her main relationships will be the one created over teaching yoga.
.
She will be a yoga teacher without a studio, it will all be online on YouTube.
.
And that’s all for now, Sara!
Little baby koala has taken its blue and red pens, and as soon as I had figured out how all the circles should go, we made a schedule of it.
It was the little baby koala.
LS Harteveld 