Yoga for Customer Service Pros; but why?

I think I get asked this question a fair bit. Why have I decided to focus on us, retail and hospitality people?

Well, why not? What is it about our life and habits that makes us think yoga doesn’t fit into it?

I have a few logical answers which I thought long and hard about, and which I want to share with you today - but at the very bottom of it all is a simple fact:

Yoga helped me SO MUCH during my hospitality journey, and I want you to be able to experience this feeling yourself. When I was in Rishikesh, India, nearing the end of my Yoga Teacher Training - all I could think of was: How can I bring this energy, this wholesomeness, this light back home and share it with all my teammates? This is what drives me, and keeps me pushing forward and, really?

That’s the best motivation I could think of.

But let’s come back from the warm and fuzzy, and focus on some facts!

The Physical Aspect

This is the obvious connection, isn't it. We stand all day, or walk all day. We carry heavy loads, be it boxes of goods, trays of food and drink, kegs or bags of frozen chips.

And during these exhausting hours, we don’t really stop to focus on our postures, the stiffness in our backs, the tingling of our feet - because there is so much work that needs to be done!

This is where yoga comes in, in two very useful ways:

A - OMG the evening stretches. The delicious release of stress from the muscles. The wonderful feeling of pain and tension easing off and turning to relaxation.

B - The body awareness! How within the practice of yoga we somehow, not exactly sure when, learn to pay attention to what our bodies are doing, how they’re behaving, and it is SUCH a game changer.

And the better point B gets, the easier point A becomes; and the easier point A becomes, the more you enjoy doing it, and the more point B becomes your second nature!

The Mindfulness Aspect

This second point is very much connected to point B I mentioned just above.

Yoga brings our minds to focus. And this focus eventually can be directed at wherever you wish to direct it, but in the beginning stages, it naturally goes to your own body.

Because this is where you’re feeling the pains. This is the tray shoulder killing your posture and making comfortable sleeping impossible. This is the stiff, achy small of your back that keeps piping up when you least expect it.

So quite naturally, this is what your minds focuses on, with the smallest of encouragements.

What yoga changes, is the thoughts that appear when you do so.

It stops being a chaotic: “Ow, I’m in pain, I’m so old, this job is killing me, ow, ow!”

And it transforms more into the likes of: “Ow, this hurt. Hang on, why did this hurt? Oh, I’m putting all my weight on my right foot again, I’m stopping this. Ha! I knew that would help.”

This is just one example of what used to go through my head every time I felt pinching in my side, but there is so much more to it!

The Clarity Aspect

Going even further down the line of these musings, here comes the clarity. The awareness. The idea of reconciling what there is and what we see. But when you’re in the business of dealing with guests or customers, there comes the third party to reconcile: it’s what we are expected to show to the world.

These are very often close enough to each other, that we can very easily confuse them.

It’s when you are expected to smile all day, in every situation, no matter how annoyed, fed up or irritated you get at the very people you have to smile to… I always used to think, well, it’s a part of the job, that is what I have signed up for - then I never dealt with the aftermath range of emotions until it was just too much!

This is such a big topic, that I really love discussing and getting into, but for the sake of this post staying shorter than a short novel, I’ll just focus on how yoga helped me here.

You will not be surprised at all by the answer - it was the focus I learned to create when doing my physical practice, which naturally turned into the mindfulness toward knowing myself better, which turned into the clarity of me knowing when I am and when I am not the face that I show to the world.

When I am not the emotions that bubble beneath the surface and when I am being true to myself.

That's My Why

There you have it, that’s my answer in a nutshell - a shell that holds so much more of the nut that we give it credit for, but there will be more time to dive into this in the future.

I focus on all of us, past and present retails, hospo and travel pros, because I believe that we are not our “Customer Service voice” or our “Front of House Smile no. 5”. I believe these are the tools we learn to use, which with enough time make it frustratingly confusing to tell our emotions apart.

And I do sincerely believe, the practice of yoga is a really wholesome way of untangling that particular bundle of joy.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments - I’d love to have a chat or maybe a yoga session together! :)

Lots of love!

Anna xx