Tawnia Converse is an experienced yoga teacher and mentor and the creative force behind A Soulful Space LLC virtual healing arts studio. Tawnia retired from the Marine corps after 20 years of service as a Spanish linguist and intel analyst and now she supports women in their spiritual journey back to become whole, radiant and sovereign souls through yoga.

Tawnia has an incredible journey and experience to share with her clients, students and fellow instructors in the wellness space and this promises to be a really interesting exploration as we learn a little bit more about Tawnia and take a look at how we can build a more authentic voice in our personal and professional lives.

So let’s start our work in with Tawnia Converse …

They say that if you're not growing, you may as well be dying. As harsh as that sounds it may be true. Especially when it comes to continuing education in the wellness space. Health, fitness, wellness, nutrition, medicine, mindset; all of those fields are constantly changing. We learn new things every day about the body that we live in and it takes time for that new understanding to filter out into the general population. Fitness and wellness professionals are a big part of how that information gets out. But only if we make an effort to go and collect it, curate it and then translate it to our peeps. And in that process we can influence the health and wellbeing of our people in powerful ways while still staying within our scope of practice. One of the ways we can do that is through continuing education.

in the fitness industry, of course, we want to have a really fantastic depth and breadth of knowledge to present to our students. And in the quest for that, it's often really easy to kind of fall into this trap of just collecting certification after certification without any real plan, or idea about what it is that we really want to get out of those certifications… sometimes what ends up happening is that we keep collecting certification after certification. And we get lots and lots of letters after our name and it can be very confusing to not just our clients but to ourselves about who we are, what it is we do what we want to offer for real and so I wanted to introduce you today to one of my teachers and good friends in the yoga industry. And we're going to discuss curating certifications a little bit more with Cara Uranga of Drishti Yoga teacher training…

Today I wanted to talk about money baggage. During our conversation last week Dennis brought up the point that a lot of how we treat money, how we feel about money and business and our behaviors around money are rooted in our childhood experiences or lack of experience and influenced by how we saw others handling money. That’s our money baggage. And that baggage can weigh us down and hold us back financially in both our professional and personal lives. It becomes a subconscious filter through which we make all our money decisions including how we save, how we spend, how we invest, IF we invest, and how we price our services.

So the question becomes what is the money baggage that we’re carrying around, how is it affecting our behavior and how do we let it go?

This week’s solo episode … it's verbal communication, but we are also communicating with our body language with our energy and that comes from directly comes from how we are connected to ourselves how we are aware of our own body's reaction to what's happening around us, and then how we translate that information that awareness into an understanding of what's going on. Now, a lot of this happens instantaneously and very, very subconsciously. In the body. We are almost never aware of this communication within the body unless we really make mindful purposeful, intentional attention to those things as they come up in the body. And really kind of becoming more curious about what that means.

Last week on the podcast we met Kim Basler. We talked about the long term effects of living in chronic stress, over exercise and disordered eating. And how common that is in the fitness industry. Of course this isn’t limited to fitness industry professionals. No matter what your profession it’s important to understand that just because you do what you do well and have done it for so long you can do it in your sleep, that doesn’t mean you’re not under toxic levels of stress. It doesn’t matter what you think is going on with your stress levels, what matters is the nervous system response.

I’d like to highlight some things that came out of our discussion that could help prevent the kind of overwhelm that leads to burnout and turnover that we see all too often in a space that’s supposed to be based on wellness. And then talk about some specific things that employers and managers can do to support their wellness contractors.