Episode 79: Lashaun Dale on The Business of Fitness
“Find The Gold Within Each Lesson”
About Todays Guest
Raised in Nature, schooled in the city, Lashaun Dale has been described by the media and her peers as a creative genius, futurist and disruptive business leader. If you ask her what she does, Lashaun would reply that she has a dream job and serves to help people wake up to who they really are and live life fully inspired. She loves yoga, fitness and finds magic in movement, group experience, and music. Professionally she loves to co-create and discover and uncover amazing ideas and then make them happen.
Lashaun holds degrees in International Relations, Philosophy, a MA in Applied Anthropology, as well as an MPH from the School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. Her research focused on cross-cultural understandings of motivation and human potential and her work continuously intersect. She has been a featured speaker for some of the world’s largest fitness conventions and traveled across the globe teaching and speaking on health, fitness, wellness, and motivation.
Stay in Touch with Lashaun:
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Show Notes
Lashaun loves all movement, but to her yoga is the space where she becomes a vessel for life and learning. When she gets get on that mat, and especially when teaching, movement becomes a spiritual practice, a place where she feels like she can work out anything.
Lashaun started in the industry when she was 12 years old. She had three jobs as a teenager and one of them was working at the front desk of a small studio called The Unique Physique.
Lashaun learned fitness from like the world of bodybuilding, which allowed her to understand anatomy at a young age. While it was bodybuilding that caught her attention, it was group fitness that captured her heart. She began taking classes and eventually worked her way up into the front row. and like many others in our industry, one day, the teacher did not show up and Lashaun’s teaching career began.
Years later after she graduated Lashaun did an internship in the state government where she began teaching the early morning classes. The early classes were a perfect fit and so she did the same thing when she moved to Boston to go to University and it was in Boston where Lashaun met Sherry Catlin, a legand in the world of fitness, who became her mentor for the next two decades.
Lashaun was in school studying philosophy and international relations and had every intention to move into politics and be a diplomat. She loved international relations and was paying for school by teaching fitness and only ever intended for it to be part-time. However, through a series of divine interventions, Lashaun slowly became more entrenched in the fitness community.
Still not in the business full-time, Lashaun moved to NYC and enrolled into a Master’s program at Columbia University and at the same time began teaching at the high profile club Equinox. One morning as Lashaun was going to teach her class, she realized that that was the only hour of her day where she was truly happy and that’s when she decided to make fitness her full-time business.
Lashaun reminds us to make sure that if we are chasing a dream, it’s our dream. Often, it’s a dream that we think we’re supposed to follow. Perhaps it’s our parents’ dream, a dream that we outgrew or perhaps it might be that you don’t think your dream is good enough, or that you’re good enough for the dream.
Lashaun talks about the importance of doing the inner work. The importance of getting support from teachers, mentors, spiritual coaches, and therapists or whatever it is that helps you along the way. Have a toolbox that lets you take whatever you experience, then pull out the gold.
She believes we need a mindset practice, a physical practice, and a career practice. Then all of those things work together to give you the tools, to be able to make use of every experience that comes your way.
We talk about ambition and the challenges that can come from that word. Lashaun believes there are so many reasons why people are not willing to go for it, but it really comes down to the particular shape of your wound around pursuing your dream? What is that voice that’s holding you back or making you think that you can’t have it all?
Lashaun is highly intuitive and talks about the importance of clarifying your signal to the Universe and aligning your vibration with your values and purpose. It is when we are sort of dabbling and we have one foot in, just playing and creating but we’re not really committed, that the Universe and the people around us, don’t really know how to help us. We need to get clear.
When we get super crystal clear then it’s super easy for others to step in and say, “How can I help?” So the clearer you get, the more action you will be able to take. Lashaun shares that it is the Yoga Mat that allows her to get clear about what she needs to do that day, what magic she needs to create, or what energy she needs to put out into the world.
She believes that when you ask for help, you will get an answer. However, if you expect a certain answer then you’re going to get the answer that you expect. She reminds us to go back to the inner work and look at our expectations. “There’s going to be something that is presented before you and you define what that is and your expectations around it. Do I expect that it’s going to fail? Do I expect that this is going to work out? Do I expect that I have what it takes to be there?”
And she encourages us to be aware, simply be aware, of our expectations.
Lashaun goes on to say you will be presented with a response and an opportunity, possibly a new path, a new person, a new idea. But then it’s on you again. It’s up to you to take it to the next step, you’ve got to keep that iteration moving forward and engage. It’s really a conversation with your dreams, with your soul, and with what you came here to do
We move into a meditation that Lashaun is exploring and one that can help us all.
A meditation that allows us to see the realization of all of our potential and goodness – and then before you open a door to any situation or room, bring all of you through that door.
Then when you step into that room, whatever that room is, and when you are aligned with the truth of you, you get to realize that you are personally here to do what you are destined to do. Then you must ask how you can serve as you step into the room. And on bringing your full self and being of service, you will glow, and the people you are meant to serve will be drawn to you.
Lashaun invites you to find a practice that lets you be you. Create a space that helps you be ready for whatever’s to come. Think of you becoming you as your work. It is your work to be more of who you are, instead of focusing on what it is that you do. Then, when we come together with other people who are in that same alignment, we get to create magic in the world.
Lashaun invites to everyone in this industry to be the change makers. She believes we are the solution for the dissonance in the world and we have the greatest opportunity to help move the world forward into harmony. She invites us to think about how many other industries or careers have the ability to gather hundreds of people one to three times a week, put them in a positive mindset where they can actually think and be open to change, and then move things forward?
Lashaun goes on to say “I think that we are a gift to the people we serve. We’re a gift to this country, we are a gift to the world and we should consider that precious. Every time we step into a room to teach, every time we touch a client, every time we write a workout program, consider it as a vessel for transformation for ourselves, for those we serve, and for the world that we live in.”
What a magnificent way to open the new series. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
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