I Hate Yoga, and What It Taught Me About Strategy

Working on the business means stepping back to set direction, where the payout arrives later. Working in the business means solving live problems at pace, where the payout is immediate. Most leaders default to the second because the return feels good now, not because it matters more.

Yesterday I finished teaching a yoga class, looked around at a room of soft, half-asleep, zen-like faces, and a woman who is fairly new to our gym said, flatly, “I hate yoga.”

A few heads turned. First to her, then, with eyebrows raised, to me, to see what I would do with that. So I calmly, still in my zen state, invited her to share what specifically she hates.

She is a runner. She loves the speed, the burn, the exhaustion. She loves that running lets her go external, lets her mind work through whatever is going on in her life while her legs do the work. The pavement takes her thinking outward, and she comes home with problems solved.

Yoga asks you to do the exact opposite

You go inward. You line the breath up with the movement. You balance, which is its own quiet metaphor. You hold a hard, slow posture past the point of comfort, and you stay there. You set an intention and deliberately slow the mind down.

So when she says she hates yoga, she is describing how it makes her feel. She is describing the discomfort of effort she cannot yet see the result of. Right now, she cannot see what it is doing for her. The value is not in the room. It is in the body and mind she will want to have in twenty years.

I asked if she would be back next week. She answered immediately. “Yes, of course, it is good for me.”

It is the same conversation I have with founders, just without the mats

We love the running version of leadership. The speed, the firefight, the hit of solving a live problem at pace. It is external, it is urgent, and you can feel the return the moment you fix the thing.

There is a reason this pull is so strong. When Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked how chief executives actually spend their time, in a landmark study reported in Harvard Business Review, they found leaders constantly drawn toward the reactive and the tangible, and having to fight to protect time for strategy. Their warning is blunt. Without clarity on strategy, a leader gets pulled into too many tactical decisions. The running is not the problem. Running instead of everything else is.

Strategy gives you nothing like the firefight high. For that, you step back. You sit with a decision that will not be resolved today. You hold an intention for the business beyond the now, and very much outside the comfort zone.

This is the inward, slow, balance-holding work, and it is uncomfortable in exactly the way yoga is. Fittingly, an executive coach named Jennifer Porter wrote a piece for HBR titled “Why You Should Make Time for Self-Reflection (Even If You Hate Doing It)”. The research she cites found that people who reflected on what they had learned outperformed those who simply kept doing by twenty-three per cent. The payout is real. It just does not arrive while you are on the mat.

The payout you can feel versus the one that matters

The value is not in the room. It is in the years to come, in a business that excels because someone stepped back and thought. That is the part many leaders forget, because the firefight pays out now and the strategic work pays out later, and we want the payout we can feel. Choosing the slower return on purpose is the whole of a serious business growth strategy.

The runner will keep coming back to yoga, not because she has learned to love it, but because she has worked out that the discomfort is the point. The result is real even when she cannot feel it yet.

So, here is the question, for you. What are you running from when you stay busy working in the business, instead of on it?