Take off the friend hat, put on the business hat
When my co-founder, Leah Gallegos, and I were setting out to start People’s Yoga back in 2012/2013, we were new friends who bonded over community soccer, trying yoga at different studios and eating vegan foods (she was the vegan showing me how to eat vegan). We were in our mid-20’s and had a shared experience in that we wanted to see yoga and mindfulness practices in our neighborhoods for the everyday person and felt it shouldn’t just live in affluent and gentrified parts of Los Angeles.
We were both early in our respective careers, figuring out what we wanted to do with our lives, and in creating People’s Yoga, we found a project that excited us. At that time, we did not know nor did we have a strong vision for what People’s Yoga would be and our first task was learning how to work together as business partners.
An early mentor of ours, Trinity Capili, gave us pivotal advice at just the right time. I am going to paraphrase but she said something like this –
“Imagine you’re wearing hats, when you two are talking about friend things, you put the friend hat on. When it’s time to talk about business, you need to take the friend hat off and put the business hat on. Then you can go back to talking about friend things later, after you take your business hat off”
This was a lightbulb moment for both Leah and I. It set the foundation for us to engage in this new business relationship when we had no idea what we were doing. With a little practice we became very good at this process. We would start our meetings by checking in on the personal, and then put on our business hats to discuss People’s Yoga.
When we talked about People’s Yoga, we both knew what time it was - it was time to be professional and focused, think about the vision and how to achieve it and to learn to work through disagreements.
Along the way, I have worked on growing as an individual to be able to better accept and hear feedback and to give it as well. I learned what my strengths were and how to lean into them and how to back off and respect the lane I was in or wasn’t in. I learned to not take things personally and learned to be a better listener and to think more about the impact of my tone and words.
Still, at the core of these learnings was Trinity’s early advice as Leah and I still reference putting on the business hat when it’s time to lock in. I have come to learn that putting on the business hat and taking off the friend hat when necessary is a skill that must be respected and practiced in order to build something big within a team. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened to People’s Yoga and our friendship if Leah and I didn’t learn the skill to navigate this line - I’m grateful we heeded that advice and went to work on it!
