The Yoga of Entrepreneurship Improves Results For Creatives

I’ve been practicing yoga consistently for over a decade now (hot yoga for most of that time), and I am constantly applying what I learn in class off the mat, including to my business. So when I met Rebecca Prien, I knew she had a story to tell.

Rebecca is a multi-talented, multi-passionate woman with a cool career path. She’s a creative, intuitive, and strategic advisor to entrepreneurs. She’s also an experienced attorney and a dedicated yogi.

Rebecca graduated from Princeton and then from Boston University School of Law where she was a member of Law Review. She went on to practice at two of the top US law firms, and then two United States Courts of Appeals. Smart cookie!

She went on to found her own law practice, Counsel to Creativity, in 2009 to provide clear, affordable, and friendly legal advice to creative entrepreneurs.

Then earlier this year, Rebecca launched a new business with her fiancé called Ompreneur, a business that even more fully than ever integrates her talents, passions, and expertise.

Through what she calls the “Yoga of Entrepreneurship,” Rebecca helps creative entrepreneurs deeply align their businesses with who they are, how they work, and what they most want for themselves. Through that, she’s offering a conscious, holistic approach to business design. (No cookie cutter strategic advice here.)

I had a chat with Rebecca about her journey, and how it shaped her unique approach to business design…

Q. Tell us about that transition (from law) to Ompreneur, because I know that’s actually been an even greater jelling of your multiple passions and talents.

Yes, Counsel to Creativity came out of a thought that I have always been a creative, and been analytical at the same time…. Creative writing has been a big part of my life in the past, and painting has always been.

It was pointed out to me, particularly when I was at the courts…most of our minds work don’t work that way where we’ve got a right brain going here, and a left brain capacity here. So I thought…”We can merge those two.”

My idea was to try and use that ability (to use both sides of my mind) and straddle that divide a little bit, and hopefully bring some legal knowledge, and representation, and support to a community that may not have felt like they were able to access that because there was a language barrier, or a culture barrier, or just a perception that a lawyer wouldn’t be able to talk to them, or wouldn’t take their business seriously, or whatever the barriers that come up when people think about talking to an attorney.

That’s what that was about, and still is about…the idea is to try and make it clear, and try and make it accessible and easy to talk to me, and demonstrate a real respect for entrepreneurship, and for creativity, and for going your own way.

Q. Tell me about the seeds of Ompreneur, then. How did that start to emerge?

What I started to see is, I was thinking up all of these ways to make…taking care of the legal parts of your business more palatable to people. And so I started thinking about “Well, what is its role in your business, and how does that compare to the rest of the parts of your business?”

And, in the background, I was doing my yoga practice, and going through a [yoga] teacher’s training…and I started making these parallels between yoga [and business].

In yoga we talk a lot about opposites. It’s a union, but it’s a union because we, in the physical world, think about things as opposites. We have masculine. We have feminine. We have hard. We have soft.

Yoga thinks about the world in those terms, and talks about the union of them. So I started thinking about business in terms of what are the masculine aspects, if you will…the structural aspects, the left brain aspects of business, and what are the right brain, feminine, passion, creativity aspects, and what is the role of one to the other?

And so I saw…”Well, law is this very rule-based, very linear-like structural thing” (i.e. masculine aspects). And I experienced that the clients who were putting that in place grew on the passion and creative side. They grew in their success. They grew in their confidence by taking care of these things (the masculine, structural aspects) that, when they came in, were seemingly unrelated.

Q. Cool! So passion, creativity, success, and confidence flourish when the structural components are in place, yet the structural aspects are often something that a lot of creative types don’t necessarily like to think about…

Yes, and yoga has really become-it’s not too strong to say that it’s my world view. I’m immersed in it. It’s the way I practice and go about understanding life. Is this dance between masculine and feminine, linear and non-linear…

So I started saying-now I started to see that I understand business is just life. Life is-it’s all the same thing, right? I just started seeing, “Wait! There’s other parallels. There’s other ways that business relates to yoga, or that yoga is impacting my business and that it’s useful.”

And I think that one of the ways that it’s primarily impactful for people is what we started talking about earlier, which is that grounding aspect: the idea that in your business, there’s a lot of moving parts. It can feel like a whirlwind, especially when you feel like you’ve taken a step off or multiple steps away from a traditional training. There’s no map, if you will. It demands a lot of you personally.

And so to have a set of tools that gives you not only a framework, but actually a set of practices to lean back on to help you is very powerful to me.

If you are a creative entrepreneur, that raises the question for you as to how well the structures, processes, and systems in your business support your creative expression.

Based on Rebecca’s experience, the dividends of having that balance are well worth the effort of designing and implementing the right structural foundation to support you creatively.

You can find out more about Ompreneur, Rebecca, and The Yoga of Entrepreneurship at Ompreneur.com.

Photo: Lenna Davis Photography