When I finished my 200-hour yoga teacher training, I was asked if there had been any connection to, or impact on, my full-time job at RebuttalPR.
My first reaction was skepticism. I didn’t want to force a connection that wasn’t there, or force some tidy metaphor about “finding your center” that sounds nice in a LinkedIn post but means nothing. The longer I sat with it, though, the more I realized the connection wasn’t a metaphor at all. Something in me had changed, and it was showing up at work in a very specific way.
Noticing the Shift
Training is more than learning yoga poses and how to teach them to others. It’s a spiritual experience, diving into the philosophy behind the practice, learning to connect with your body through movement and breath, and learning your own truths along the way. Every time you step onto the mat, it’s another chance to learn something new about yourself. For me, that meant repetition. Breathing a certain way until it stopped feeling deliberate. Being corrected, again, on the same misalignment I thought I’d fixed weeks ago. The depth of it snuck up on me through all that repetition, not around it. Somewhere in the middle of it, my nervous system started responding to pressure differently.
I noticed it in small moments first. Being put on the spot with something I wasn’t prepared for. Being asked to do something where I had no idea where to start. The kind of moments that used to send a little spike of adrenaline through me now just… didn’t. By the end of the training, compared to the beginning, the difference was obvious. I wasn’t managing my stress anymore. There wasn’t much stress to manage.
What’s interesting is I can’t point to a single moment where I used a breathing technique to talk myself down. That’s not how it works once it’s landed. It stopped being a technique and became the way I respond to things by default. Which is, I think, a remarkable takeaway from the training.
The Press Conference
The clearest place I’ve seen this play out is coordinating a press conference. Anyone who’s done this knows it’s not one task, it’s fifteen at once: speakers who need to be briefed on messaging, reporters asking for details before you’re ready to give them, a location that needs to be set up, a client who has a million questions that we don’t yet have the answers to, and a timeline that has no patience for any of it going wrong. Something is always shifting until the moment it begins.
The version of me before training would have felt that chaos in my body and the temptation to move faster instead of clearer. Now, when everything is happening at once, I notice I just do the work. I move through the list. I answer the question in front of me instead of the five behind it. It’s not that the pressure isn’t real.
It’s that I’m not adding my own panic on top of it anymore, and that means everyone around me isn’t absorbing it either. A calm coordinator makes for a calm room, and a calm room makes for attorneys who deliver their message clearly instead of defensively.
Trust, Not Just Calm
If I had to name the actual outcome of all that breathing and repetition, I’d call it trust. Trust that I know how to do this job even when I haven’t done this exact version of it before. Trust that the team around me will do their part while I do mine. That trust is what lets you act in the middle of chaos instead of freezing or spinning. It’s the difference between a press conference that feels like it’s barely being held together and one that looks, from the outside, like it was always going to go exactly this way.
I don’t think yoga is secretly a PR training program. But I do think the version of me who finished that 200-hour training is a better person to have in the room when a verdict lands, the phone won’t stop ringing, and a press conference needs to happen in an hour. I didn’t set out to learn that. I just noticed, somewhere along the way, that I had.
