Episode 20: Becoming Intellectually Curious: The Importance of Independent Thinking With Jason Crandell
There is so much to know about in this world that if we are only intellectually curious enough, we would be able to achieve and become what we want. In this discussion, host Amy Vetter talks with someone who has always been one himself - finding an entirely new path from what he thought he should be. He is internationally recognized yoga instructor, Jason Crandell. Together, they talk about Jason’s journey from starting out as a philosopher to becoming a yoga teacher. He shares the leaps he has taken to be where he is now and the things he leaves behind with the people that are important to him. After all, to really create success, it takes to have the drive and desire to go after it.
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Becoming Intellectually Curious: The Importance of Independent Thinking With Jason Crandell
I interview Jason Crandell, an internationally known yoga instructor who teaches on power yoga, anatomical precision and mindfulness teachings. He is named one of the teachers shaping the future of yoga by Yoga Journal. He’s been an in-demand teacher at conferences around the world for more than a decade. Jason is considered a teacher’s teacher where he has taught countless teacher-training faculties, leads training globally and regularly presents teacher-training content at esteemed conferences. In my interview with Jason, we talked about his journey early on from being a philosopher to becoming a yoga teacher and what it takes to create success when you have the drive and desire to go after it.
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I'm here with Jason Crandell. Jason, do you want to give a little background on yourself?
I'm Jason. I grew up in Ohio. I grew up in Toledo, but I've been in San Francisco for the second half of my life, the second of 22.5 years. I've been teaching yoga pretty much that whole time.
Maybe you can give us a little background of where you began. Growing up, you were Ohioans. You lived in what city in Ohio?
I lived in Toledo. Then I went to school in Southwest Ohio.
What did you go to school for?
I have a Philosophy degree.
What made you want to go into that degree in the first place?
I had always been an intellectually curious person and at that phase of my life, there wasn't any career that I was oriented towards yet. I always thought that I wanted to be an educator of some sort. Philosophy was genuinely the subject matter that I was most interested in.
Were you doing yoga at that time?
No, my yoga practice started during my last semester in college. It had no direct connection to my program as such.
How did you start in yoga?
It was a Kinesiology class. I had to take a kinesiology class to graduate and my girlfriend at the time was adamant that was what we were going to take, so I did it.
Did you like it?
No, I didn't like it, not even a little bit. I always felt good afterward, but I didn't culturally identify with what I thought the yoga scene was going to be like. I had played demanding physical sports my whole life. I played hockey in Detroit and skateboarded pretty much both of those things since the time I was a little kid. I wasn't inclined towards something that I thought was going to be hippy-dippy.
Where did you get the thoughts about it being hippy-dippy? Was it cultural?
I truly don't know. I grew up skateboarding, I'm always in the counterculture. Subcultures often don't like other subcultures. The skateboarding world, the people that we thought were the worst, were hippy world, grateful dead listening people. That's what I thought. I was partially wrong.
I'm a CPA by background, it took me a while. I tried it a few times and I was like, "Not for me."
A little nonspecific for a CPA type.
What made you continue or when did you do it again that got you involved?
To be honest with you is, even though I didn't identify with it, it worked. I felt better and more grounded. That's the bottom line. It made me feel good, so I never stopped. I became a teacher only a few years after I started. It was a long set of events. My teacher at the time asked me to take over his intro to Ashtanga classes. I took over these classes and that's how it was done for a lot of generations. I was the last generation of teachers who usually didn't start with the training. We were asked to teach at the behest of our teacher.
With your Philosophy degree, were you doing that as your job? Were you an educator?
No.
What did you end up doing after college?
Yoga. It all happened quickly. I had some random jobs, I worked at yoga studios right away. I worked in a warehouse loading and unloading trucks and some stuff. I was in a Master's program for International Relations. At that point, I had decided I didn't want to be an academic and I wanted to do something. I was searching and my teacher at the time asked and that was it.
Becoming Intellectually Curious: To be an entrepreneur, you have to put yourself in a position to develop your business and be willing to take a lot of risks.
What were your parents' careers?
My parents and my grandparents both have histories of owning small random businesses.
How did they feel about the decisions you were making at that time? Were they supportive?
They were supportive. How did they feel? I don't know. Were they supportive? Yes. It's very Western, I don't know how they felt.
That's an important lesson too.
They tried to steer me in a different direction.
That takes a lot, especially you're not sure which direction you're going at that point in your life. You took over Ashtanga teaching and then what happened from there?
A lot. Around that time, I was also starting to take classes outside of the Ashtanga world. I was starting to study with Rodney Yee. At that time, Rodney was the most influential yoga teacher at least in the country, I won't irritate people by saying the world, in the country by a landslide. There weren't other well-known teachers. Rodney was in the East Bay and we connected personally. I got along with him well and I started taking the class with him. It was the world of yoga opened up differently, in a much more complete way than I had experienced from the Ashtanga world. That was it. I slowly migrated away from the Ashtanga world.
I did a 1,000-hour program with Rodney and Richard Rosen and Mary Sullivan and some other amazing like Garrick Dean was part of that. At that time, I can't imagine a better faculty and stuff like that doesn't exist anymore. That was a time and era where the yoga industry in some ways hadn't developed and yet the training was across the board so much more complete. There weren't these short little 200 or 500-hour programs. Those didn't exist. Those were too short. No one in that era would have considered those to be sufficient. They didn't exist.
When you shifted into the role of teaching a class versus taking it, going back to when you took over for your Ashtanga teacher, what did you learn for yourself as you shifted into that role?
I learned that I didn't know what I was doing. That teaching, that discipline was a different thing from practicing the discipline. It was an entirely different thing. I was always a good communicator. I joke with my students all the time because my students see the real me, but they see me doing the thing that I'm by far the best at. There are many things in my life where I’m average to bad at. I've been a good natural communicator and I'm good at explaining things to people. I see the big picture, I see macro-level concepts pretty easily. I feel like I have the natural attributes to be a teacher. All I understood at that point when I started teaching was like, "I have all the attributes, but I need some guidance." Teaching and practicing are different.
That's important for most people as they shift roles, whether it's in business or as a yoga teacher or any educator. It's a lot different to explain something than to personally go through it yourself. A lot of times, we become experts in what we do, but when we get into the next best role for us, then we have to start learning all over again because it breaks down what you knew. You got into this training with Rodney and all these other amazing teachers. Where did you go from there?
I did what pretty much every yoga teacher does, which I taught a lot of classes for a long time. For over ten years, I taught fifteen classes a week. I taught a dozen privates most weeks. I had second jobs. That's another thing too. No one in that generation expected that that was going to be a single or a complete living. There wasn't a model for it. Rodney was the only model of having this higher level of commercial success. I don't think many people expected that. The other thing that we didn't have is we didn't have the crazy-making that occurs via social media. We didn't have to see what we perceived as other people's amazing success line, which it's all smoke and mirrors.
It's an unbelievable amount of smoke and mirrors. Do you want to see people who have a lot of followers and almost zero actual business? Look at Instagram. Social media is not converting for people to an actual student basis. That's beside the point. I taught a ton for a long period of time. I was also in a good position. I started teaching classes for yoga journal staff because either office at that time was in Berkeley. The owner at that time knew me from Rodney. He was a student of Rodney. I started teaching three days a week at the Yoga Journal teaching staff and that turned into writing and a commercial presence for me that was significant.
Both of those points you make are important as one, we might look at images on social media or marketing and start coming out ourselves with self-talk when we don't know the story. Second, all the things that you need to do and give in order to be able to get to certain positions. I'm sure a lot of the stuff you were doing for Yoga Journal, not everything gets paid at that state. You're trying to break in and make connections.
I say this to people in my training all the time. "If you have decided that you want to be a yoga teacher to avoid work, this is not for you." You're not going to work less than your lawyer, partner, friend. You're not, not if you want to make a living at this. It's not going to happen. Also, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to put yourself in a position to develop your business. There's no support structure. No one's going to come and say, "Here's the path." You have to figure a lot out and be willing to take a lot of risks.
There’s not one path that works for everybody. It's interesting too because one, I took training with you. I'm a yoga studio owner. One of the things that you've brought up is how hard it is to have these businesses. I've been a speaker at some of these yoga conferences with entrepreneurs where some of them go in because they liked to teach and they think they can create their schedule. Shifting from student to teacher, teacher to entrepreneur, you’re at everybody else's whim of what they need and you have to be open to listening so you could shift. You made this leap of getting known through a Yoga Journal and nationally known as an instructor. How did you create success in that, though? You can get those opportunities, but what do you think the things are that you did that broke through for you?
The online content, working for YogaGlo for a long time because that's where people practice with you. If you compare something like that to Instagram, people don't practice with Instagram. They don’t practice via Instagram. They might learn something, they might gain insight, they might be motivated by seeing someone's pose. They not practicing with that person. Where teacher-student relationships are formed is when they're engaged in something. The digital content where people are practicing with me online via YogaGlo, that's by far the biggest thing and then my wife's podcasts, the Yogaland, because that has such a massive reach. It's not this short form quick thing you have to invest your time to listen to it like the audience to this podcast.
When people invest more of their time to establish a relationship, they're more likely to do a workshop or do training. I would say it's those two main things, YogaGlo and that Yogaland where people get exposure to me. It's not a photograph of me doing something. It's me teaching them. That develops the relationship. That develops the bond. I have a lot of online yoga students who are real, steady students. I have people tell me all the time when they meet me at workshops like, "I take your class three days a week. I have for the last four years." None of my students at home do that. Those are real relationships. Those are real teacher-student relationships.
I'll say to people all the time, they introduce themselves and this is like, "Hi, my name is John." I'm like, "Nice to meet you." "You have a great practice." I’m like, "You're the only person I ever practice with." Those are real. Those are distance learning things. It's a combination of those. I've had a relentless travel schedule for a long time and I go back to a lot of the same places. Year over year, I make those connections and develop students in those locations.
The bottom line with all of that is relationships, that connection.
There's one more thing, which is there's actual content there. I am an avid and prolific content creator. I'm always working to develop different ways of teaching, improve techniques, improve sequencing. I'm studying with doctors of physical therapy to look at injury management. I'm extremely invested in quality developments. It takes a lot of time and effort that there aren't that many people at a high level doing. It's that connection in that content over time.
What do you think drives you to want to do that?
It's exactly the words you use. It's just a drive. I'm super compelled to do it. It's like a chef or whatever. I'm not going to say I don't like it, but I'm not going to tell you like, "I'm having so much joy." It's a strong urge. It's an expression of who I am and what I'm interested in. I enjoy it but it's less joy and it's more drive to create.
Be better, always wanting to keep taking it to the next level.
Becoming Intellectually Curious: The vast majority of yoga teachers are under-prepared with regards to having a full suite of information about yoga, anatomy, sequencing, and adjusting.
I have denied that for a long time. For my first decade and a half or so in yoga, I thought, "I shouldn't be aspirational." I grew up playing competitive sports. I want to be good at what I do because I'm good at it. I trained in a martial art. I go rock climbing. I do all these things that I am genuinely not good at. For the amount of time and effort that I put in, I'm fine. I have no real inherent talent towards those things, but I enjoy them, so I do like them. With teaching and developing curriculum, I have the inherent talent and I'm driven to do that well. I was in denial of that for a long time.
That's interesting because of yoga philosophy to have that conflict inside of you, that you are aspirational. You do have expectations of yourself.
I misunderstood.
It's being okay with who you are, which feeds into non-judgment, but rather than judging the fact that you do have that drive and do want to do better and try to hold back for other people's purposes, you do it. From your learning over time, from the change in your belief systems, when you go to these other studios, when you teach other students, what are the things that you want to leave behind with those people that are important to you?
Three things stand out for me and starting from the least important. The least important, but what I do want to pass along is information about the topic, information about the subject. The reality is that the vast majority of yoga teachers, including myself for all a long period of my career, are under-prepared with regards to having a full suite of information about yoga, anatomy, sequencing, adjust. There are many layers to this topic. I don't want to be negative. I started teaching yoga with zero training because my teacher asked me, but you look at a 200-hour training and you do the math, that equals 115-hour semester at college. Five hundred is 1.5 years of the semester. At our highest level, we have 60% of an associate's degree and yet we're expected to know about injuries. We're expected to know about human relationships. We're expected to know about playlists. We are woefully underprepared for the reality of what our job is asking us. That's okay. That's how it is.
I am a living example of you can continue to learn and grow and get a lot of on-the-job training and eventually be pretty well informed. That bottom-line thing is information. On top of that, is our understanding of the concepts that underscore the information so that people develop critical thinking skills. The final thing is independent thinking. This gets complicated, but if you're a yoga teacher or a teacher of anything and you are not teaching critical thinking skills by helping people understand concepts, if you're not encouraging independent thinking, then not only are you not helping students as much as you could, but you may be putting students to some degree at emotional risk. When people start to believe you, but they don't understand why you're saying what you're saying and you aren't trying to help them think independently. I see a lot of potential error there.
That's true in any job as a leader. If you try to micromanage or not let people figure out their path of learning to get to an answer and then you keep doing their work for them, you end up creating the same business.
I have little experience outside of the yoga world, but I can imagine this translates everywhere.
You've got a demanding life as far as travel and so forth plus other research and everything else you do. As you've pivoted and changed in your career, how do you think you've made changes that have affected the people around you, whether that be people you work with, whether that be your personal life? What are some things that you've had to pivot overtime to make that all work?
That's tough. I don't see moments in my life where I made a pivot. I don't see a moment where I went from A to B. I can trace the whole evolution of my thinking. Certainly, there are critical areas where I'm doing A and then I'm doing A plus one and then A plus two. I'm slow in those actions. I'm super incremental. I don't like abruptness. I don't like quick or intense change. I have an aversion of that. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to my beliefs. I don't have conservative belief systems, but I'm conservative in that I am reluctant to change. I don't change quickly or freely or easily. I have to be convinced of something for a long period to make those changes or roll that out. The thing that stands out for me as it relates to others, sticking with my professional life is, I've become a lot better at teaching teachers. I know many of where our gaps are in our community and I'm much better at being able to directly address and communicate to those gaps.
I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, it's either family and friends, money, spirituality or health.
I'm thinking about either money or health.
Which one?
Health.
Things or actions that I don't have that I want with my health?
That I can have or I wish I had?
Either.
Here's what I'm thinking. I can't see for a dang. I can't change that. There are other things that I could probably change.
What would that be?
Fewer injuries from training Jujitsu, not from yoga.
I was going to say that's your whole thing.
It's easy to not hurt yourself doing yoga.
Things or actions that I do have that I want, that you want to keep as far as your health?
I'm going to say three. My cardio endurance, my strength to weight ratio and my range of motion.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want as far as my health?
Becoming Intellectually Curious: If you're not encouraging independent thinking, then not only are you not helping students as much as you could, but you may be putting students, to some degree, at emotional risk.
I don't believe that I have any underlying chronic disease. I hope that it maintains that way.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as my health?
I need a little bit better LDL to HDL ratio. It's not that bad, but it could be better.
You can tell you're a medical trained.
Total cholesterol is good, but we could have an improved ratio. More avocado.
Is there anything that you want people to take away from our conversation that is important for you as far as your message to people around on your journey?
I feel like maybe this came up when I was teaching yoga. This is something that's been coming up for me. On some level it's simple, but it fits well within the narrative of your podcast, which is to remind people that they can continue to learn new things. They can continue to learn, grow and evolve. When you don't think you can learn and when you don't think you can grow and you don't think you can evolve, your life gets small. I think about that a lot. One, because I'm a teacher. Two, because I'm middle age. There's a part of me that wants to stick within my little-known sphere. I'm already on that cusp of being like, "Get off my lawn." Also having a kid and wanting her to be willing to expose herself to a lot of things and to know like, "I'm way bigger and stronger than she is." Rock climbing is easier for me, but if she is steady with this in three years, she'll destroy me in three years. She doesn't know that. It's the same thing with people of all ages. Are you going to start in your mid-40s and become a professional rock climber? No. Can you continue to learn and grow, be inspired by newness? Yes, you can. I'd say along with that is it's okay to be lousy at stuff? You don't have to be good to enjoy certain things. Just enjoy it.
We get stagnant in our careers or things that we're doing, or even outside hobbies and we have to remember to keep expanding ourselves and winding our horizons. Keep growing. It keeps us young. Thank you so much for taking the time.
My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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There were a few areas that are important to step back and pause on. First off was his term of intellectually curious. I know all of us have these different paths in our career and how we begin is interesting. I think it’s giving ourselves space to take those journeys in our careers and our lives. That can happen anytime in our life. It doesn’t necessarily just happen when we were in college or starting out in our careers. That term intellectually curious struck me where we want to have that our entire life. It’s not something that we have once and trying to figure out where we’re going.
It’s times in our lives where we continue to pause, be curious and allow ourselves to experiment and learn about what our interests are and where we can integrate that into our lives rather than trying to control what is happening in our lives and finding those paths and being an observer to see what could actually happen for you. He’s a great example of that. Once he stared this yoga journey that he went with the flow of the opportunities that came his way, didn’t reject those opportunities even when someone came to him to teach a class that he’d never taught before and wasn’t trained as an instructor. Taking on those opportunities and making those shifts is where our growth starts to happen. We start to understand what is important about that next level or next opportunity that we want to take on. We have to be open to coming back to being intellectually curious.
The other thing that I thought was important, whether you’re in the yoga world or entrepreneurial world or in your career, feeling competitive with other people that social media doesn’t always tell the real story of what’s happening in people’s lives or businesses and so forth. If we want to make sure that we’re not getting stressed out or thinking that we don’t have as much success as another person, it’s important to filter out what isn’t serving us. We can think that it’s fine for us to see the images but if it’s creating an emotional response internally or getting in the way of you staying positive and taking stock of all the opportunities you have without worrying what somebody else does, then it’s important you figure out a way to curb it.
When he was talking about his journey to become successful at what he does, he noted that it was good that there wasn’t social media, so he didn’t feel bad or think that he wasn’t doing as well as he was doing. I think we have to go back to that mindset prior to social media. How did we control our emotions and not worry what somebody else was doing?
Maybe we worried but we couldn’t see it. It's important that we figure out how to adjust our lives so that we are not creating those emotional responses for ourselves. The other thing that was important and this applies whether you're in the yoga profession or any profession is that if you want to make a living you have to work hard. There is no quick way to success. A lot of the work to get to success is giving our time for free. It's what we need to do in order to get exposure or to meet people or to network and it's giving in order to get. A lot of people that open businesses expect the phone to ring, expect immediate success because the effort that you've got to put into a business or put into a career in order to create the successes is not something that they want to put forward and that is fine. The part that's not fine is not being honest with yourself on which side of the fence you're on.
If you are good at maintaining and good where you are, then don't try to hurt yourself or harm yourself by thanking you should have more success than you do. If you're fine with the amount of effort that you're putting in and the result that you're getting, then be okay with where you are. If you want more success, then it does take that extra work. It does take developing relationships and new ways and finding where your path is which isn’t necessarily the path that is somebody else's that you might see from someone that you look up to you or on social media and so forth. Being open to the work that you have to do in order to create success.
The other thing that was important moving from that to relationships is that working on a business or a career is all about developing relationships. It's not a photograph on social media and if what you do is on social media, it's how you create an engagement with the audience. Depending on the audience, that could be offline, that can be independently one-on-one, that could be publicly or in a group where you're making an emotional impact for people. They feel connected to you and they want to follow you to other things that you are doing because they are receiving the value that they hope by being around you. It's not just about showing off and maybe ego-driven things that can happen. It's about how you engage and how you give back in order to create that sticky relationship.
His points about learning apply no matter what is that we have to get a deeper understanding of a topic in order to truly understand what we're doing. It's not just about the text, it's not about memorizing. It's about understanding the underlying concepts of what we do whether that's our profession, whether that’s something in our personal life. It’s going that layer deeper so that we can internalize that information and become what he calls an independent thinker. That is so important that we not only train ourselves to be independent thinkers but train the people around us to be independent thinkers. They're not always going to ask you for the answer. That you have imported enough information on education. That they are able to find a way to not just regurgitate what you say but understand it from a deeper level and be able to get creative with the information as well and get to maybe an even better answer.
As we go through change, Jason's point is important that we make change incrementally. We take the time to learn and we learn the pros and cons and so forth rather than making rapid-fire changes. Take those little steps so that you can be convinced of any path that you are going to go and you're not regurgitating information that you were told or belief system that you have because of somebody else. Instead, you're taking those moments to truly understand why you are saying what you are saying so that you can provide value to the people around you.
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About Jason Crandell
Jason Crandell is a natural teacher and author with more than 15 years of experience. His accessible, grounded classes integrate the best elements of power yoga, anatomical precision, and mindfulness teachings. Jason’s articulate, down-to-earth approach to vinyasa yoga will educate and empower you. Named “one of the teachers shaping the future of yoga,” by Yoga Journal, Jason has been an in-demand teacher at conferences around the world for more than a decade.
Considered a “teacher’s teacher,” Jason has taught on countless teacher-training faculties, leads trainings globally, and regularly presents teacher training content at esteemed conferences. Jason is a contributing editor for Yoga Journal magazine where he has written more than 25 articles. His critical thinking skills will support you on your path of practice, teaching, and self-inquiry. Jason’s primary teacher is Rodney Yee—who was kind enough to say, “Jason is taking the art of teaching yoga to its next level.” To learn more, visit JasonYoga.comLove the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
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