The right hemisphere of your brain is most commonly associated with creative tasks. It also handles most of the stuff we identify as desirable character traits: spirituality, empathy, a sense of shared identity. It's where the intent to speak is formed -where ideas are put together. When your client asks, "How do you dream this stuff up?!? Do you lie awake at night thinking of new ways to torture us?" You can just tap your cranium and say, "Nah, it's just my right hemisphere."
When we're describing ourselves in a personal ad, or online, or in a resume, we boast about skills borne of the right hemisphere. "I'm very creative," you'll say. "I'm spiritual," or, "I work well in a group." It's these tendencies that we prize, and for that reason, we tend to value the right side of our brains as more important.
New gym owners think about the white canvas: what will my gym be? How will we behave? What will it look like? How will I program? They see themselves, the Great Artist, painting a landscape that turns itself, layer by layer, into a masterpiece. It's a beautiful process, and perhaps the triumph of entrepreneurialism: your practice is your art, and your gym is your medium.
But.
No one thinks about the easel.
No one thinks about where the next brush is coming from, how tightly to stretch the fabric. No one thinks about building the frame.
This is the world of the left hemisphere: the organizer, sorter, translator. A beautiful idea, left untold, is just a dream. Your empathy, unshared, is just a prayer. The left hemisphere organizes thoughts into language, objects into numbers, randomness into programming. Without the left hemisphere to form concrete ideas and actions, the right would be left to its own mute conceptualization.
In a franchise model, you get a shrink-wrapped, "just-add-water" colour by numbers kit. Not so with a garage gym, martial arts studio, or CrossFit box. What you get are instructions on plucking the hair of the horse to make the brush, perhaps, or how to fold black into red to make bloodtone. This is the way we want it, right? We want to be right-side Creative; free to experiment and make mistakes; to build our wings on the way down.
Or, maybe, just a little help with building a frame....
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