We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tiffany Andras a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tiffany, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?
Making the decision to step away from the stability of the corporate world and start my own business in mindfulness and stress resilience was one of the most frightening experiences I had encountered in my 28 years of life (at the time). Having no real experience in starting a business or running one, there is the first hurdle of imposter syndrome, the second hurdle of how the hell you’re going to make it while you build something from the ground up, and the biggest one: “is this even going to work?!” There was a single, beautiful moment that impacted me enough to drive this deep desire to be of service in the world. At the time, I was taking an 8-week class called Mindfulness Based Stress Resilience (MBSR), and because of the financial state of my family, the only reason I was able to take the class was that I was offered the ability to show up early, stay late, and help the class facilitator set up and tear down the room. After a particularly powerful class, I found myself driving home into my neighborhood that was early in its stages of transitioning from a low income area, when I realized that in all likelihood no one in my area would even hear about MBSR much less be able to afford it. This realization drove my desire to build a non-profit that used funding from paid programs by businesses and law enforcement to offer free programming in underserved and under-resourced communities. After building the foundation for the non-profit, I found myself about 3 months in with no paid programming coming in. Despite reaching out to multiple sources in a variety of industries, simply nothing at all was moving.
The moment that radically and powerfully changed the trajectory of my entire career was the day I recognized that absolutely nothing was preventing me from doing the free work in the community: that I did not need to wait to have money coming in, to be of service to those in need. I reached out to a community non-profit, Whitefoord, and set up a time to deliver my first free 8-week mindfulness training. Not only was the experience a wondrous and beautiful one, but the collaboration created momentum where there had previously been none. From that day forward, I did absolutely no marketing for my business but instead began being suggested, offered, and recommended from one business to another.
The two things I would offer to anyone thinking about starting a business:
1) When considering any work or effort, look beyond the immediate outcomes and recognize that being in practice at all, offering your services in any space (even free ones) builds connections and creates possibilities that didn’t exist before. Stay creative, optimistic, and curious about where opportunities lie. Think outside the box and simply find ways to get out and DO IT. No opportunity is a wasted one if you’re open to learning and making connections along the way.
2) Stay open-minded and open-hearted about the growth of your business. Looking back, my career has evolved in completely unexpected and amazing ways. At multiple times, opportunities were offered to expand the ways I taught and offered mindfulness trainings – things I never considered would become integral to what I do. By saying yes, I find myself today living my dream career. Any time a door opens, even if it’s one you’ve never considered before, FEEL into it. If you feel excited and curious, if it feels expansive and filled with possibility, say yes! The reality I have discovered over and over again is that when you reach a goal, it’s never going to look exactly like you thought it would when you started, so be willing to stay open and flexible and see the door that naturally open for you in reaching toward your dreams.
Tiffany, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
11 years ago, I woke up one morning and realized I wasn’t happy. Despite being a month away from graduating with Master’s Degree from Georgia Tech, having my thesis published on the cover of a scientific journal, having accepted a job as the State-wide manager for a political non-profit, living with my partner of nearly 2 years, and adopting a dog together, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread, dissatisfaction, and that nothing felt “enough.” I joke now that I’m so grateful to have had this moment at 25 rather than 50, for it radically and completely changed the course of my entire life. A month later, I decided not to take the job, separated from my partner, moved out of my apartment…YES, I kept my pup! and ventured to upstate New York to spend a month at a Buddhist monastery. It was in this month that I FELT, alive in my own body for the first time, love, happiness, contentment, satisfaction, and joy that had absolutely no external source at all. What I feel like I walked away from that time alone in the mountains with was the understanding that no amount of success will ever MAKE us happy. The crazy thing, is that happiness is always right here waiting for us: one breath away from dropping our disapproval and rejection of whatever we’re currently experiencing to discover that love is always here, alive in our own hearts. When I came home from the monastery, I had no money, no job, no place to live, and no idea how I was going to fix those things, but I knew the world would provide, and I knew that what I had learned on that mountain was worth following a path of being able to offer to others.
Over the last 11 years, I have become deeply committed to my own spiritual path through mindfulness trainings and my personal meditation and yoga practice. I am now an RYT, 200 certified Yoga Teacher and a 300 hr certified Mindfulness Teacher. I have certifications in teaching Secular Buddhism as well as Trauma-Informed Teaching, and at the core of my business is my own lived experience of being human: of the ups and the downs, the twists and the turns, the “ah ha” moments that define new paradigms and break old ones, and the SHARED experience with others that transcends all demographic ideologies, all traumas, all histories to connect us as people doing our best to live, love, and be free. I think one of the things I am most grateful for in my journey of offering the practices and tools that have and continue to radically change my own joy in living, is that there really is no end to the beauty of getting to share in the journey of another human being.
My current role works directly with law enforcement, corrections, and first responder populations. With the stigma that exists in our society around these roles, it has been an honor to see and connect to the human beings on the other side of the uniform. In a way, I always leave trainings feeling like for a moment, all history didn’t exist, and we were simply able to share space and time in a way that our hearts bowed softly to one another. I know I always leave changed after these experiences, and my hope is that the officers do as well. At the core of my work with these and all groups of people is the remembrance that no one, none of us is fundamentally flawed or broken. The same way I came to discover the innate aliveness of my heart one day sitting atop a mountain in NY, any of us can rediscover the truth of ourselves if we are willing to slow down, look, and feel. I would say one of the primary goals I have as a teacher and facilitator is give permission for our humanness (this is something that took me YEARS to learn: to soften the voice of my self-critic and give myself permission to be imperfect), but as well, I am to encourage all of us (myself included), to expand our capacity for self-awareness, to be willing to lean into hard moments with compassion and patience for ourselves and others, and to trust that from a wide-enough view, everything that comes our way in life is in benefit of our spirit. The process of uncovering our truest selves is one of courage…it is way easier to keep going the way we always have than to look and make change, but I hope to serve authentically as an emblem of what being willing to the warrior’s path could look like. As I reflect on myself and my own experience of living, I went from a dissatisfied, perfectionist with anxiety, an anger-issue, and a loud self-critic to someone who feels a ubiquitous sense of contentment in my living. I fundamentally trust the beauty of everything that unfolds, and I have become proud of the human I am in the world. Now please, do NOT get me wrong…I still fuck things up, get things wrong, and have hard emotional moments because no amount of meditating makes us NOT human, but I LOVE life in all its unexpectedness and raw beauty, and if I could hope anything for anyone on this Earth, it would absolutely be that.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
It’s wild to me when I look back at the growth and evolution of my business in the last 8 years. What I would start by saying is that for me, marketing and advertising had absolutely NOTHING to do with my success. While there were a few programs that I set off to create on my own, marketed and advertised for, they were the least success ventures in my career. What catapulted me and my business over time was making real, genuine, heart-felt, and authentic connections to anyone and everyone that came into my business view. Whether I was teaching at a martial arts dojo, an international marketing firm, (for free) at a high school or a non-profit, I took the time before every session to remember my intention: “I am here to OFFER presence, love, and to plant seeds of knowledge and practices that hopefully grow into something beautiful over time.” What I found over and over again was that it was showing up, being fully present, and connecting to the people in the room with me that ultimately brought me new clients over and over again. From my first session with a local Atlanta marketing firm, I was passed along to another, from there another, and from there 5 more local Atlanta businesses. Those connections grew into one-on-one coaching clients, corporate retreats, and weekly training sessions with a group that has been with me for the last 6 years. My free work in communities has expanded from a local non-profit to high schools, elementary schools, and the SEL leaders of the Atlanta school system. Free meditation offerings on Insight Timer brought me my first coaching client which expanded into a broad-scale coaching business with clients spread internationally ranging from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to concert pianists and stay-at-home moms. And that first coaching client relationship also brought with adventures in facilitating corporate culture change for organizations across 7 countries.
It was a free one hour training with Georgia Tech Alumni Association that created a connection with the company I now spend most of my time with. Before the session was over, I had an email in my inbox that read “have you ever considered working with law enforcement?” After a 3 hour coffee conversations and sitting in on multiple sales calls, I decided to join the team. My primary focus, aside from continuing to maintain my coaching business, is now bringing the tools, skills, and practices of mindfulness to law enforcement and corrections officers across the country.
The greatest piece of advice I have to offer is every single person is an opportunity you have absolutely no concept for. Be present. Be real. Be human. Share in their humanness, and make time for everyone. You never know what avenue for growth, expansion, and beauty will come from the next random person you connect to.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I think that one of the things we talk about the least in our culture is our hardest moments: the moments we feel like utter failures, that we’ve messed something up, or we’re simply afraid of how we’re going to be seen or perceived as a result of something we’re going through. I don’t buy it. I deeply believe that it’s our suffering (and our joy) that connects us all. So, I’d like to offer what feels like my hardest moment, biggest failure, and what got me through. At the beginning of 2022, I found myself staring at my wife of 10 years as she packed her things to move out of our family home. Our son (my step-son), then 13 wasn’t home at the time, but I remember the feeling of recognition that despite the hopefulness of us finding our way back to one another, that more than likely this was not only the end of my marriage but the end of my family and the life I had spent 10 years building and loving. Nevermind you all the usual stories of failure and pain, I was also struggling deeply with the reality that as someone who teaches other mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and human connection, I couldn’t keep my marriage afloat.
By May of 2022, I was deep in the process of my divorce. My son had moved in with his father and his wife, and I was seeing him only one day every 2 weeks. I had sold our family home, purchased and moved into a new one on the other side of Atlanta, had no relationship to speak of with my wife, had largely lost my entire group of friends, and started a new job only 2 months before. There were moments in my process of grief, that it felt hard to tease apart the difference between the reality of dying and wanting to die. As everything I knew about who I was, how I lived, and what made my life beautiful disappeared, I was forced, radically, to learn to hold myself in the greatest pain I had ever experienced and to rediscover what it truly meant to live and love alone.
Interestingly, though my 10 years of a meditation practice laid a powerfully beautiful foundation for me to begin anew, to feel the enormous weight of my grief and fear in what was to come, it was actually skydiving that broke me open to an entirely new way of showing up for myself that I know define, fundamentally, as real resilience. In the plane at 13,000 feet in the air, I found myself in an instant moving from calm to utter panic. It was my first solo jump (carrying my own parachute and jumping unattached to anyone else), and I was 1,000 feet away from the door opening and being the first person to leave the place. As my body went into fight or flight (no pun intended), I felt my heart racing, my breath shortening, and the feeling of being on the verge of passing out when a quiet voice whispered in my mind “I’m here. I can hold you. I can hold you, baby.” Though the fear stayed, my heart slowed, and I realized this was the entire purpose of this time in my life…to learn to hold myself through anything. I left the plane door, breathed in the horizon and the curve of Earth as I fell, and landed myself safely on the ground. That moment has changed my life forever. Now when faced with any situation that may be difficult or painful, I see the plane door and remember, I already have and always can hold myself through anything. My moments of grief and grieving, of sadness, of fear, of loneliness, of anger haven’t felt the same since. I still have these moments, but they are now layered with a tender presence that is always here waiting for the moment I need her to softly wrap me in her arms and remind me “I’m here. I can hold you. I can hold you, baby.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amindfulheartyoga.com
- Instagram: petitetiff24
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanyandras24/
- Other: https://soundcloud.com/wtfupodcast https://insighttimer.com/tiffanyandrasmyers
Image Credits
Liz LoPresti, Liz LoPresti Designs Scott Pope, Sgt. Oklahoma City Police Department