As a Dru Yoga teacher I am often humbled by the level of trust my students place in me. You trust us with your physical, emotional and mental wellbeing, you trust us to keep you safe during class and you trust us with your personal (and sometimes very personal) details.
What a great privilege it is to be trusted in this way, so I feel it’s only right that I take care of my students! And take care of your personal details to the best of my ability. It’s for this reason that I am embracing the new GDPR (general data protection regulation) that are coming in to place on May 25th 2018.
I thought it might be helpful if I wrote this blog to let you know some of the things we do at Inside Out to meet the GDPR requirements.
We have a written GDPR Statement, which we welcome you to read. You can find a copy displayed at our Acanthus studio, it is on our website and each of our tutors has a copy of it too. I’ve also posted it on our Facebook page recently, so perhaps you will still be able to find it there. In it I have documented what we do with the information you give us, how we store and archive your notes, and how and when we destroy out of date notes.
Although the only thing we store electronically at Inside Out is your email addresses, we are still registered with the ICO (Information Commissioners Office). We have recently been sending out emails asking you to opt in to our mailing list so that we can be sure that you really want to receive our newsletter. Please be assured that we would never sell our mailing list, and we will respond to any requests to look at the data we keep on you following ICO guidelines.
I realise that this is a dry subject, but I feel that it is important that everyone who comes in contact with Inside Out is treated with care and respect, and really wanted to reassure you that we take data protection seriously.
On a more yogic note, I have found the whole GDPR process quite interesting. At first I found it overwhelming, there seemed to be an enormous amount of regulations for a small business like Inside Out to deal with, but I was pleased to find that actually we already met the majority of these requirements, I just needed to hone in on what was relevant for our students. To help me focus, I did some pranayama practice first – 3 sets of 10 Kappalbhati to clear confusion and bring clarity, followed by 10 rounds of Nadi Shodana to bring me back into balance and ready for action. I can highly recommend these breaths if you have a challenging task to tackle!
I also found The Eagle pose (Garudasana) a fabulous posture to help me pin point what was important, helping me to break the tasks down into 30 minute chunks, which I could then work on when I had a spare half hour. For me, this made the tasks less daunting and I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I made progress.
Working through the GDPR helped me to go with the flow, to not resist change (which I can be very much inclined to do!) and in doing so I gained many more positives than I initially imagined. Going with the flow is so much easier than resistance – good lesson for me for GDPR and life in general!
If you have any questions about this blog and how we look after your data, please do get in touch.
Bring focus and clarity