307 Reclaim Your Spark With PoleFit Nation's Jane Wilson

Jane Wilson is the founder of PoleFit Nation - a pole dancing for fitness company. When Jane started teaching fitness through Pole Dancing in 2008, she understood that what her clients were learning wasn’t so much about pole dancing, it was about self-esteem and embracing who you are and who you

want to be. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of women feel strong, empowered and confident. She is the Canadian Masters Pole Fitness Champion of 2015 and she has been featured in national publications including Chatelaine magazine. Jane believes that through Pole Dancing, you can reinvent your life.

Contact Info

Most Influential Person

My father

Effect on Emotions

I have an anxiety disorder and being mindful has helped me calm my anxiety disorder down. I'm very different now with it.
Every single day I'm aware so if I feel the anxiety is sort of coming through. If I'm feeling anxious, I understand the physiological response, my body response, so I'm able to work through the steps to calm myself down and do the cognitive therapy to calm myself down.

Thoughts on Breathing

I have two different ways of breathing. So we have the regular way of breathing, but then we also have our diaphragm breathing and I'm working on my public speaking.
I've learned how to speak in an effective way and breathe so that I'm not holding my breath and then talking a lot and then running out of air. So it's interesting you ask that because I've been working for the past few months on improving my breathing when I speak.

Suggested Resources

Book: The Little Book of Mindfulness: Ten Minutes a Day to Less Stress and More Peace by Dr Patrizia Collard
App: Calm

Bullying Story

This incident happened in 2014 and it actually involved the studio and myself in which I was protested for a week. So this lady had driven by the studio and she looked through the windows. We weren't open at the time and she saw a room full of brass balls.
When we have classes, we close the blinds, but during the daytime the blinds are open so you can see inside. And there was a poster of me on the window where I'm holding the pole. It's one of our marketing posters. I'm looking happy and smiley. She was deeply offended and it triggered her.
It actually triggered a negative memory she had when she was younger. So in her youth, she unfortunately had a terrible childhood in which she was living on the street, became a prostitute and she was a stripper. And seeing the studio and me on the pole triggered it. So she felt she needed to have the studio shut down, that it wasn't OK and that what I was doing was wrong and she was very upset with it.
So first she went on Facebook and in Oakville there is a Facebook group about Oakville which has about 8,000 members on it and that's where she started. So she posted that she needed people to band together to shut down the pole dancing studio and that what I was doing was wrong and I was teaching women to become prostitutes.
So she projected by what was happening with her. I was, I was mindful enough to realize what was happening, but we had a situation where I had somebody who was not healthy and happy and if I were to attack her back he would make things worse. So I just, I stood up and I spoke about what the studio was about with more of an education point of view.
And then I didn't respond back after that. Well, because there's 8,000 members involved, people jumped on and it went on for like three days of online shaming towards her because she's attacking so people want to fight back. So I had to tell all my students do not participate, do not get involved, leave it be, because we don't want to feed the beast, the social media beast. So my students were very wonderful about it and it faded away.
So we didn't participate. we stood back from it. So then after it all calmed down, she decided to stand in front of my business with a sign saying, prostitution is wrong. She would arrive around 9:00 AM and would leave around 4:00 PM. The police arrived the first day and they talked to me about it. And in Canada we have the charter of rights.
So she was fully allowed to do that, to stand on public space in front of my business, to promote her agenda about prostitution is wrong and I totally agree, prostitution is wrong. But that's not what we're doing. Whenever people would walk by, she would tell them stuff about me, she would slander, she would say negative things.
So the police on the very first day pulled me aside and said, do you have a choice on how you want to handle this? You can either attack back, which will make things worse or you can ignore and we highly recommend you ignore. And so I also spoke to one of our local MPs, a member of parliament, because we all know politicians get protested quite a bit and he advised the same thing. He goes, don't engage, don't participate, don't even look at her when she arrives, go home. And that's what I did every single day.
She chose to protest against me during the first week of July, which was the hottest week of the summer. So I went home every single day when she arrived, I would say see you later, get in the car and go home and hang out with my kids and she would stand out in front. So I didn't really, I didn't want to hear what she said about me. I didn't want to know.
I just knew, eventually she would move on and in fact, by the end of the week, she called me up on the phone and left a voice message saying that her work was done. My apologies for causing any hardship, any pain. She said I need to move on now. So I'm actually very proud of how I handled that. I was being bullied, but I chose a different path of how to handle it instead of fighting back, I chose peace and not to engage.