Les Mills Colours

Les Mills Creative Milly Taylor says: "As Instructors, we often feel external pressure to be bright, bubbly role models – the picture of health, radiating peace, love, and energy." But the truth is, we all have off days, and it’s healthier to embrace our full range of emotions – both positive and negative – rather than suppress them.

In this interview, Milly talks about her new tool designed to help us live more authentically, now available on the Releases app.

What inspired the concept behind LES MILLS COLOURS?

Milly: LES MILLS COLOURS was born from my personal journey with anxiety and yoga. While studying psychology, I became interested in how the wellness industry often promotes toxic positivity – encouraging only “happy” emotions while ignoring others. I wanted to challenge that by creating something that embraces the full spectrum of human emotion. Les Mills had been open to these ideas through past wellness work, so it felt like a natural next step.

What is the principle behind LES MILLS COLOURS?

Milly: I worked with Dr. Jackie Mills and a team of wellness experts to create LES MILLS COLOURS – a guided mindfulness tool. It’s a resource that helps you explore your relationship with emotions and it gets you questioning how you engage with different feelings. There are six practices and each features a guided inquiry that sets you up with practical tools to help you sit with and navigate feelings with awareness and acceptance. The aim is not to feel happier or brighter. The idea is to feel alive, energized and authentic.

How does it work?

Milly: It’s really open – there is no right or wrong way to use this tool. You can journey through all six sessions at a pace that works for you, or just choose the colours that resonate.

The sessions are not designed to be done in response to feeling specific emotions, they can be done at any time. It’s a way of building your emotional capacity so that the next time you feel a certain way, you'll have the tools to navigate it better. The aim is not to try and 'fix' a feeling, the idea is to learn to be okay with that feeling.

If you want to stick with the same colour ten times over, go for it – you’ll likely get something new out of it each time.

How will Instructors benefit from LES MILLS COLOURS?

Milly: LES MILLS COLOURS is a tool to increase your self-awareness and embrace the benefits and potential of all feelings. And it's not just for your personal wellbeing. By increasing our emotional awareness, we can help build and spread emotional intelligence, which will help us generate a culture of care – something we really need right now.

For those working in the fitness industry, when you nurture emotional awareness, it helps you lead with more clarity and confidence. By becoming more authentic in your own self, you provide the opportunity for everyone that comes to your class to be their authentic selves. It can help you create deeper connections and lead with more authenticity and purpose.

How is it different from other meditation and wellness practices?

Milly: This is completely accessible for all. You don’t need any meditation experience and it’s really varied. There are droplets of visualization, breathing, open meditation, and somatic practice, so you get a taste of it all. If you’re an aesthetic person, you’ll love the visualization, and if you don’t like the idea of closing your eyes and meditating, you can still focus on the visuals and have that experience. We’ve also made soundscapes specifically for each colour, and they hold the space for the whole experience.

You can tune into it however you like. Even if you don't end up dropping into the meditation aspect that deeply, you’ll still benefit from the inquiry phase you do at the beginning of the video.

It's the suppression of the emotion that causes the not so good social behavior, not the emotion itself.

What if you don't think meditation is your cup of tea?

Milly: LES MILLS COLOURS is more like an inquiry tool than a meditation tool. It’s not about clearing your mind, or feeling that blissful, unwavering, calm kind of clear state. It’s more about becoming more compassionate and aware of what's going on for you. It will help you feel like you have more of a stake in your life, so you’re not just blown around by all of life’s goings on. It will give you space to slow down and reflect, which can help build your emotional intelligence.

What happens when you build emotional intelligence?

Milly: Emotional intelligence is like self-awareness. It helps you notice how you react to something, and then go a layer deeper and notice what's underneath that reaction. You ask yourself: ‘Why am I blocking that?’ or ‘Why am I being drawn towards that?’. And emotional acceptance is how you meet that with compassion and navigate it. You start thinking. 'I know what's happening and I’m not going to resist it – because the more I resist it, the more I'm going to feel uncomfortable.

The aim is not to feel happier or brighter. The idea is to feel alive, energized and authentic.

Yoga, Pilates, relaxation and mindfulness … there are plenty of other ways to improve well-being. How do you suggest people navigate this space without feeling overwhelmed?

While it can feel overwhelming, it’s also an incredible opportunity to try all sorts of things that can meet your needs. It really is a case of trying different things and seeing what resonates. And you don’t have to force things that don't feel natural.

I’ve found developing discipline comes up a lot when you’re on a self-awareness journey. But discipline for me can quite easily turn into rigidity, which is not helpful. What's helped me is loosening what discipline means, so it’s not about having one thing or practice that I stick to for the rest of my life, it's more about developing a skill or intuition that helps you identify and choose what you need at any given point in life.

That's where LES MILLS COLOURS can really help. It’s all about self-awareness and authenticity. It’s not a magic pill that will fix everything, it’s just another tool to add to your toolbox.

LES MILLS COLOURS is now available on your Releases app!

You’ll find all seven videos in the Tips section, accessible from the Learn menu.

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