Splendid Yoga: Manage Your Money Yogically

Crystal Goliday earned 3 degrees worth over $360k without any student loans. Nope, her parents didn't pay either. She got her Bachelors in Computer Engineering, her Masters in Science and Tech Management, and her Master in Business Administration without spending a penny. Don't you just love intelligent women?? Go read her book, "How To Go To College For Free," to learn how you can afford to make your dreams come true without going into debt.

Find Crystal At:

Alice Santos is an influencer, a model, and a social media manager who helps health and wellness businesses scale online through social media lead generation.

Here are her top 3 tips for lead generation:
1- Have a good offer!
2-Have clear branding!
3-Channel your creativity into video posts!

Alice is a super ambitious digital media rockstar obsessed with optimizing her lifestyle. She blew up on TikTok last year and utilized the knowledge she learned the from business course she took in London to teach others how to utilize ads to scale their businesses.

In this episode, we work on her money mindset reprogramming the idea of "I have to sacrifice and work hard to make money" to "I am abundant, I have enough, and I am ready for more."

Find Alice on:

Let’s talk sales with yoga teacher Suzanne Dulin! She’s a genuinely brilliant engineer who was fortunate to find some incredible yoga teachers to guide not just her practice but her business as well. She now helps yoga teachers build up their businesses. Check out her YouTube channel for details on how to set up your lighting to film your yoga class. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxnVL8guNyXtEIglClKlHqw 

Join Suzanne on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/GetaBiggerBoat

Mags Baker is a digital mastermind, award-winning director, healer, and a serial entrepreneur! Mags helps people of all genders manifest abundance, dream clients, soul mates, business achievements, and essentially anything into their life! They give their advice on stepping into your power and growing a successful and sustainable business through community and mindset! In her words: " I am here to have a massive impact and help people become the fullest and happiest versions of themselves while creating the most free lives for themselves and create a lot of money! Let's be free, let's get rich, and let's save the fucking world!" 

Here are the links:

Jodie Fox is a musician and a teacher who I met on a yoga retreat in Costa Rica! She used to own a luxury airplane transportation business. This is the story of how she and her husband went 300k into debt to pay off their credit cards, mortgage, and student loans.

Buckle your seatbelt: Donna "Tiger" Willis takes us on a wild ride through divorce, Christmas Tree farms, and amassing and paying off 350k worth of debt. 

Donna is a self-awareness coach, thought leader, mentor, and speaker.

Here are the top 3 takeaways:

1 - Have self-awareness around money! Be mindful of your relationship to money, but cultivate a simple, loving relationship to it.

2 - Notice what other people are doing that's working. Nearly every successful business grows by going into debt; any time you consider debt, have a plan to pay it off.

3 - Practice what you preach!! Coaches recommend the "magic" work of mantras all the time...and then forget to do them for years. Here is the mantra she and her husband used: "I believe in you, I believe in me, I believe in our shared prosperity."

Aline took out 80k in student loans to get her MBA and paid if off in 2 and a half years.

This is how she did it:

1 - REFINANCE. Google “refinance student loans” to find the cheapest rates. Aline reduced her 10 year loan with 7% interest to a 5 year 3.5% loan. That psychologically made the debt feel more bearable.

She also recommends setting up auto-pay (most loan processors will give you a better deal if you do this) but actually pay the debt earlier in the month so you don’t have to pay for the extra days of interest.

2 - SAVE UP AN EMERGENCY FUND. Standard personal advice says you need at least $1000 and up to 1 year of your budget (so if youspend $40k in a year, you need to have $40k in a liquid savings account). Aline saved up some money to give herself a cushion.

3 - INVEST TO PAY OFF YOUR DEBT. But don’t invest in what you don’t understand! Aline bet that should would make more than 3.5% off her investments, and she won that bet and used her gains to pay down her student loans.

4 - MAKE MORE MONEY. Aline got a new job making more money - that’s the quickest way to give yourself a raise.

5 - NEGOTIATE YOUR STATIC EXPENSES. Aline negotiated with her landlord to get $500 off her rent because of the pandemic conditions.

Check out the episode to hear more details about Aline’s story!

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Jennifer Willemsen began her career as a psychologist, but her intuitive guides had other plans for her. Listen for her story on how her spiritual surrender led to her experiencing ultimate bliss (called samadhi in the yoga world), how she won over her ego's interpretations of the spiritual channeling she was gifted (not schizophrenia!), and how spending $9000 was a healing experience. 

If you take one message from this podcast, it is this: your true self only speaks to you lovingly and with compassion.

Chloe Ward and her husband used the Dave Ramsey Envelope Method to pay off 114k of debt on 14 months. She and her husband amassed the debt between car payments, student loans, and credit card to pay for fertility treatment. She's now a mother to a 4 and a 3 year old and says, "I felt we would never get to where we are now," which is saving up to buy a house in Santa Barbara, where her family has lived for 5 generations. 

The biggest factors in paying off debt were eliminating rent and childcare expenses by moving in with family. She and her husband took every overtime opportunity, and her husband took advantage of the gig economy by driving for Doordash. They also sold as much as they could, including selling her beloved Mercedes for a "Dave car," a used, reliable Honda Civic. 

Throughout this debt journey, Chloe experienced mysterious and worsening symptoms, including post-partum depression, post-partum anxiety, chronic fatigue, headaches, digestive issues, weight gain, mood swings, eczema, dermatitis, sudden food sensitivities to gluten and dairy. She went to her doctor, and the blood tests said that everything was normal, but she didn't feel normal.

A friend recommended a naturopath, and she discovered she had leaky gut, adrenal fatigue, PMDD, high estrogen, low zinc, magnesium, and vitamin D, and with the naturopath was able to find a good supplement and exercise regime using yoga, pilates, and meditation to heal her body.

She shares her story on her blog and Instagram, One Healthy Meal At A Time.

Felicia Wright decided to go rogue as a wife, mother, and teacher, when she realized she wasn't dong anything for herself and was burning out fast.

Allison Braun is scaling her way to 7 figures with her business and life coaching business. 

She is one of those people who you just instantly trust with your life story, and while working in a sex-positive shop, would spend hours listening to people’s issues so they could find their pleasure....for minimum wage. 

She started researching how to most efficiently make money, took a few online marketing courses, and now has a team of 3 helping to build her empire. We chat about her upcoming Unconventional Workshop series, what you should do if you don’t know how to say no, and how to create win/win/win relationships throughout your life. 

Emily Sussell is the CEO of Abundant Yogi Coaching, a business coach for yoga teachers transitioning to an online coaching business. After graduating from college, Emily didn't want to work a "real job," so she taught yoga for 7 years. But she wasn't making a ton of money at first. 

So she started pivoting, and she's been pivoting ever since. 

First, she focused exclusively on private clients rather than studio or gym classes that paid way less. Then, she realized other yoga teachers needed help making more money, so she started coaching them on CONSISTENCY and SYSTEMS to make a sustainable income as a yoga teacher. 

Meanwhile, she was mastering selling online courses with 20k launches, so the next level was to create Butterfly School, the six month coaching program for yoga teachers pivoting into coaching. She argues that you can use debt wisely to invest in coaching programs and courses and shares her story of the 25k business coaching mastermind that led to her 100k month. 

And I want to emphasize: you don't have to spend money you don't have on these high ticket offers to experience that kind of success. It helps to have someone show you the way. Investing in courses has been way more valuable to my finances than any specific class I took in college. 

But prove to yourself that that coach will work for you. Any business coach you're considering working with will have loads of free resources for you to utilize. 

Take advantage of them. Do one of their webinars. Sign up for a free challenge. And do everything they say. 

See if you get the results you want. See if it makes you money. 

Then use that money to invest of one of their programs. 

It's possible to use debt wisely to grow your business - every hugely successful business has, AFTER they've proven a concept can make money - and it's possible to go unbelievably broke hoping that just one more course is going to change your life, or just one more MLM is going to make you thousands a month. 

It doesn't work if you don't implement the strategies, and if you don't enjoy the strategies you're being taught, you won't do them.  

All that said! 

Evoni Seigler, the Wig Coach, is an absolute DELIGHT! After traumatically losing her hair, she realized how crucial it was to her identity. As she says, "I could bring in my boss chick when my hair is done! I feel like Beyonce!" She create amazing wigs for her clients, but she also realized that other wig makers were seriously undervaluing their work, so she started coaching them on how to make a profit.  

Chelsea Riffe-like-Knife (not riffey like spiffy) is a Mindset Manifestation Coach - and a former coaching client of mine!  She spent a few years in the corporate world before following her heart to Australia, where she dabbled in teaching yoga before a deep meditation led her to the realization that she needs to teach people about how to create the life of their dreams.  She recently sold out her first course "From Chaos to Confidence," in which she shares her manifestation tricks and creates the community and accountability to make powerful Big Dreams come true.  Her biggest wins came from trusting that inner knowing, and realizing that IT'S SO EASY for her to teach people this stuff because she loves it, lives it, and embodies it.  She's super inspiring - go check out her podcast (including her recent interview with manifestation goddess Gabby Bernstein!!) 

“Being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything,” John Berryman said. “It’s just something you do.” Just wait until Jo Heckett's voice rolls over you with her potent poetry - and I don't even like poetry, y'all. We actually had two conversations as Zoom fails led us to scrap the first one, and my mind was buzzing for days afterward each conversation with her deep, luscious intelligence. Jo and I were connected via a mutual friend and friend to the MYMY Podcast Kari Cowell, and I'm so glad that Jo agreed to be part of my healer series. I love that she's creating an income stream from a notoriously impoverished industry: she has a poetry subscription! 

You can check it out here (makes an absolutely lovely gift!): www.joheckett.com/poetry  

Check out here instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/joheckett/  

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Diana Forero left her home country of Colombia for the great white north: Canada! After years of tinkering around with the idea of starting a clothing company, she used her Covid layoff and severance as an excuse to follow her dreams. She wants to help as many women as possible follow a healthy lifestyle, wherein health is defined as a balance between body, mind, and soul. After lockdown started, she noticed her friends and family were feeling overwhelmed, and that spending all day at home in their PJs didn't help, so she created a clothing line to help women feel beautiful and inspired to exercise their bodies.  As a Colombian, her instinct was to put lots of color into the style, but after some market research, she discovered her market really wanted neutrals. This comes to a core Splendid Yoga tenet: SELL IT BEFORE YOU CREATE IT. Diana agrees that social media, especially Facebook groups, are one of the most powerful ways to do just that! 

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Ashley Mansour is a book strategist and the founder of LA Writing Coach. Have a book in your soul ready to be unearthed? Sign up for her Profitable Book Formula starting in January! In her own words: “I want to empower women entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and business owners and show them that they can absolutely leverage their existing knowledge and expertise to not only create an amazing book, but one that will best-sell, generate profit, and grow your business to at least 6 figures! If I can do it, you can do it too!!” 

Kelsey Delane worked for Corepower Yoga for over 7 years. As she describes it, the practice of yoga is learning how to increase joy and decrease suffering by learning how to master the mind. With a background in psychology, she is uniquely qualified to guide her students through that. Eventually, she couldn’t put her name to the business practices she witnessed and live in her integrity. It was relatable and accessible for her in spite of the name making her suspect of how yogic the practice would be. A friend of hers invited her to class, and she appreciated how accessible the yoga class was. Her background in psychology helped her understand the intrinsic value of yoga. She taught for several years before getting into management. As a working single mom, she wanted to streamline her life, and working full time in the yoga world was the best way to do that. In management, she loved being in the studio setting wearing “glorified pajamas.” It felt like her work life and spiritual life could be one of the same, but the culture of overworking was difficult to navigate. The salary, of course, was low enough that she couldn’t afford an apartment. Because she was on salary, she couldnt work more than 40 hours a week without bringing her daughter to work, so she set boundaries around her work life. That brought in pressure that she wasn’t performing because she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her home time. She developed a program studying the yoga sutras, generating income for the studio the knowledge she’d received outside of the studio, and when she sought due compensation for the additional value she was bringing, she was told it wasn’t in the budget. The pressure of enrollment was intense for Kelsey. The expectation was to hit quotas whether someone was ready for or could afford the program. She was explicitly trained to encourage students to go into debt to afford teacher training programs. In fact, her trainer told her, “I lie to people all the time to make them feel good.” Pure manipulation, huh? When I asked her what needs to change, she said, “Honest dialogue.” When she brought up manipulative and unethical sales practices, she got pushback and accusations that she wasn’t practicing gratitude or being a team player. As she says, “They receive the feedback and do nothing with it.” Nowadays, she offers yoga therapy to increase prana and mitigate suffering. 

Tami Lane found an incredible resource in Corepower Yoga when the Seasonal Affective Disorder that comes with living in Portland led her to the hot yoga studio. She made her way to LA and into CPY management, and that's where the sanctuary shifted. Because of the high turnover, the massive growth, the lack of clear leadership and expectation, she found herself struggling with managing the CPY studio while still needing to hold down a job as a hairstylist to make enough money. Good news though: she's making her way to Ecuador, where she and her partner are hoping to offer the teachings of yoga through retreats and trainings.

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Nicole Syverson is an empowerment coach for women. She helps heal emotional and sexual trauma to heal the relationship between your body and your bank account. Yay! Her yoga world started when she was in massage therapy training, and after a particularly opening trikonasana, her intuition guided her to her first 200 hour yoga teacher training in Rishikesh, India. Even though she was terrified of public speaking, she went on to do her 300 hour training in Bali, and then got into the Corepower world through their extensions mentorship program.  She loved the foundation of knowledge that Corepower gave teachers, especially how to cue, and the intelligent sequencing. The community and homogeny that makes it the "Starbucks of yoga" is what made it feel like home for her no matter where she traveled. The flexibility of getting classes covered also served her wanderlust heart. She ran into similar problems that other teachers and managers have had: there was a lot of pressure on the financial side, she was specifically discouraged from having another job even though she couldn't afford to work fulltime for Corepower, and she was not allowed to promote her own services as an empowerment coach, removing a valuable resource from the students. She was made to feel ungrateful for asking for a raise. Her biggest message now is: know whatever happens in your past, it doesn't define your potential. 

You might know Joe's voice if you're an avid gamer (he's a voiceover actor!), or you might know him from teaching at CPY. He loved the teachers, the sense of community, and the fact that he got stronger and more flexible the more he practiced there. Because he didn't rely on CPY for a primary source of income, getting paid wasn't an issue for him, but he did see it become an issue when the most popular teachers weren't incentivized to stay. The corporate yoga community in general needs to be more open to receiving and acting on the feedback it receives, and he felt the managers didn't have the authority or training to make decisions that would make the studio a better place.

Tony Baker was able to use the marketing skills and community to build his own fitness business, FitGroupUSA. He eventually grew out of the model with his entrepreneurial spirit, but had a lot of gratitude for the family he was able to cultivate from the CPY community. He differentiates himself from the CPY lineage by listening to his community and acknowledging their feedback with a reason for why or why he can’t take their suggestion. Like everyone I spoke with, the low pay for managers and teachers was a problem. It’s a systemic problem: we as a culture don’t value education. Tony’s business contracts with fitness professionals at a rate 3-6 times what CPY pays its employees. They offer everything from chair yoga to qi gong to hula-hooping. 

Anushree walked into the studio for her first C1 and was humbled, like so many of us are, by her first yoga class. She used the practice to heal her PCOS (Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome), and now works as a PCOS coach with women around the world to help heal their bodies. Coach Nush loved the management at the Atlanta Corepower Yoga where she worked, and experienced and incredible breadth of community that encouraged her to take a teacher training, try out, and coach two teacher trainings herself. One of the best parts about CPY is its ability to give students the support network through these big transitions. 

Kari Cowell worked for CPY for 4 years under both the franchise and the corporate studios. A bit of a nomad, she loved that she knew she could get a job teaching yoga anywhere she moved, and she had the comfort of the familiarity of corporate branding.  The pay structure was frustrating, as it was for many teachers, for the level of work and experience, but ultimately, it fed Kari's desire to be her own boss. She's taken advantage of lockdown, took a bunch of business courses (including one of mine!) and now offers her work online as a spiritual healer, yoga teacher, and dating coach - yay! 

You can check out here stuff here: 

Aliza worked for CPY for 3.5 years. She loved that the training she took made her feel equipped to teach, and the community that allowed her to look forward to her time behind the desk bonding with teachers and students.  She also had to work 3 other jobs to support herself while working nearly 40 hours a week at Corepower. The toxic positivity - the "attitude of gratitude" - was used as a reason not to give her a raise for the work she was doing, and she found her requests for a more reasonable working wage fell on deaf ears, which was frustrating for a company rooted in feedback. It was also frustrating when the teacher trainings moved into quality over quantity. In order to support the expansion, CPY had to train and hire a lot of teachers - quickly. This led to a generation of teachers that were not well-educated in anatomy and how to safely direct students. Aliza now teaches online at privateyogaathome.com. 

You can also find her at her social media homes: 

Elyse Pancheri, mother of Eagle, Master of Crow, worked at CPY for 7 years and loved the community and the students. When I asked her what changed, it was all the things that have been recorded in lawsuits against the company, including the unpaid wages lawsuit for which the plaintiffs were awarded $1.65 million in a class action lawsuit. (A quick google search revealed two other lawsuits in which Corepower Yoga is currently embroiled: backing out of a M&A deal, and continuing to charge its members for classes after they have canceled their accounts). (Lawyers like to get involved in businesses with big investors.) 

The corporate yoga model is emblematic of systemic problems that we as a patriarchal, capitalistic culture are realizing needs to change. On this season, I chat with a few Corepower Yoga teachers to figure out what we want that change to look like. Please reach out if you’d like to be interviewed for this series!

I was absolutely entranced by Lisa Rose, a sex, pleasure, & embodiment coach who helps women prioritize pleasure and have wayyyy more of it! She firmly believes pleasure is a revolutionary act. 

A world of women embodying their pleasure is the world she’s committed to creating Lisa is the founder of The Pleasure Academy, a monthly membership program exclusively for women ready to make sex, love, dating, and pleasure, hella pleasurable! 

Stephanie Bousley is a personal finance author and a HUGE inspiration in the student loan game. 

She shares her story of why and how she moved to Singapore to pay off 6 figures of student loans. 

She learned so much, so wrote a book about it! "BUY THE AVOCADO TOAST, A Guide To Crushing Student Debt, Making More $$$, and Living Your Best Life" tells the true story of a millennial debtor-turned-success story. 

It's all about Stephanie found financial freedom, and she provides a treasure trove of unconventional ideas to help you do the same. I love Stephanie's unconventional story, especially now that she's figured out how to use debt comfortably to get her to her goals faster. 

Kids, this podcast is NSFW!! We talk about the existence of sex, specific sex acts, and the other types of things you can imagine happen in a strip club. Kari Cowell and I know each other through the CorePower world, where we are both yoga teachers. I really wanted to hear Kari's story of how she decided to become a sex worker / stripper, how it affected her relationship with money, and her advice to anyone thinking of taking on stripping as a source of income. 

You can get in touch with Kari at her Instagrams: 

I loved this conversation with Melissa Kim Corter 💛 so much that I’m actually repurposing it! 

I released this in my Splendid Yoga Daily Meditations podcast, and it’s such a good conversation, I wanted to share it here too. 

Melissa helps you discover your relationship to money and power. As she says, “Money is a mirror.”  

Melissa used to do intuitive work helping heal energy blocks, but found that her clients needed to do a lot of work around MONEY.  She uses hypnotherapy and tapping (EFT) to help her clients look at their conceptual reality. 

We discuss how the decisions I made at age 18 allowed me to make my dreams come true at age 28, and why it didn’t need to take that long.  We dig into clear sentience and how to develop psychic ability.  

And we chat about some The Prosperity Game, to generate goodwill around receiving and managing money (this is a free program!).  

How to keep the social media momentum going! Sign up for all those freebies, be willing to evolve, and keep studying yourself.

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Hootsuite? Planoly? Later? Have you used these social media scheduling apps before? I’m going to talk about why I DON’T, and why I prefer to outsource small tasks on a project basis to a team of VAs I keep on retainer.

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Ready to start writing? Get your meditation in, do some journaling or research, and learn how to edit yourself or hire someone to edit your writing. From there, make a social media map that makes sense to you to market research your content as it spreads across your channels. Here’s the content creation equation: problem ➡️ vulnerability ➡️ solution ➡️ call to action

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YES, you need to interact daily in social media - so make sure you pick social media that you love! Facebook and Instagram are easy ways to crowdsource content, and you can use that to filter the content to longer-term mediums like blogs, podcasts, and email lists.

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How’s that imposter syndrome going for you? We’re gonna y’all about how to fail enthusiastically, the BIGGEST issue my clients deal with when starting their business, how to GIVE YOURSELF CREDIT for how far you’ve come, and a brainstorm of the top 5 problems I’ve solved in my life, and the top 5 problems my clients bring to me.

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We’re gonna go into this in WAY more details in the Money Manifestation Course, but here’s a very basic primer on how to use your existing network to find your best clients, and how to have the confidence to push through imposter syndrome.

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This is a very basic rundown of why it’s SO important to have multiple income streams and how to create those active, passive, and semi-passive income streams you need to live life on your terms. 

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We’re gonna talk about a super sexy subject, y’all: BUDGETING!! 

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Y’all have some SERIOUS debt. I used to too! It’s okay; you can actually use debt to your advantage as long as you’re mindful about it 😊 Listen up for my top 10 ways to pay it off. 

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This is how I learned all about money! This is how I got myself into debt, how I got myself out of debt, and how I now use debt to grow my empire. 

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