Transcript of The 6-Figure Yogi

Welcome to the I Am Charles Schwartz Show. In this episode, we're unrolling our yoga mats and diving deep into the world of wellness entrepreneurship with Shana Meyerson, the visionary who transformed a personal passion into a global yoga empire. With a journey that spans from Hollywood boardrooms to yoga studios worldwide, Shana has cracked the code on turning downward dogs into upward profits. From pioneering children's yoga to scaling her business across continents, Shana's story is a masterclass in niche market domination and adaptability. In this conversation, Shana peels back the layers of her extraordinary career pivot. She reveals how she leveraged her corporate background to revolutionize the yoga industry, turning a saturated market into a gold mine of opportunity. You'll discover why your unique life experiences are your greatest business asset. And how embracing failure can lead to unprecedented success. Shana unveils her yoga of money, philosophy, demonstrating how conscious capitalism can align profit with purpose. She shares her strategies for weathering industry upheavals from economic downturns to global pandemics, all while maintaining a thriving business and a commitment to charitable giving. If you're ready to transform your passion into a profitable enterprise, grab your journal and prepare to revolutionize your approach to entrepreneurship in the wellness space.

Shana's insights are practical, inspiring, and packed with actionable strategies that could redefine your business trajectory. Whether you're a yoga instructor looking to scale, an entrepreneur seeking to pivot, or a business owner wanting to infuse more purpose in to your profit model, this episode is your roadmap to success. The show starts now. Welcome to the I am Charles Schwartz Show, where we don't just discuss success, we show you how to create it. On every episode, we uncover the strategies and tactics that turn everyday entrepreneurs into Unstoppable Powerhouses in their businesses and their lives. Whether your goal is to transform your life or hit that elusive seven, eight, or nine-figure mark, we've got the blueprint to get you there. The show starts now.

All right, welcome back. Today, we're with someone who does things that I never even thought was possible, but we're getting into it. How are you? Welcome to the show.

Hey, it's so awesome to be here.

Before we get into the fact that you're this six-figure yoga instructor and you do phenomenal things and your health's amazing, let's give some people some preamble. Tell us your story. How did you get here? Tell us more about you.

I'm Shana Meyerson, and I actually have two different businesses. I have yoga, Athletica, which is super athletic, hard core yoga. Then I mini yogis, which is the opposite, which is yoga for kids. Actually, though yoga athletic is my primary business, now mini yogis is the one that's going to be more interesting to you because that's what made me my fortune. I have always been an intense athlete, obsessed about athletics. And many times I thought, Oh, I should be a personal trainer back in my previous life as a corporate person in real world. And I never did because just plain old physical fitness just didn't seem like enough for me. I needed more. When I discovered yoga, it was the mental and the physical. And then that extra spiritual piece that spoke to me on a level that said, this is everything that I have been looking for in life, and I really need to share this. And I wound up leaving the corporate world. I was also getting my MBA at UCLA at the time. I left my MBA program, which was insane. I decided to be a yoga instructor. I didn't know if I'd ever earn another dollar, but it turns out I have.

You're In your previous life before you did this, you were in corporate America. You did some pretty amazing stuff because some people are like, Oh, well, she's always just done this. No, this is just one side of you. Tell me a little bit more about what you did before you opened up all of that.

Yeah. So I actually am also overly educated, which is not a great point of honor these days. But I only say is to say I was really on a different path, really on a different path. I'm like a zig and a zagger. My goal in life is to just make sure I do what I love. I think that, honestly, that is the formula for not just success in business and financially, but also just in life. If you have to dread five-sevenths of your life, you're doing something wrong. I don't care how many more millions or billions of dollars you're earning than I am. This is life. This is not submission to business. I totally forgot my train of thought.

It's okay. You started up and you go to Ivy League school. Oh, yeah. Then you were in corporate America. Tell me about corporate America. What were you doing?

Right. So, broadly enough, I went to school for law. That was what I did. And then, instead of doing what a normal person would do from there, which is go to law school, I decided to go to Hollywood. I mean, I'm from Southern California. I don't mean go to Hollywood. I'm here, but to work in the film industry, to become a writer. And so I worked at one of the the big three talent agencies. And I was there working with a man who now has the biggest deal in Hollywood history, a movie deal. So he taught me the ins and outs, not just of Hollywood, but really of business. And then I was in the film industry for about seven years. It's funny because when I went to leave, I tried for a year, a year to get a job with Nike, and it didn't happen. I interviewed a million jobs, and then I wound up getting the job I wanted for Nike, oddly enough, with Microsoft instead. It's only odd because I was an Apple person always. It's okay. Well, no, I mean, I don't think you mind, but Microsoft, I'm like... But They hired me to be basically their traveling roadshow.

I don't know what else to call it. I was like a spokesperson. I talked at big events. I was somewhere between a marketing program I'm literally not a marketing person, but a marketing program is how I was labeled in sales. I didn't actually sell. I was more like the information person. I worked there for a while. And of course, I went into. Com from there because That's what you did around the turn of the century. And that brought me to yoga, which was a complete hit me out of nowhere, to be honest. If you had told me the day, the day before I discovered yoga, that I would ever in a million years be a yoga instructor, I would have laughed in your face. Twenty-two years later, I'm not laughing anymore. Here I am.

It's interesting because I have a Microsoft background as well. We never talked about this beforehand. I'm actually an MCT, and before that, I was an MCSE. For those of the listeners who don't know what that is, it's a Microsoft Certified System Engineer and Microsoft Certified Trainer. I was a super dork. There's probably events that we probably crossed paths before because I used to speak at events about this all the time, especially as an MCT. We probably crossed paths and we just didn't know it. Look, cool things you find out. I then went and I sold my IT company and doing what I'm doing now. If you had told me a very similar story, if you said, Hey, you're going to be doing this, you're going to be scaling businesses, and you're going to be helping people. If you would have told me that day, I would be like, Absolutely not. I'm an IT guy. I'm a dork. That's what I do. If you would have said the same thing before I did a podcast, and you're going to be a come up podcast, I'm like, No, I'm not doing it. So I get that. You've done something magical, though.

Most people I know that are in the the yogi space, the wellness, the spiritual space, most of them don't have your background. Most of them don't have your knowledge, your training, your Ivy League schooling, which I agree, it's not the best thing in the world right now. But we'll try to avoid that topic. But most of them don't have that. You took that information and that knowledge and that experience being in that industry and create a really successful practice that you've been doing for 22 years. For people who are like, Oh, well, these strategies will only work in one specific industry, no. Strategies are strategies are strategies. If you're going to try and scale something, you're just going to scale it. You've gone out, you've transferred into this. 22 years ago, you said, I'm going to be a yogi, and I'm going to be a yogi instructor, which I don't think is the same thing, but you're going to do that. When you walked into it, explain what your business is and how it works.

Okay. To be honest, when I started, okay, so this Let's put this in context, okay, and why yoga spoke to me on such a visceral level that I was willing to give up everything for it. I discovered yoga about three weeks before 9/11. I'm like the 9/11, not just like general 9/11. And I got into it really, really fast. And when 9/11 hit, I felt like it was yoga that helped me to maintain my sanity. It's almost like God was like, If I give this to you a few weeks in advance, you'll have some time to at least absorb it a little bit because something really bad is about to come, and this is going to help you. And I think that that was Those first three weeks, I was just so enthralled. Like, what is this magical sorcery? Like, what's going on here? But then I was like, wow, okay, this actually serves a very practical purpose in my life more than just like, do I have a nice body? Do I not have a nice body? Or even just, am I healthy? Which is I was obsessive about the gym before then. So when that happened, I really started looking at it as a formula for living.

Now, I was older. I don't even know if you were alive on 9/11, but I wouldn't- I was.

I was working at a hospice at the time. I remember exactly where I was when it happened.

Okay. Because I'm 52 now, so I was pretty old. I was- Seventy. Yeah. Okay. You're baby maybe. So I was almost 30. And if I could rewind one more time, I didn't want to go to Cornell. I really, really did it. I wanted to go to Stanford. I really, really did. And I didn't get into Stanford. And I know I'm going way back now, but what happened was I was the golden child. I could do no wrong. I won every award. I was the captain of every team. I had a four million average in school. I had the highest SATs. I mean, the things. I had never failed in any significant way until I was 18 years old or 17 years old. When I did not get into Stanford, I thought my life was over. I mean, I literally was like, This is where it ends. And it's funny because I was a very competitive tennis player. I think we talked about this, did we? About No. Okay. So I was a very competitive tennis player, and that weekend, I was the number one draw in the tournament that I was playing. I played tournaments every weekend.

I lost the first game. Not the first Set, not the first, whatever, second set, the first game. I walked off the court and I never went back. I was number one. See, that's where I was in my life. I carried that burden with me because I was young. I went to college when I was 17 until I was 30. Oh, okay. For 13 years, I thought I was worth nothing. It didn't Yes, I went to an Ivy Lee school, but it wasn't where I wanted to go. It wasn't where I felt like I deserve the things. But you know what happens when you're that judgmental of yourself? You become that judgmental of everybody else. When I found yoga, and it was the first time in my life, and I don't blame my parents for this, it's not their fault. I was the golden child, just a very typical middle child. When I got into yoga, it was the first time anybody had ever told me it was okay to fall, ever. I was 30. That was- That's a late start on that one. It was a big eye opener. After just a few months of practicing, I was like, Why didn't anyone tell me this when I was three?

Why did I have to wait till I was 30 to find out that I'm not—I don't know if this is family show, a piece of whatever, that I was still worthwhile, even though I didn't accomplish this one big goal that I had spent 17 years trying to accomplish. So my big idea was not as simple as, let's just leave the world and become a yoga instructor. Back then, yoga instructors were earning an average of, I I think $17,000 a year. Even in 2002 terms, that was crazy. I'm like, what if I teach yoga to kids? And that was That's what makes sense now that I understand why you took us on that journey because now we're going to teach that. That's right, because I'm a queen of tangents.

Yeah, I was like, Okay, now it makes sense. Because I was going to ask her, Why yoga to kids? Now it makes sense. You've tied it together.

Exactly.

Because you learn that the only way you can succeed is to fail. It's one of the hardest things that... I was lucky because I was a pitcher, which might be insulting to everybody who's ever been a pitcher before. I was a thrower. I threw balls somewhere in that general direction. Sometimes it would hit the strike zone. Most of the time, it would hit the person next to the strike zone, which is how I knew I was getting close. I was horrible. Horrible. But I had a really good arm. Every time I would mess up, I'd get reencouraged. The coach was like, Great, cool. Let's adjust this. I was never punished for failing, where in school, it was the opposite. It was a very similar experience you had, which was like, You can't fail. If you fail, you're bad. You're going to go to detention. We're going to give you bad grades, so on and so forth. I learned it through sports, and you got to learn it through yoga. But it's interesting, you were a top seed in tennis, and no one had ever had that lesson with you. I think it's just a narrative that even in business and with entrepreneurs today, we don't talk about it enough.

I tell people all the time, You're not going to succeed your way to success. You're going to have to fail. If you're not failing fast enough, you're not going to succeed faster. It's that simple. When we were doing IT sales, we were getting every single one of the sales calls would close. I was like, This isn't going to work. I I'm locked in and I'm like, I'm mad. They're like, Why? I go, Because every one of our sales calls is closing. They're like, Why are you mad at that? I go, Because we're not calling enough people. If we're closing every single one of these, I want us to have a 30% failure ratio. Keep calling people till we hit a 30%, and then the business exploded. You got a failure rate of success.

Or your price point isn't high enough.

I was lucky. I was in Bocca, so our price point was stupid. We just presented well. We just presented really, really well. We outdid everybody by about 20%. We just built in our messaging that was just bulletproof because we realized that, and you're in IT, so you're in it. You're supposed to be IT, so you get it. People didn't give it about tech. They didn't care. I would walk in, I'm like, Listen, we're in hurricane country. A dragon can physically eat your building, and I can set you up in the world and you'll be able to do payroll. You'll be able to operate anywhere in the world. You can walk into Mumbai and walk into a coffee shop and you'll be able to do your stuff. They're like, Whatever that is, I want that. That was our sales pitch. It was really simple and easy. It was just virtual machines. It was really what it is, hosted environment. No one was doing it back then, but again, this is early 2000s. You decide that you want to help out kids and you decide you want to teach yoga and you want to teach this practice to children.

How do you even begin? What are the practical steps? When you're like, Okay, I've done this. I'm going to start this. People are making 17,000 pesos at this point, it might as well been. How do we get in the environment where this is going to be financially successful? Because you've become exceptionally financially successful with this.

Yeah. I mean, let me just say that now in 2024, yoga for kids is ubiquitous. I hardly know a teacher who doesn't teach yoga to kids. But in 2002, it was considered to be absolutely ridiculous at best. I mean, I did the staff, which was, buy a URL, all the normal things, build a website, blah, blah, blah. But you're going to laugh because I started with, again, I'm so old, fact blast. Fact blast, because most people didn't even have... You're like, What's a Facts Blast?

See, that one, I don't even know what Facts Blast is. I'm an IT dork. What is Facts Blast? Okay.

Because most people didn't have emails in 2002. It seems so recent, but literally, a lot of people did not have an email. The internet was so nascent, it wasn't even easy to find an email, right? So a fax blast. And by the way, I was way ahead of the tech on this because I did it from- Are you saying fax?

Like F-A-I-X? A fax? Yeah. Okay, I thought you said fax. No fax. No, I'm not even doing fax blast. Oh, yeah, fax blast. Yeah, that I know. The Facts Blast. Oh, yeah, I remember these. Okay, so for those of you who aren't old like we are, there was this thing called fax machines, and you could send a piece of paper to another one, and it would print it out on their a fax machine. It was called a fax simuli. Yes, and these were blast. Okay, now I'm with you.

Right.

Some of you are going to have no idea.

It's going to be wild. Yeah, it's just like an email blast today.

Yeah, but it's physical copy.

Yeah. I just contacted Every preschool I could think of in Los Angeles. And of course, the two who replied were one in Malibu, which if you know LA at all, is way up north, and one in Hollywood, which was way east. I'm in Brentwood. Probably the two furthest ones that I contacted in opposite directions were the first two to contact me. I'm like, Okay, true.

For those of you who have not been to LA, you have to understand, when she's mentioning this, it might as well be, if you're in Miami, it might as well be Delaware at this point because of the traffic. It is just unbelievably far. It's just a hassle to get it. I used to go from the hills by the stadium into Culver City, and I would have to pack a lunch. I was like, I'm never going to get there. This is horrible. I'm never going to get there. Anyway, you got these two people, I replied to you. It was brutal. Okay, so- You get these two people to reply to Right.

Here's what's pretty insane. The way that my business went nuts, like nuts, I was like, Okay, this wasn't really as much a concept back then as it is now, but what is going to be my niche market? I'm thinking, Okay, well, what differentiates me? What I came up with is Jew. That was literally all I come up with. I'm Jewish. So I sent a fax blast to the Jewish school that was different. And it said, I remember it said, Putting the Om back in Shalom. And I fax blasted it out. But this is so crazy. So one of the rabat... Oh, so I'm like, do I send it to Chabbat, which is the most religious? If you're not Jewish, it's like the people with the hats and the beards and the jackets, the all the things. I'm like, There's no way that they're going to want yoga. No way. But I'm like, It's seven tasks and a send. So why not? I'm like, Okay, whatever. Send. A second later, the rabbi calls me, and he says... But it wasn't even for mini-yogis, ugly enough. He goes, My wife just said she wants to start yoga.

Do you also work with adults? Now, my rule, and so I grew up in LA, which means everyone has done a little bit of acting here. The rule in improv is no matter what the question is, you just... Hey, yeah. The answer was no, but I said yes. And he says, Okay, well, can you come work with my wife? I'm like, Of course. I go work with her. Fine. So there's this big family of well brothers and a sister who ran all of the chabbads. And you don't have to be from LA to understand the pattern I'm about to give you. They had Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, Mali, Malibu, Brentwood. So what's the pattern?

You hit the goldmine.

That's right. This family was like the royalty, and they had all the wealthiest congregations. I started working with her. She says, My sister has a preschool in Malibu. Can you work with her? This is where that came from. I said, Sure. I worked with her. She says, My sister-in-law has a camp in Pacific Palisades. Can you work with them? I said, Sure. Then she said, We have a mommy and me. Can you work with them? Sure. Malibu again goes, Wait, you do mommy and me? Can you work with us? Sure. Now, here's where it gets crazy. One of the women who comes to mommy and me, well, actually, they said, Can you do our women's group? And I said, Sure. Now, one of the women who went to the women's group says, My husband works for Hughes Research Labs. Can you do it for them? Now I'm in the real world. I mean, not that not that, Khabbat, isn't the real world because Chabbat around their whole community. But from HRL, I started working with their wives and their husbands and their whatever. My whole business was built by approaching that one rabbi that in a million years I never thought would be the one who would actually respond.

It was also built on you niche down. We talk about this all the time, inch wide, mile deep. If someone's coming in and they want to break down how to find their niche, because you've done this for a while, what are some of the things that you would advise? If someone came in and said, Listen, I don't know how to find a niche. I don't know how to do this. What are the steps that I need do in order to identify and then penetrate into a niche?

Sure. Well, the first thing is you have to identify the problem that you could provide the solution for, and then you have to figure out who has that problem. But the problem with that problem is that you have to honestly be able to solve it. I think that it's gotten a little sloppy these days where people are like, Oh, everyone wants to earn $10,000 selling their course online. I mean, how many people are selling that right now? And they don't have the answer. They're just stealing from the other person who stole from the other person who stole from the other person. And so it's like this trickle down, which is not the good trickle down. It's that when we hear information, scientifically, they say we don't absorb more than 30% of the information that we receive. Let's say that you're getting it from the third or fourth person who has passed it down, What's left? What's left? My recommendation is, not only did I wish I had this when I was three, to be honest, I don't think there's anyone in the whole world who loves children more than I love children. I honestly believe that.

I love children with every ounce of my being. If you don't love children, I don't care how much you think that this is the niche that's going to make you a million dollars, you're going to suck. You're going to suck. Let me tell you, remember I said that I came to Hollywood after school because I wanted to be a writer? You know what I went up doing in Hollywood is what's called script development, which is basically what people would think of as editing screenplays, which is rewriting other people's work, which is I I was never willing to leave a job or a stable, secure paycheck to be a writer. So I was never going to make it as a writer because it was a side hustle. But when I said, I am ready to give up everything to pursue this concept of helping children, which is so deep in my heart of something that I wanted to do to change the world, I didn't know if I'd earn another dollar, I was earning six figures within probably the second year. Again, the outcome being $17,000 a year.

When you broke down your niche, you're like, not only am I going to solve a specific problem, I'm going to identify a specific problem. You leveraged the fact that you were part of that community already, so you had access into that community because you go into it. But more importantly, you did in a way that aligned with your passions of who you were and what you love on the highest level. People will think, Oh, well, she just got lucky. It's not just getting lucky. There's tactical things you did there that most people will just pass over in the story because they're like, Oh, she mailed a bunch of rabbis, and then they introduced the community, and then magically money came out of the toilet. It's like, That's not what happened here. There's a lot of those little things because being able to help entrepreneurs all the time, if you haven't nailed yourself down in this way, and if you haven't picked it to the point where it's that identified, that you're eliminating a problem that you actually can solve, because to your point, you can go buy a million different courses. They're a dime a dozen at this point.

They're not going to work. Because the regurgitations and the people... Even if they're really good, you're not going to get the follow through with it. Now that you're in this and you've penetrating this community, did you look into scaling? Is it just you? What did you decide that you wanted to do? Once you got into the community.

Right. Basically, there were two other people doing this on any significant scale that I knew, one in Indiana and one in New York at the time. I was not only the only game in town, I was one of the only games on Earth. When I say these two, I mean in the Western world. I don't know of a single person who is doing it yet in Europe, for example. I had At first, I'm like, Okay, well, whatever. I'll teach whoever wants me to teach, right? And then what happened was I'm one person. And as my bubby would say, my grandma, you could only have your two of us in one place at a time. You can't be at two schools at one time. I started doing teacher trainings. It wasn't my intention or thought at all. Again, I was expecting I'm going to be earning $20,000 a year. That was my realistic expectation at that point. So I'm like, Okay, well, I'll do these trainings. And then I started hiring the people who I trained to take over my overflow. And then I started teaching trainings all over the world. And because I was one of just a couple of people who were doing this and they weren't really traveling, I mean, I remember, I went to Zurich.

I used to cap at 20, but they took 30, but they got 60. So I wound up doubling. I wound up doing two trainings in one weekend, which meant 10 hours a day instead of 5 hours a day or whatever. I had 30 in every city. I ended up bumping it up to 30 because everyone was like, Well, we've got this huge waitlist. I'm like, Okay, well, I could handle 30. I don't think it was ideal. I think it was bigger than it should have been. It was obscene. I was traveling 20, 25 weekends a year before the pandemic started. Each weekend, you're talking up to $15,000 for 10 hours.

Not a bad gig if you can get it. When you started training people, did you think about opening up practices? Did you think about what did you decide that you wanted to do? How did you want to monetize it so it was sustainable? Because you could have sat there and worked every single weekend on the planet and burnt yourself out and just absolutely died because people don't get that. That's the other side of this. Just because you've built this wonderful system and you're scaling, that machine will chew you up unless you automate yourself out of it. So when did you make that decision that you're like, Okay, I've got to pivot here. I've got to figure out a different way because if not, I'm going to pull my hair up.

Right. And it's so funny you should say that because there was one day where I woke up in my own bed and I didn't I don't know where I was. And that was a day that I realized, I can't keep this up. I need some grounding. Ondly enough, that was very shortly before the pandemic. So it was like, God made the whole pandemic happen for me or something. But there was actually something else that happened. This has to do again with defining yourself as a professional and how you wish to be perceived in the world. And so though I was known throughout the world as this kid's yoga instructor, I also happen to be one of the most advanced adult instructors, which is literally the opposite end of the spectrum. Anywhere. My specialty is hand stance and all the crazy, crazy contortions and stuff. And I'm a very, very serious practitioner. I practice at least 2 hours every day. And I I was doing the yoga athletic in Los Angeles, but I was doing mini yogis on travel. One time I said to... I would become very good friends with the studio owners because I would go back every year to train their people.

I said one year, I said probably about 10 years ago, Can I do some handstand workshops while I'm there? Can I do some yoga, athletic, whatever? What they said to me, with all due respect, because again, I literally consider them like sisters. I'm so close with them. They said, Everybody knows you as a kid's instructor. No one will take you seriously. That, I was like, Okay, it's true. I had to decide at that point. I'll ask you, if you had a kid and somebody comes and works with your kid, how likely are you to be like, Oh, that's probably the right teacher for me, too.

Unless I saw her, my default would be exactly what the market did. She's just a kid instructor. I'd have to see her.

But let's reverse that. If I'm your instructor and I'm amazing, and I say, By the way, I also work with kids, how are you going to feel about me working with your kids?

It's a completely different narrative.

You see what I'm saying?

Absolutely. You changed the marketing.

That's right. I pivoted to yoga, athletics, very hard. But there's a lesson to be learned in this because I cut off my nose despite my face. I took an industry that I had created and owned, and I laughed at... Not laughed at, not laughed at. I still work with kids, but I moved all of my marketing over to yogaathletica because I can see your face when I said that you're like, Okay, no brainer. Right? But what's the difference? The yoga for kids market at the time was still very small, and I was a big fish in a small pond, and I pivoted to the biggest pond. That's small fish in a small pond.

So how are you doing that now? What is your game plan now? Do you pivot back? Do you retake your pond? Or what is your game plan?

Well, first of all, all the dynamics of the yoga world changed during the pandemic. I probably don't to get into that for you to understand what happened when everything pivoted from A, it's not safe to be in big groups, B, you don't have to drive anymore or park or do the things that in LA we hate doing, and C, oh, by the way, It's all free now. Because that's what happened during the pandemic. Everything went online for free. It's like, okay, a few people went viral on YouTube, and they own the market. Everything changed. Changed, of course. I have a good social media presence. My YouTube is my calling card. You go there, you understand what my skills are. So it's worked out simply because I do have a skill set that not only very few people have, but very few, almost 53-year-olds next month have, which means that, A, most of my students, honestly, are pretty young, 20s and 30s. But I also have women in the 50 to 80-year-old range who are coming to me and saying, I want to do what you do, which is amazing.

It is. It absolutely is. My great-aunt, because not all the terms we can use here are Yiddish, but my great-aunt is... She's 93. I'm like, I wish she had done this 15 years ago, 20 years ago, because her abilities would be completely different. She has all of her facilities, but she has to stop driving because she doesn't have the upper body strength anymore to turn the wheel. You just don't think about it. She's just like, I'm around her. She's like, I just don't have the upper body strength to physically turn the car fast enough, and everything else is fine. So very blessed, but there's only so much you can do when you lose that muscle. When you go through this, you've had radical success, you've done pivoting, you've learned how to fail. All of a sudden, though, when When this happens, your mindset when it comes to money has to change as well. You've got some serious awareness around this, and I'd love to talk about and share some of this because some people will never make 15,000 in a weekend. They're just not going to do it. They're never going to do it. As someone who's done it routinely and who had did it for a really long time, and then all of a sudden COVID shows up and everything changes, there's a different mindset that comes with this.

We don't talk about this enough as scalers. As we come in this environment, we're scaling businesses. When I I started scaling businesses and I was doing it over and over and over and it was great. Very similar situation you had. I woke up and I was like, I don't even recognize myself. I would look in the mirror and I was getting dressed to go and I was like, I don't even know who I am. I was like, I have to stop doing this. So you couldn't recognize your own bed. I couldn't recognize the guy looking back in the mirror and I was like, This isn't going to work. It's a byproduct of spending eight years in a hospice watching people die. You will start valuing your time very differently. I think your practice led you into some insights when it comes to money that most people haven't the slightest. So I would love to talk about that if you're open to it.

Yes. I really do love talking about the yoga of money because I think that people don't understand this confluence. For reasons that I can't understand, people think it's okay to pay an actor $20 million or a football player $100 million, but a rabbi or a priest or a yoga instructor or a teacher, it would be obscene for them to earn that money. I think that that speaks a lot to the values of society. I can tell you that as a yoga instructor, that gets projected onto me a lot as well, that people expect everything to be free or to be affordable to them or whatever. And by the way, I always work on sliding scales. If someone can't afford something, I will make sure that they get what they need. But at the same time, if you can afford me, don't shame me by telling me you can't, right? Because what you're saying is that you don't value what I offer. And so part of the yoga of money, honestly, is being willing to own your own self-worth. Because as one of the broad concept of yoga honestly, is that all humans are equal. I mean, it's not that weird of a concept, but it is.

And not just equal, but actually the same. I love this concept. If you think of a bubble, right? And you being a bubble, right? If you were to pop the bubble, we'll call it death, you pop the bubble, what's the difference between what was inside and what's now outside and what was outside the bubble is nothing. And so that's the yoga concept of a soul, is that we We have these compartments, but there's nothing that actually separates us. How could I say that the President of the United States is worth more than a garbage collector, the mayor is worth more than the mayor is worth more than a yoga instructor? I can't. But the flip side of the yoga money is If you don't have money, you can't give money. I think that one of my... I tive, meaning I give 10% of my income minimum every year to charity. These days, because my income has gone so low, I literally pay it out of my savings. That's how important it is to me. I think that that money, this The concept that money is evil only applies if you don't use it for good, and that if you're a good person, money is not the evil anymore than a gun doesn't kill a person.

A person with a gun kills a person. Money is not evil, but evil people with money don't create good.

Yeah, see, for me, money is very similar to alcohol. It's an amplifier. If you're a fun, loving, exciting guy, and I give you a bunch of I don't drink. But if I give you a bunch of alcohol, you're probably just going to be a more fun-loving, outgoing guy. If you're a put, and I give you a bunch of alcohol, you're just going to be a bigger put. And I have found money is the same thing. It is an ampli... As I grew up, I couldn't afford the last few letters of poor. I grew up very, very broke. And as I started to have some financial freedom, it amplified very specific traits. And as I worked with my clients, and they were just getting more and more success, it amplified their traits as well. Right. It's one of those things... I love the example you just gave that, like guns a gun. I always use the example of a knife. I give a knife to a crazy person, he's going to try and stab me. I give that same knife to a chef, he's like, I'm going to have the best meal I've ever had in my life.

It really comes down to the person behind it. Doing yoga and doing these practices and doing these level of awarenesses, you can, and correct me if I'm wrong, because of my shoulder, I can't do yoga, it comes out of thought. It hurts. I can do some things of yoga. I can stand and clap. When you're doing this and you're doing these level practices, it's also a mental practice. You're discovering who you are as well in these, and you're diving deeper into it. If someone's coming into this and they're like, Okay, I love this. This is amazing. How do I launch? How do I scale? If I'm in the yogi world and you're one of the godmothers of this world, I guess, would be the nicest way to do it for Western world, and you're pivoting, you gave a little insight, and we skipped over it, which was, Hey, you originally started in this market, which was these baby yogis, right? You're doing this for the young ones. And all of a sudden now, because of just life, life keeps life on. Now there's this other market that's found you and say, Okay, holy crap, how are you doing this?

I want to do the same thing. And now you found a new niche that you can run into and you can start penetrating to. How does someone do that if they don't have the gifts and the blessings? How do they go into this? How can you advise them? Then also to be wise with their money so that when the money does reduce, they can continue to give.

Wow. Okay, that's a lot of questions I didn't write down, so I might have to ask you to repeat those. If I could rewind for one second on the money talk, which is keep in mind that another word for money is currency, and currency is shared vibration. If we think of money as energy, because it it is what it is, it's an exchange of energy, then we can understand a little more specifically how money works. Now, to go to your first question, which is, what if they don't have the skills and what if they don't have the knowledge. You're not going to like this answer. I do believe that, A, you need to be blessed to find your calling in this life. I think most people don't. And in fact, when I left the world and I left my MBA program and everything, I thought my parents would be so pissed off. But my mom supports everything, and my father literally said, You know what? I wish I ever found the thing that I loved. Go for it. That wasn't what I was expecting, but it's true. I think that not everything that we love in life is what we're to make a living at, unfortunately.

If you don't have a skill for it, I would just ask this, if we're speaking specifically about yoga, do you want to go to a yoga instructor that doesn't have the skill for it? I don't think this is or the knowledge or the experience or put in the hard work. When people think yoga, I know they think a lot of airy-fairy, and there is a lot. I'm not very business-oriented people, but you got to keep in mind, I had the toughest business training that there is outside of Wall Street. I mean, working in a Hollywood talent agency, a top 10, top 2 at the time, I was at ICM, it was number two, taught me how to be a crack business person. I work investment banker hours, and I always have. So this isn't like I go in teach three classes to five-year-olds and put on a clown outfit. This is super serious business for me. I know a lot of people who go into the yoga world are not ready to put in that work. I also, again, I hit my mat a minimum of 2 hours a day. If that means waking up at 5:00, I wake up at 5:00, but this has to happen, and I need to invest in myself.

This something that runs through my veins. Again, I would have loved to have been a successful screenwriter. I would have loved it, except for that I never put in the work. Obviously, I didn't actually have the passion that I thought I had. It's funny when your mind doesn't always know the truth about yourself. I think that if you... Well, the traditional question is, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't get paid for it? That's your calling. That's your calling. I think that yoga in specific is a pretty... I'll be nice and say saturated, but really oversaturated market right now. If you're not extraordinary at what you do, it's going to be hard to make a good living at it, to be honest.

I agree. If you're willing to put in the... The good news is there's so many people out there who are trying to do it, as you talk about as a saturated market, that don't have that discipline, that don't have that mentality, that don't have that, I'm going to get up at five and just make it happen. So in some ways, it's easier, and in other ways, it's a little bit more challenging because we are a connected world now more than we've ever been. You could have a kid that was... One of the guys that used to be in my mastermind, poor kid, he was 17 years old. He came into the mastermind and he was like, Hey, I want to learn. I'm like, I can't let you in here because I can't charge you because you're not an adult. I go, But you can audit it. He got what he needed, and then now he's doing seven figures a year and a half later.

Wow. I mean, what?

He just disciplined. He closes, and I can't talk about it too much, but he helps close for large hedge funds. Wow. He tapped into it and he's like, I'm going to learn how to do this. I don't like being poor. He went in and he started volunteering at one of the largest sales closing agencies in the world, the Braes out of Australia. He goes, I'm going to come and this is what I'm going to do. They're like, We're not going to pay you. He's like, I don't care. He'd learned from these guys and he dug in and he learned, and he was on the phones longer than anyone else, and he just mastered it. He was like, Okay, where's the money? Because he didn't have an exceptional set of skills. What he had was he was going to get on the treadmill, and either you were going to get off or he was going to die. And that's what's his discipline. He's like, I'm just going to do this. And he dug in. And because of that, he got rewarded for it. And if you're not God's gift, you're going to have to work a little bit harder.

It's just that's the nature of the beast. You're going to have to dig in. That's The thing, though, that I really wanted to talk about, and this was the last one, so I know I asked you a bunch of questions.

Yeah, what were the other 53?

What was the other 53 questions that I asked you? I wanted to talk about how when you get this awareness, the yoga of money, if someone goes into this, how do they find and they start dismissing their belief of, Oh, money's bad or money's good, or how do they start making peace with this? Because financial education right now and financial literacy is so poor in this How does someone start doing this? I mean, obviously, they're going to track you down and bother you, but what are two things they could do right now that are like, Hey, this is going to start about it. Is there things they could read? Are there things they could do? What are the things that would help them start building that?

I think that there's not a lot of financial literacy in this world, and especially people who aren't used to handling money have a tendency to spend it way more than they should. And so on a yoga level, it's funny, I've never thought about this, what I'm about to say, but coming back to the concept of if money is shared energy, which it is, and yoga is about balancing our energies, then if you want to live a balanced life in some form of homeostasis, then you need to treat your energy, the energy that you carry and the energy that you have in the form of currency with respect. The other thing is, quite honestly, in yoga, this is not a practice of access. I personally am a huge saver, and it's really paid off, again, with my charity work. But I think that also that when people get in the habit of giving, they also get in the habit of saving because they start understanding that there is a preciousness to giving that's so much greater. I don't care if I buy a new BMW. It doesn't feel half as good as sending money, a lot of money to a cause that I really deeply believe in, where maybe I know I'm saving a life.

It doesn't matter. Condos are nice, houses are nice, cars are nice. But that can't be what drives us in this world. I think that when we answer to a higher purpose, we'll naturally have a certain tendency to not overspend and overindulge. I would just say that financial literacy or not, there's something that's called common sense. That's not common. Yeah.

Common sense is not common.

When I think about a C-E-N-T-C-S, because a lot of these people are only earning sense. But you spend within your means, for example. If you're bad with money, I always say, then cut up credit cards, buy things with the money that you've got. It's that simple. I had a friend, had a friend. I had to let her go because she racked up $30,000 worth of debt with Target, and she never paid it. And she was mad that after seven years, they were still going after her. This is a yoga instructor. I'm like, You understand that it may be legal, but it's grand larceny. You just stole $30,000 of merchandise from a store. And I don't care if it's been seven years that they haven't caught you. That's not very yoga, my friend. And I think that also on the yoga basis, if people understand, I think people think of companies as things. We've got houses, we've got stores, we've got companies, we've got whatever nature. Companies are not things. Companies are people. I don't care if it's Nike, Target, Coca-Cola, or the mom and Pop down the street, down the street. During the small business days, and I'm all about supporting small business.

I'm a small business. When people are like, Oh, don't go to Starbucks, go to Alfred or whatever, I'm like, Okay, well, what do you think happens to the staff at Starbucks if nobody goes? Do you understand that those happen to be people, too? I think that that also changes things. When we start understanding that when we spend above our means we are stealing from people. And that is a very non-yoga concept. In fact, there's literally one of the Ten Commandments of yoga. They don't call it the Ten Commandments, but there are Ten Commandments is Esteia, which is literally not stealing. Selling. It's a good place to start.

I could probably steal tons more of your time, and I know people want to get access to you. How can people find you? What's the best way to track you down? If they want to start learning this stuff from someone who's been there through the ups and the downs, has done something that I don't know anybody else in your industry that's done it. Most of the people I know in your industry live in two-store Dorito bags and make the 17,000 a year. How do people find you? How How they track you down? What's the best way to connect to you?

Well, honestly, I have all my social links on my yogaathletica website. Yogaathletica has one A in the middle. Everyone spelled it wrong, and like 100 people have stolen my name, even though I own the copyright because I'm a business person. It's Y-O-G-A-T-H-L-E-T-I-C-A. All of my social links are in the top banner. My YouTube is pretty popular. I have to say, actually, for anyone who's interested, literally just a couple of weeks ago, I started a new private Facebook group, which is called the Asana Alchemist, Turning your yoga flow into income flow. It's all about strategies for leveling up your actual yoga business. I also welcome fitness and other related industries. People can ask or request to join my Asana Alchemist Group on Facebook as well.

To be able to monetize what you do, I don't think it's something I know how to do. It's impressive. I will track it out. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming on.

It's been so wonderful. I'm so glad that we had the chance to connect.

That wraps up our enlightening conversation with Shana Meyerson. We hope you found her journey from corporate powerhouse to yoga entrepreneur as inspiring and transformative as we did. A heartfelt thank you to Shana for sharing her incredible story and practical strategies with us today. Her approach to niche market domination, conscious capitalism, and creating a purpose-driven business model is truly revolutionary. To our listeners, your commitment to transforming your passions into profitable enterprises and becoming more conscious entrepreneurs motivates us to continue bringing you this high-caliber content. If you're eager to implement the strategies we discussed, we've prepared a comprehensive guide for you. This resource distills the key points from our conversation, including Shana's techniques for identifying your unique market position, scaling your expertise through teacher training, and implementing the yoga of money philosophy in your business. You can access this companion guide at podcast. Iamcharleschwartz. Com. Remember, as Shana emphasized, the key to success in a saturated market isn't just about working harder, but about leveraging your unique experiences, being willing to pivot, and maintaining a balance between profit and purpose. Thank you for tuning in, and here's to your business finding its perfect pose for success.