What brings a Geordie lass, who spent her early career teaching English to young offenders within the prison system, to create a very successful yoga brand?
That wasn’t the backstory I was expecting when I met Chrissie. Nor was I expecting to hear that she didn’t actually like the thought of yoga before trying it and was instead living an adrenaline fuelled life, squeezing in high intensity work outs whenever she could. Burnt out from a very demanding, yet rewarding, career and ready to start a family Chrissie decided to try acupuncture. She’d considered herself a very healthy person so was surprised when the acupuncturist suggested her lifestyle was leaving her body in fight or flight mode and a constant state of stress. They suggested she try yoga to rebalance and, though sceptical, she took the advice and was surprised by what she found. Obviously you can guess what the outcome was!
Ready for a new direction, and now with a young family, Chrissie had chance to take time away from her work with young offenders and rethink what she wanted to do next. Having enjoyed yoga, seeing its benefits on her health and wellbeing and wanting to continue teaching others, Chrissie realised she could teach yoga and build a community around it. Taking an intensive yoga course over the space of 6 months, it’s now 2 years since she started Yoga Social Club. If you’ve ever met her you’ll already know this, but for the benefit of those who haven’t Chrissie is a bold, energetic, straight talking, person with a positive attitude and incredible drive. Not afraid to fail she has built her business into a strong community and worked incredibly hard to build a brand that she has been able to franchise. Under the Yoga Social Brand, Chrissie guides and supports other yoga teachers to create their own business within their communities. There are currently 25 Yoga Social Clubs across the country and I don’t know why but I wasn’t expecting her to say there is a Yoga Social Club in Winchester!
Community is an important driver for Chrissie. Based in Urmston, she built her first Yoga Social Club there, offering classes with a strong community focus. All her events have an open invitation to either a cuppa or, for the evening, a good glass of wine. There’s no pressure to join but she wanted to give people the opportunity to talk with each other after the class and build new friendships. Even when we met she took time out of her day to visit a yoga mum and baby class at RiverBank Cafe, stopping to chat with mums leaving the class and see how they were getting on.
Whilst I started off wondering how on earth she’d gone from teaching English to young offenders to running her own yoga community I can see how she got there and it’s not such a wild leap that she’s made after all. Both roles have a strong focus on working together, helping and educating others for the better, building and strengthening communities, tenacity and persistence. It’s an incredible achievement to have made in such a short space of time and I don’t think she’s reached the end of her ideas yet. Keep your eyes peeled for the different events Chrissie hosts. Top of my list is her yoga event with the Halle orchestra. Though I think it’s very likely the tickets have already sold out.