Vicki Baumann of YogaWithVickiB on Overcoming Injury to Become a Fitness Entrepreneur
Joining the many talented entrepreneurs who have featured on the Leadership Gazette is the wonderfully inspiring Vicki Baumann from YogaWithVickiB.
Vicki’s life-changing career into yoga started on 1st August 2012. After suffering a traumatic foot injury due to a hit and run driver in London, she wondered if she was ever going to walk again.
She considers this accident a “life changing injury”, and rather than being depressed, Vicki found it more of a “liberating” moment.
“I decided this wasn’t going to define me.” After 30+ years in the marketing and print industry, she made the decision to get back into fitness.
A year after all her operations and rehabilitation, Vicki took to her yoga mat — big time! It was during this time that her yoga teacher invited her to join his teacher training course. Aside from hating exams and a belief she wasn’t a ‘good’ learner, she agreed, and proved herself wrong. By 2017, Vicki qualified as a yoga teacher. After three years working full-time in her print company while doing part-time with her YogaWithVickiB business, on Friday 28th February 2020, she left behind her previous career to focus 100% on her yoga business.
“My new life and journey had begun,” Vicki remembers fondly.
She describes her role as a yoga instructor as “providing her students with an environment that allows them the freedom and confidence to discover just what they and their body is capable of.”
Vicki creates a space to remove any ‘boundaries’ that many of us set ourselves. As someone who has overcome an injury, she understands what it takes to overcome those struggles back to fitness. Her students love that she doesn’t fit the perception of a perfect ‘yoga/body/age’ but that she is a woman of a certain age (58) and has weaknesses of her own. She believes that there isn’t “I can’t” — only “I can’t do it YET”.
When asked: what are the most important values to you and the business that you lead? Vicki replies “to provide a supportive and encouraging environment for all my students. To enable my students to believe that their body and mind is capable of much more than most of us think. And not to worry that they can’t do it today — it will come.”
After such a journey, Vicki says she is not sure she believes in ‘wrong decisions’ and that our choices are right for what we knew at the time. It may lead you down a path unexpected or, on reflection, unwanted — but she reasons it was still the right decision at the time.
Vicki is a big advocate for having belief in who you are, and when you can express this, it helps to get others on board with your ideas. She listens carefully to what is needed; how people react to existing choices and situations and develop and change to better suit as her clients needs change. For example, since starting her business three years ago, she has introduced an early morning ‘Sunrise’ class for those that find morning classes better into their week. It’s all about being adaptable and rolling with the routines of peoples’ lives.
Having now gone full-time into her yoga business, Vicki is looking forward to increasing private 1–2–1 classes and to secure corporate/office-based clients. In addition to yoga classes, Vicki has added workshops and wellness retreats for anyone who is looking to take their experiences further.
Thank you Vicki for sharing your amazing story with the Leadership Gazette, and we wish you all the best for the rest of 2020.
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