As a part of the Morning Lazziness series about empowering women who are encouraging and doing incredible things with their ideas in society, I had the pleasure of interviewing Morgan Balavage.
Morgan has worked for 15 years in the corporate world; she has learned everything from handling scandals to million-dollar negotiations.
She started doing yoga at the age of 16 and got really into it after a series of broken limbs and broken hearts led to a significant weight gain in her early 20s.
After a fortuitous lay-off, she extended her love for yoga as a yoga brand, Splendid Yoga, to include online offerings, retail products. Along with teaching mindfulness practices, she also works as a business coach.
Besides yoga, she likes to enjoy chihuahua Spike and hiking, cycling, running, experimenting with vegan baking, and otherwise celebrating being a spiritual being having a human experience.
Many thanks for doing this for us; please let our users know about yourself and your inspirational journey as a business coach?
Hey! I’m Morgan!
For 15 years of my life, I worked in banking, PR, and logistics – very different from my life now!
But then, I REALLY got into yoga and discovered the huge benefits of it after experiencing a series of broken limbs and broken hearts that resulted in me gaining a lot of weight in my early 20s.
I lost 50 lbs, and I no longer had a passion for corporate. Instead, I wanted to give my whole heart to yoga.
So I expanded my yoga brand, Splendid Yoga, and I started to include online offerings and retail products.
I expanded my business further after a few friends started asking me what they needed to do to create an impact with their business as I had with mine. I’ve always had a deep passion for helping others.
And just like that, I began my business coaching enterprise!
What is Splendid Yoga? And how it believes in bringing more focus, more enthusiasm among people?
Splendid Yoga integrates ancient, simple practices to deepen your connection to your intuition and create an easeful mind-body-spirit integrated lifestyle rooted in pleasure.
This has been particularly crucial during the apocalypse!
I share the practices and rituals that have helped me attain a sustainable level of peace, abundance, and gratitude.
We’ve helped thousands of people through in-person and online workshops, coaching, courses, ebooks, podcasts and are starting retreats beginning in 2022!
I was on a call with a potential client, and when I asked her how I could help her, she said, “It’s hard not to be inspired by you.”
I think people are inspired by the fact that I do whatever I want, and what I want is to help people.
It’s my belief that this is people’s true nature, and this is what the yoga sutras teach us: we’re here to learn how to quiet our minds in order to open our hearts to compassion through mindful exercises.
It’s a much easier way to live life, though not without its challenges and disciplines. The trick is to make it as much fun as possible and to laugh a lot at all of it.
What techniques do you teach in your Splendid Yoga Mastermind Program?
Yoga is simply connecting your body to your breath; we achieve that mindfulness through pranayama, asana practice, chanting, and various meditation techniques.
I love Nadi Shodhana Pranayama, alternate nostril breathing, for bringing focus to anxious, distracted brains. You alternate plugging your nose: inhale through your left nostril, exhale through your right, then inhale through your right, and exhale through your left. That’s one round. Repeat 5-20 times.
My favorite *super* magical meditation for my clients is using the lighthouse visualization to attract soulmates clients.
And, how do you motivate people to join you and build a community?
Purely living by example. I don’t chase; I attract my clients through my daily rituals.
I’m very honest about sharing my journey. I speak about the privilege I’ve experienced in this world, as well as the trauma that yoga and meditation have helped heal.
Especially in this age of social media and marketing, authentically sharing my story from a solutions-based perspective (i.e., not complaining while it’s happening, but reflecting on what helped, in order to help others going through the same issue) has helped me easily find my soulmate clients.
At what age, you get first introduced to mindfulness yoga?
I was 16 when I went to my first yoga class! I HATED it, hah! I didn’t fall in love with yoga until I was 24.
How has practicing yoga changed your life?
In literally every way: I have a new body every time I breathe. My severe anxiety and depression are managed without medication. I have a heightened sensitivity to my intuition, which has allowed me to easily attract success. I experience a deeper level of spirituality every day through learning how to feel my breath. My orgasms are magical. The sun shines brighter. I see auras.
Please recommend the five best yoga asanas to stay calm and happy?
- Legs up the wall (Viparita Karani) – soothes anxiety
- Child’s pose (Balasana) – grounds manic energy
- Wide-legged forward fold (Prasarita Padottanasana) – floods the brain with blood
- Half Pigeon (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana) – releases emotion
- Corpse (Savasana) – integrates mind, body, and spirit
Share your 5 best streams for passive income; which women of any age can start?
- Dollar-cost average a stock of a company you use every day
- Buy cryptocurrency and take your gain
- Write an ebook
- Create an evergreen course
- Affiliate marketing
What is your magical way of manifesting everything?
I wake up at 4 am almost every morning and chant, meditate, and journal. After that, the universe gives me pretty much whatever I want so long as it helps serve my highest purpose as a healer.
I also work with the moon cycles and my menstrual cycle to set intentions for my most powerful days (the new moon and my luteal phase) and take inspired action on my most energetic days. (full moon, days 5-10 of my cycle)
Being financially independent is important for today’s women; share your five best tips to manage finances?
- Do what works for you.
- Research money for an hour a day (read a book, a blog, or listen to a podcast) to figure out how to do what works for you.
- Write a love letter to your debt (if you have any) and your money (if you want more).
- Check-in with all of your accounts every single day.
- Know your numbers: how much do you need to make per day to afford your dream life? (Psst…I have a free challenge that will help you figure this out!)
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Give yourself permission to quit every day, and keep going anyway.
I’ve quit my business hundreds of times. I throw myself a proper pity party, let those thoughts gather that tell me how pointless all of this is, take myself on a walk (usually to meet a girlfriend for a commiseration glass of wine), nap, and then get back to it.
I started my business because I wanted the freedom to work when I wanted.
I started a business I’m passionate about, so that means I want to work pretty much 24/7.
When I start having the thoughts of “Why do I bother?” or “This isn’t going to work,” I know it’s a sign of burnout, and I give myself a break by doing the same thing I did in the corporate world: quitting in my head, and showing up the next day anyway.
The difference is, when I show up for myself the next day, I’ve set myself up to do something I’m EXCITED to do instead of something I have to do because it’s my job.
It’s easier to keep going when you’re passionate about what you’re doing.
It’s easier to keep going when you take breaks.
- Your business is going to pivot—a lot.
When I first started Splendid Yoga, I thought I was starting a private yoga teaching business.
I do that!
But it turns out I wanted to do a lot of other things, too.
My clients ask me if they should have a separate business for their separate ventures, and sometimes that’s appropriate, but more often, I suggest they do what I did:
The name doesn’t matter. The brand is you. If you want to specialize in ax throwing and relationship coaching for nerds (a real-life example from one of my clients!), we can create one business where you get to do all that and more whenever you want.
- The less you do, the more you make.
This is true in the corporate world as well: I never made more money than when I was doing around an hour of work a day.
I do way more than one hour of work a day on my business, but I focus on the stuff that I LOVE to do, and I make WAY more money when I ONLY do what’s fun for me.
I hire out the stuff I don’t love, but that needs to be done anyway.
I hired an online business manager (who helped me find and edit this pitch!), and my income has skyrocketed 300% in the 2 months since she’s taken on this role. It’s freed up so much of my literal time, but also my mental time: the time I spend thinking about things I want to get done without actually doing them. Now, I just shoot off a text, and it’s as good as done!
- Do what works for you.
I took a digital marketing course to do Facebook giveaways and tried to follow EXACTLY the system the founders had created.
I couldn’t do it. I did some of the stuff, but it was a LOT of work.
It worked okay. I added a thousand members to my Facebook group from the giveaway.
From there, I incorporated a few other strategies from other courses I’ve taken and ended up making $17k in contracts from the new members of my Facebook group.
You’re going to need to combine loads of different strategies to find the ones that work to actually make your business money.
Trust your intuition. (Or hire me! I’ve taken all the courses, lol; I’ll point you in the right direction for what marketing strategy will work best for you.)
- Treat business income as business income. Create multiple streams of income to support yourself while you build your business.
I lived off my business income for the first 3 years of my business.
I thought I needed to because I didn’t want to spend my savings.
Then, a coach told me I needed to treat my business income as business income and not as my primary income.
That totally changed things for me.
I started investing more in cryptocurrency with my nest egg and was able to create a strategy that paid for my day-to-day life.
That meant I had utter freedom!
I didn’t have to make money in my business anymore!
And that mindset left me open to SO much abundance. Clients flooded in when I didn’t NEED to make money.
It also left me with enough money to hire someone, which has been an incredible investment!
Which book has inspired you the most lately?
Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
What’s one quote you live by?
“What you seek is seeking you.” – Rumi.
Lastly, what’s one goal you’re looking forward to achieving in 2022?
Selling out Splendid Yoga Retreats! We are hosting 3 retreats in Arizona, Mexico, and Costa Rica in 2022 — eee! So excited!
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
