Yogi Rodney Yee Shares His Secrets Of Success

From Katie Morell:

My Dad is obsessed with Rodney Yee. I bought him Yee’s A.M. Yoga DVD for Christmas a few years back and now he uses it every morning to de-stress.  He brings up how much Yee has personally helped him at least once a week.

And I can’t blame him. It was at least 15 years ago when I was introduced to Yee’s videos (they were VHS tapes back then) and now I, too, incorporate yoga into my everyday life.

In a nutshell, Yee is the father of yoga in the U.S. He started teaching in California in the mid-80s and then hooked up with what is now Gaiam, an information provider out of Colorado, to produce yoga-teaching videos. Since then, no one has been able to touch Yee. He’s appeared on Oprah, Good Morning America and PBS to chat about yoga. Today he flies around the world teaching workshops, taping new DVDs and instructing students at Yoga Shanti, the studio he owns with his wife, Colleen Saidman, located near his home in Sag Harbor, NY.

How did he create such a strong brand and become so successful? Hungry to find out, I called him up.

Q: Could you tell me a little about your background?

A: I was born in California and my Dad was in the military, so we moved around a lot. At one point I lived in Oklahoma and at another point, I lived in Puerto Rico. I moved to Oakland when I was 13 years old, went to the University of California, Davis, after high school and then transferred to University of California, Berkeley, for philosophy. I was really into dance, so I joined the Oakland Ballet.

Q: How did you get into yoga?

A: One day in 1980, I decided to take my first yoga class—the studio was just above my ballet studio. I went because I was really bound up in my body and yogis seemed to know a lot about stretching. I was hooked from the first class. It was everything I was looking for—movement, philosophy and spirituality—all in one dream container. I haven’t stopped since.

Q: Did you quit ballet and start teaching yoga right away?

A: No, it took me about five years to go from being a ballet dancer to a yoga instructor. I started teaching yoga in 1985 at The Yoga Room in Berkeley, then, in 1987, a few colleagues and myself opened the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland.

Q: When did you start teaching yoga outside of California, and what was the reaction of students?

A: My first out-of-state class was in Tennessee in 1990, and it was a very confusing concept for people to understand. No one knew what yoga was at the time. I remember people confusing yoga with yogurt. They thought I was in some kind of cult and did not understand that someone could have a career in yoga.

Q: When did yoga become mainstream?

A: I don’t think it was until icons like Madonna and Sting came out doing yoga in the late 1990s that popular culture really started looking at it as something they wanted to do.

Q: How did you get involved with starring in yoga instructional videos?

A: In the early 90s, a company called Healing Arts asked me to do a yoga video. They already had Patricia Walden, who was tall and slender, so I, with my short and muscular body, was the difference they were looking for. In 1992, I signed on for my first video, and it was mildly successful.

A few years later, I was on a plane with the head of Healing Arts when we came up with the idea of A.M. Yoga. It was right around that time that Gaiam bought Healing Arts. Then everything took off.

I’m happy that my videos have inspired so many people to try yoga. Oprah is one of those people and after I went on her show (in 2001), I remember getting phone calls from studios all over the country thanking me for making such a high-profile appearance. It really helped the yoga community.

Q: What are some challenges you’ve faced along the way?

A: One of the challenges is the lack of privacy. Everyone recognizes me. Sometimes that can be a beautiful thing, like when I’m at an airport and someone nudges me to thank me for giving his or her life back through my videos, but sometimes it can infringe on your personal life.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I just released my newest DVD, "Daily Yoga," which educates people on what schools of yoga are out there and how to incorporate them into a daily yoga practice.

Q: What’s your secret to being so successful?

A: The real secret is that I’m in love with what I’m doing. The only thing I’ve done to be successful is to be truly passionate about what I’m doing and to always investigate how to do it better.

Q: What advice can you give to others who are trying to brand themselves?

A: Fall in love with your subject. Fall in love with your business, which hopefully is your subject. Be passionate about it. By doing that, you will learn so much that you will end up being a leading expert.

Source: http://www.openforum.com/articles/yogi-rodney-yee-shares-his-secrets-of-success

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