Episode 24: Dani's Story - BURNTHEORY Fitness - Hobart Moonah Tasmania

 


Hannah:
Welcome back, Burn Pod listeners. Now, on today’s episode, we are very excited to peel back the curtain and give you an insider’s chat with our amazing studio manager, Dani Klye

Hannah:
Now, Dani’s been in the health and fitness arena pretty much finishing school. There’s quite a few of you know, she’s an absolute whizzbang instructor. So we wanted to delve into her story and her journey in the health and fitness space. So welcome Dani.

Dani:
Thanks for having me. Very excited.

Hannah:
So our listeners get a overview of you. Give us a rundown of who you are, what you love, or if you’ve got any passions.

Dani:
Yes. Well, I’ve got a few. So I teach pilates, Barre yoga, a form of pilates and boxing.

Hannah:
Just a few.

Dani:
Just a few things. Obviously I’m really passionate about health and fitness and also super passionate about natural health and naturally being, cause I am a qualified bach-path. I don’t practise and I think I saw two patients. Graduated and it wasn’t for me doing that one-on-one consulting, but I’ve definitely taken a lot out of that degree and implemented it into my daily life. So I’m super passionate about all things, health and natural health, in particular. I’m also super passionate about mental health and self-care and self-love. That’s been heavily influenced just over my own journey. I’m a huge advocate for tools like meditation and breathwork, and, and also connecting with people. I think that’s a huge piece of that puzzle in that self care and mental health kind of field. So it’s one of the reasons why I love being an instructor, because I get to connect with people and get to know a lot of people and a lot of people that I wouldn’t otherwise get to know or even kind of come across.

Dani:
That’s one of the things that I really love about the job. I found when I was living in Melbourne, I was there for six years and I felt the fitness scene, in particular, the yoga scene, I found it was very cliquey and I never really felt I fitted in into that. Seen over there, it’s just completely different here in Tassie. I think a lot of people would agree that we’re very unique down here. We support each other and welcome each other. Now that I’m back here, I’ll never leave.

Hannah:
So some of you may or may not know, but Dani and I were actually friends at Ogilvie High School together. Literally way, way back, which kind of makes me feel old.

Dani:
{inaudible 00:03:41].

Hannah:
Kind of scary when do you think it’s, I don’t know, 10 to 15 years ago. So we were only high school before she left for the mainland. We cross paths here and there, but it wasn’t really until you returned to Hobart a few years ago that we really reconnected. Our clients can get a sense of where it all began for you. Can you take us back to after school and deciding health and fitness was your focus?

Dani:
Definitely. I’ve actually been thinking about this recently and I’m trying to pinpoint kind of a moment that kicked it off and I don’t really have one of those. I just remember when I was younger, my mom put me into dancing and I danced from, I was probably three or four [inaudible 00:04:26] for 11 years.

Hannah:
Wow.

Dani:
I loved that. Then I tried…I honestly tried every single team sport. Honestly, I did hockey, netball, basketball. I do rowing, I did cricket. I did softball. Literally, I tried everything. Because my mom or my parents actually were big hockey people and that’s how they met. So they were really big on that team sport in that community. Which is amazing, but just nothing really stuck for me, even though I tried everything. I eventually found my way back into fitness, through Pilates and through yoga.

Dani:
I think it was, you’re doing the exercise for yourself and you’re not doing it as part of a team. Obviously that side of team sports have a huge place, obviously. Huge benefits. But I like to work out with myself for myself, but also being in a group setting that’s where I get that community. I just drifted in and out of different sports and then I eventually moved up to Queensland to study. I remember my friends taking me to a studio up there and instantly I absolutely loved the classes. I became addicted to them and I was going every single day. At the same time I started studying the bachelor of health science in the tropics. That had a big influence over the health side of things as well.

Hannah:
[crosstalk 00:06:24] Going up to Queensland to do your degree or did you go up there before that happened?

Dani:
No, I went up to do my degree and it’s kind of a funny story. Just after I graduated college, I went straight into a 9-5 job in the government. It’s Interlink.

Hannah:
Did you really!?

Dani:
Yeah, and I was on it. Such good money. It was almost 80 grand or something. Straight out of college. Insane. I actually got fired.

Hannah:
What did you?

Dani:
Well, I didn’t technically get fired. I had the option to get fired or quit.

Hannah:
Oh my God!

Dani:
So I don’t think I’ve actually ever told my parents.

Hannah:
Well that’s hilarious.

Dani:
I might have to give them the heads up first. So I got fired or I quit and this course is starting in Queensland in two weeks and I didn’t want to tell my mom and dad that I got fired. I think thinking about this course, I’m like, yeah, I might do it one day.

Dani:
And so when that happened, I was like, I can’t tell them I got fired. So maybe I’ll just move to Queensland and just do this course. It’s starting in two weeks, let’s do [inaudible 00:07:54] that’s literally how it happened. I said to mom, I’m going to move to Queensland in like two weeks, and they helped me move up there. I was only 19 at the time and then I just started studying up there and then I found Pilates and then I ended up doing my teacher training and it just kicked up this whole other…

Hannah:
Other life.

Dani:
Yeah, of my life. Yeah

Hannah:
Well that is so funny. I can imagine you being like, hey, so I just decided, it’s not because I totally got fired or anything, I just want to move.

Dani:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly. [inaudible 00:08:30]

Hannah:
Oh gosh, that’s crazy. So now we’re up in Queensland and you said you’d been looking at these course and wanting to do it. Was there anything in particular that drew you to this area?

Dani:
I don’t really know. It was one of my friends told me about it. She was thinking of doing it. She actually never ended up doing it, but she mentioned it to me. I didn’t know that it existed. And for whatever reason, it just sparked my interest. I can’t really again, pinpoint, yes, this is the path for me because of this, this and this.

Hannah:
Yeah.

Dani:
It just interested me. It’s funny. It’s kind of like one of those sliding door moments. If that didn’t happen. If I didn’t, get fired, I don’t know if I would have ever done it. I don’t know if I ever would have left. Yeah. There’s so many what ifs isn’t there? But, it interested me and then that event happened and then I just decided to go for it.

Hannah:
Yeah. That’s so cool. How do you incorporate any of the learnings from your studies into your life now?

Dani:
I incorporate so many things from that degree, but I would almost say I’ve learnt more in the years after I graduated than what I learned during the degree. It definitely started off a whole new…Or opened up a whole new world for me in terms of natural health and natural living and natural medicine, obviously. Now it’s such a huge part of my life. I really consciously am aware of what I eat in my body, on my body. Haircare. Perfume. Actually I don’t go near perfume anymore because it’s literally toxic. I use essential oils instead and household cleaning. Literally everything. It changed everything it’s been a slow process. I know people can feel overwhelmed when they start on this journey of natural health because there’s so many things that we can change and swap in and swap out, which is amazing. You can literally swap your chemical cleaners and everything for something more natural. That’s what people do or people can find it overwhelming. So I just started slowly and just started researching and try new things and looking up different recipes and try one thing at a time. Now my house is, I would say 95% clean products.

Hannah:
That’s cool. It’s much better for the environment as well, which is a massive [crosstalk 00:11:53] focused hot topic at the moment. Which it should be.

Dani:
Mmm.

Hannah:
Our environment is the thing that keeps us alive and if we don’t have one, [crosstalk 00:12:01] not much point in having an economy, if we don’t have an environment to live in.

Dani:
Exactly.

Hannah:
Now let’s set the scene a little bit. Coming down from Queensland and your studies. Some of you may already know, but Dani actually then moved to Melbourne during her journey and opened her very on yoga and Pilates studio. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what led you here and that part of your life?

Dani:
Yeah, so I was in Queensland. I was on the gold coast for five years and my partner at the time said to me, one day, I’m ready for a change. How about you? And I was like, sure. So we just decided to move to Melbourne. It was partly because I had one year left in my degree and I wanted to finish it and the options were Melbourne or Perth. I didn’t want to go to Perth, so we decided on Melbourne. I’ve always loved Melbourne. I was there for six years. So I finished my degree the first year. After that, I did go into practise. One of the other graduates opened up her own naturopathic clinic, which is amazing, and she opened it up for all of us that were graduating with her to rent a room and just start working. So I did that, like I said. I saw a couple of patients and realised that it wasn’t actually what I enjoyed.

Dani:
I also felt I didn’t learn everything that I needed to learn on the course that I did. I’m not going to recommend the one. Not mention it in case someone’s looking at it. It just so happened that she owned this building and upstairs she had a vacant space. I just asked her, is there any possibility that I could use the space and run some yoga and Pilates classes? She said yes and it was beautiful. It was a old residential building that she then changed over to commercial. It was an old kind of art deco apartment and beautiful natural light and floorboards. It was literally someone’s living room. No one lived there, but it previously was the living room.

Hannah:
That’s cool.

Dani:
Well, Mats were packed in pretty tight, but it worked. I started with a couple of classes a week and then after a little bit of time, it evolved into an actual business and studio and I started to employ teachers and we had a pretty full timetabled.

Dani:
It was just another one of those things that kind of just happened.

Hannah:
Just evolved.

Dani:
Yeah, it evolved. One day I kind of woke up and I was like, oh, how did I get here? This wasn’t really the plan. Then I was super busy with that and that’s absolutely my passion is teaching and it was really hard to juggle with practising naturopathy as well. So something had to give and I let go of the naturopathy and focus more on the studio. After some time I realised that I needed a bigger space. I’m a bit of a dreamer and I always like to look on realestate.com and to see what’s there. I found this beautiful space, which was one suburb away and for whatever reason, I just decided, oh, I’ll just go and look at it.

Dani:
I couldn’t do it. It’s too expensive, blah, blah, blah, self-limiting beliefs. I went and looked at it and it was stunning. And I messaged a really good friend of mine who has her own studio down the peninsula. I said, look at this beautiful studio. I love it, but I couldn’t ever do it. I’m just showing you the pictures just because you’d might like to [inaudible 00:16:16] then she ended up asking me if I wanted a business partner and we ended up signing the lease and opening the studio together, which was a whole journey. It was the most stressful thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. Just the whole process of the fit out. [inaudible 00:16:42] On way more work than we ever should. We put the full bathroom into this room that had no plumbing. It was upstairs.

Hannah:
Oh wow.

Dani:
We had to go downstairs and put floors down.

Dani:
We had to put soft clothes and the whole studio space to buffer some noise coming from downstairs. Oh my goodness. I would never, never do that again. I learned so much from it that it was extremely stressful. And because of that, when we finally opened, we had more energy left. We had no kind of…although still a bit of excitement, not what you would hope for when you finally open your business.

Hannah:
Yeah.

Dani:
It took a big toll on both of us and we had it for maybe a year, I think. Again, another big change in my life happened and she told me that she wanted out. She was doing too much. She had still had her orange studio running. So this is her second studio and it was completely different business. She was too stressed and too overwhelmed.

Dani:
It was funny because I actually didn’t realise that you can sell your half or whatever share you have in a business. You can sell that? I should? [inaudible 00:18:16] Your half. What does that mean for me? And I had three options. It was, I could buy her out, which I could not afford. I didn’t want to run it myself. That was never the intention. It was always to do it with her. The other option was to get a different business partner and I just didn’t want to do that. There was no one else that I wanted to go on this journey with. So the last option and the one that I went with and we went with was to sell it as a whole. We got really lucky in the fact that we found the right broker. She already had people that were looking in the area. She didn’t even need to advertise it, and we sold it. It’s still stressful.

Hannah:
Hugely stressful.

Dani:
It’s similar when we buy a house. Or you sell a house, I should say. Until that money gets into that bank account, anything can happen. Even though I paid what [inaudible 00:19:22] signed all the documents. Until that money comes into your bank account, anything could happen. That was a four month process, even though we essentially sold it on day one.

Hannah:
Yeah, yeah.[inaudible 00:19:35] going through all of that anxiety until it’s actually full moneys in the account and it’s done, you just don’t know, you can’t count on it.

Dani:
Exactly. So that was the catalyst actually to move back to Tasmania. Huge, huge learning curve. Even I don’t have my own business anymore, I don’t use my really expensive degree. Actually. I have absolutely no regrets because it brought me back to Tasmania and I feel so at home here now. And when I was younger, I needed to leave to come back and appreciate it. I know a lot of people can relate to that experience. Also, with everything going on in Victoria at the moment, I’m so glad that I came back when I did.

Hannah:
Right before. Yeah. You came back when you needed to. Exactly.

Dani:
Yeah.

Hannah:
And Tassies such a special place. We see greater connection to community down here because of that smaller number of people. There’s sort of less, you mentioned, the less cliquiness or the less trying to be New York style studios. Let’s just move our bodies because it feels good and connect with people.

Dani:
Totally. There’s so many studios, mainly in Melbourne that they spend so much money on their outfit and they have the most beautiful studios. You see in a magazine that they designed by architects and this and that. Unless of one, the classes are good and the community’s there, what’s the point? It’s all kind of…I don’t want to say it’s all for show. It’s definitely not all for show, but there is a big element of that, and that’s just not me. That’s amazing. Whatever floats your boat, but I’m more about

Dani:
the team that I’m working with and for, and the people that come in and I get to connect with…

Hannah:
Real world women then.

Dani:
Exactly. You got it.

Hannah:
Well, thank you so much for joining us on the pod. I know our listeners will love knowing about your background a little more and seeing what your amazing experience, instructor skills, and studio manager skills come from. So thank you so much for your time.

Dani:
Thanks so much for having me.

Hannah:
Until next time guys! Have a wonderful rest of your day and we’ll catch you on the next Burn Pod.


 

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