A NEW LIFE: A love interest took Lara Goodbody from her Dublin-based recruitment business to London, where she got the yoga bug, she tells Sylvia Thompson.
Lara Goodbody (31) has that potent mix of self-confidence, business acumen and youthful energy that gives the impression she could turn her hand at anything.
So when you discover she gave up her successful recruitment company in Dublin to move to London last year and is now developing yoga for children, you wonder why the change of focus?
It becomes clear when she explains it was a love interest that drew her across the Irish Sea and that the yoga-for-children business is one she has set up in partnership with her boyfriend's sister, Fenella Lindsell.
"I met my boyfriend on a skiing holiday in Austria two-and-a-half years ago and after doing 18 months of the 'Ryanair love shuttle' it came to the stage when we wanted to buy a house.
"At the time, my business in Dublin was growing and I would have had to take on a employee. I didn't want to do this and continue travelling to London so I chose to sell my company and move," she says.
As a recruitment consultant, Lara easily managed to secure a job for herself and started working in a London based head-hunting firm last September. But, four days into the job, she resigned.
"I just knew it was the wrong thing for me. I didn't want to work for someone else and I couldn't get my mind off the idea of developing Yoga Bugs which I had spent much of the summer talking to Fenella about."
Ever since, she has been busy putting together yoga teacher training manuals, developing codes of ethics and even lobbying for yoga to be put on the school curriculum in Britain at meetings in the House of Lords and House of Commons.
"In some ways, I'm working harder than ever but the people I'm dealing with are lovely. It lacks the commercial aggression and there is a lot of knowledge sharing," says Lara about her new breed of clients.
"I go to the office in flip flops and linen trousers and sometimes find myself sitting on beautiful big couches drinking green tea, having a great chat with someone."
But, occasionally she does miss the cut and thrust of the recruitment industry. "I miss the networking and pushing of people. There was a great sense of continuity when you placed someone in a job and then they got promoted and became your client. But there were huge knocks as well. I could work on a placement for two months and find somebody who then chooses not to take the job at the last minute and my targets for that month would disappear."
Lara has, however, used these sharp business skills - learned also from her degree in marketing at Portobello College, Dublin and while working in her father's industrial chemical and plant machinery business in Dublin - well in London. Yoga Bugs has now trained more than 200 teachers throughout Britain and intends to come to Ireland in the autumn to train teachers here.
The yoga classes themselves are given to children of all ages and special modules also help teachers adapt the classes for children with special needs, deaf children and children who have been traumatised by difficult family issues. The perceived benefits include increased concentration and energy levels, improved posture, flexibility and body tone, co-ordination and balance.
Although not a yoga fanatic herself, Lara says: "I love children but I'm a bit of an armchair yogi. Once a year, I used to do a six-week course of yoga but I never kept it up."
And her boyfriend, how he is faring out in the midst of all this hard work? She laughs: "He works in marketing and is a huge support and advice to us. He's our chairman. It really is a bit of a family affair."
See also www.yogabugs.com