We were lucky to catch up with Nicole Woodford-Shell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nicole, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

Before I opened my business, I had been a registered nurse for 8 years, and it was a very important aspect of who I felt I was at the time. I learned a lot of valuable lessons as a nurse on many different levels and planes of being. On the more administrative side, I learned how to manage my time, how to multitask, how to use different modes of communication (often simultaneously), and how to think quickly on my feet in stressful situations. Much of nursing is coordination and organization, and what that really means is: talking to people. Intuiting their needs, and executing on what you discover. It’s important to be present, to learn to read body language and energetics in order to be an effective caretaker, and I have found that all of these skills translated very seamlessly to business ownership.

Business ownership can also be quite stressful, and nursing is often a stressful job that requires both logic and creativity. Working with a variety of different people with different needs and desires has its challenges. As a business owner I’ve often found myself recalling situations I experienced as a nurse, and I’m sure if I ever went back to nursing this would go both ways. I would say that the MOST important lesson I learned is if you put people first, you will usually always figure out the administrative stuff later. Focusing on the moment, the person in front of you, is more important than anything else. Presence is everything. When you’re able to connect with people and help them to feel that they are valued and important, most other things will ultimately fall into place.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Nicole, and my partner Kate and I own Yoga Squared, a studio in Akron, Ohio, in Highland Square. Kate also owns Akron Athletic Collective, a gym in the former Martell Dance studio space above Aladdin’s in the Square. I’m a yoga teacher who teaches classes almost daily, and I also facilitate workshops, 200 and 300-hour yoga teacher trainings, and international retreats. Retreats are a big love of mine- through Yoga Squared, we have traveled all around the world, visiting Costa Rica, Belize, Greece, Todos Santos, Mexico, Tulum, Mexico, and Vieques, Puerto Rico. We’ve got four trips coming up: to Bali, La Paz, Mexico, Portugal, and Ireland! I also just booked a retreat for *myself* to Acadia, Maine next year, which I’m super excited about! The thought of just being a student on retreat is so relaxing. I’ve done it twice before, but not since I started facilitating my own retreats.

I lived in Highland Square for most of my 20s, and grew up down the street in Goodyear Heights, and I’ve always considered myself a passionate Akronite. In my late-ish 20s, I fell in love with the practice of yoga and took my teacher training, and during that time ultimately came to the surprising decision that I would open a studio in Highland Square! I never had dreams of business ownership, but I did have the desire to create a space in my neighborhood for practice. During my life, I experienced periods where I felt like I did not belong, and it became a passion of mine to open a space where belonging was front and center to the experience. What I lacked in business knowledge I like to think I made up for in passion and excitement! And a lot of early mornings, hard work, and risk. I am still incredibly thankful to my family (including and especially my wonderful parents) and my best friend, Allison, who helped me make so many decisions that I was scared to make! I was surrounded by a lot of support.

I think there’s a space and a community for everyone, so I don’t like to say that anything in particular sets me/us apart from others, but I hope that the people who really need us find us. I’m proud of the relationships I have experienced myself, and the friendships and relationships I have seen flourish in the space I helped to create. I want people to know that at the heart of it all, I care. I think that yoga is tremendously meaningful both personally and within communities, and that every day I spend at Yoga Squared I feel that I am living my purpose, my passion, and connecting from the deepest part of my soul. I’m the person that I always wanted to be thanks to the people I’ve met at the studio, who have chosen to see me and love me in all of my phases!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I think the easiest but also most true and relevant example is the pandemic. As an in-person, service-based business, we were dramatically impacted pretty much immediately. Interestingly, we had just completed a big renovation of our space as the pandemic was beginning. We combined our current suite with the one next to ours, which was a long-awaited project we’d been saving for for years- it was probably the most exciting time ever for us! We were HUSTLING to get the project complete, and on the weekend we were projected to reopen…the pandemic happened. We elected to close our doors a couple of days prior to the statewide shut down, which was an agonizing decision. We were in such a state of panic and uncertainty, but ultimately we looked within and knew that it was the right thing to do.

We had to immediately make a lot of big decisions about our business. Would we pause memberships (our biggest stream of income)? Would we pivot to an online platform? We had ideas of how to do that, and oddly enough my partner Kate and our studio manager Elizabeth had started to film online classes on our retreat in Costa Rica, which is something we’d never done before, so we did have a head start on that! We created an online platform we called Virtual Squared and began filming classes in our small studio space (shout out to Zen Space, turned the first Akron Athletic Collective!) Elizabeth had the technological know-how to make this happen and we just…started. We filmed classes. Elizabeth edited and uploaded them. We created a virtual option for our members and even had some non-members join our virtual platform.

Then, we started teaching classes via Zoom. I had genuinely never heard of Zoom, which sounds hilarious to me now. I still remember the first big Sunday Zoom class we taught from our house. Many of us cried after that class as we saw familiar faces we loved so much for the first time in days during a time of such drastic uncertainty and fear.

Ultimately, we just figured one thing out at a time, which I think is the only thing you can do in a crisis situation. We survived and even- possibly- thrived. Of course, people had (and still have!) a lot of different opinions about how businesses should have handled the pandemic. We knew right away that we could not please everyone but we wanted to do the best we could to be ethical and still survive. It felt like a fine line sometimes. Social distancing, mask requirements, financial worries… we experienced a lot during those years and the experience is still echoing. But ultimately I feel that we survived because we put our community first and we were willing to do whatever it took to keep going. I’m happy we did. We truly could not see the future and had to trust that there would be something on the other side, which is a lesson I try to remember in my life now.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I unlearned (and am still unlearning) my long-held belief that change is something to be feared. I always highly valued having a stable, professional career. I knew from a young age that I wanted that, and when the time came to pick my major in college, I chose nursing because I had an interest in healthcare and knew that if I graduated it would immediately lead to a job. I worked on the exact same floor for eleven years. In college, I worked at the same restaurant. Change is not something I’ve ever sought out or been comfortable with and yet I have embraced a life now that is almost constantly in flux. Our business surviving through the pandemic was also a huge lesson in change and flexibility. Resisting change is something that I still struggle with, but I also know it’s important to be dynamic, to take risks, to let go of certainty in order to grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yogasquaredakron.com
• Instagram: @nicolewoodfordshell @yogasquaredakron
• Facebook: Yoga Squared

Image Credits
Elizabeth Tipton