You Are Complex: Meet Author, Speaker & Founder of Barre & Soul® Andrea Isabelle Lucas
Here at Vibrant Health, we believe health is an inside job, unique to you. After all, you’re one-of-a-kind and your needs are complex – that’s why your supplements should be too.
To celebrate all of the beautiful complexities of our lives, each month we’ve been highlighting individuals in our community – taking a peek into the behind-the-scenes of their work life, wellness routines, and all the wonderful things that make them who they are.
In honor of National Author’s Day on November 1st, we got to chat with New England-based author, speaker, and founder of multi-million dollar fitness enterprise Barre & Soul® Andrea Isabelle Lucas. Through her book Own it All, she shares her personal story of how she overcame adversity and started creating the life she was meant for — and how you can do it too.
In this inspiring interview, Andrea discusses how she went from hitting her rock bottom moment to building her own multi-million-dollar barre business from the ground up, how mala beads are essential to her meditation ritual, and the power of taking little risks to catapult you forward. We hope you enjoy our series…and remember, keep being you!
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Fierce, feminist, fun
As an author and founder & CEO of the multi-million-dollar business Barre & Soul®, can you tell us about your journey to starting your own business?
I always knew I wanted to own my own business and I knew I wanted studios, but I didn’t feel ready at first. So I went with a management role for a while at a high end spa that was able to give me enough experience to gain some confidence going on my own.
Another thing that lit a fire under me to get started was that barre was starting to blow up and have its moment. I knew that if I hesitated, I’d be kicking myself because so much competition would show up. I had already been teaching the method and was so highly trained for years at that point and I knew that I was really poised to make a move quickly when demand really spiked for barre. So that’s what got me started — just taking a series of progressively bigger risks and steps to own a business.
November 1st is National Author's Day, celebrating authors and the books they write. What can readers expect from your book Own it All and what inspired you to write it?
Own it All is really a collection of my best tips and lessons that I learned along the way from my own personal rock bottom moment when I fled from domestic violence to eventually building a multi million dollar enterprise — and what it took for me to take each step in gilding that.
To me, Own it All is about really proclaiming what you want in life and then giving yourself permission to have it, and all the ways you can remove obstacles that stand in the way of that. My intention is to give away those tools and lessons and to provide helpful reflection questions, journaling prompts, and things that folks can use to make these discoveries for themselves (without having to wait until they reach rock bottoms as I did).
What is the #1 piece of advice would you give to someone who is playing small and knows they're meant for more? Any tried and true mindset shifts?
Take the biggest risk that you can stomach for today. Often our goals feel so big or unattainable, or we haven’t leveled off our identity yet to the point that we think we can take them on.
Rather than thinking of the biggest risk EVER that you can take or the biggest thing you can do that would catapult you toward your goal, I think it’s more helpful to look for the next step that feels risky but is moving you in the right direction. Continuing to take the baby steps one at a time because they do add up. And a lot of times, after that baby step comes another opportunity that you actually could not have foreseen before getting there.
What are your go-to healthy snacks or meals to fuel your workday?
I try to focus on lean protein and vegetables and build lots of snacks around that. I don’t restrict anything from my diet. I just try to focus on the two most important things first and then add the rest in.
Do you have any self-care rituals you want to share with our readers?
I, for years, thought it would be great to have a meditation practice but didn’t know how to get myself going with it. What really kicked off my meditation habit is I developed a mantra that was the most empowering affirmation I could think of that I needed to hear the most, and that would nourish and fill me up the most. In the morning, I would sit with mala beads and say that affirmation to myself for each one of the beads. Mala beads have 108 beads and we give our members a mala strand when they’ve completed 108 classes at the studios.
Since starting my meditation practice that way, I’ve gotten to the place where I so look forward to my sacred alone time in the morning when I now really love to pull a tarot card and ask, “What is the wisdom that I need for today?” What I love about doing that is I think however you interpret the card that you pulled is a message from your higher self or your subconscious, the universe, spirit, god, or whichever labels feel right to you.
It also reminds me to stay open to divine intervention and the great mysteries of life. It’s a great reminder that I’m not in control of everything and there are larger forces at work. It also means that it’s okay to ask for help from something higher than yourself.
What does wellness look like for you?
Wellness for me looks like having a healthy balance between our wants and our needs, and finding a lot of places to feel and experience joy and pleasure while giving ourselves what we need. For example, staying in bed might be a want. But getting out into the community or taking a class might be a need. So continuing to balance those things is really what wellness is about.
