It seemed strange that the Wall Street Journal-so concerned about beating the competition in hard news-would choose for a Page One story today a piece on business people who do yoga. Really, WSJ? It's a pretty standard, low-hanging "take a trend, and add business angle" story that might have more rightly been in the back pages. But their work had this added benefit: a WSJ editor owns her own yoga studio, and one of her employees gives great on-the-money quotes: Tina Gaudoin was brought over to the WSJ from the UK early this year to edit the paper's upcoming "lifestyle magazine." She's also the owner of Triyoga, a chain of yoga studios in the UK. And she used to tout that fact over and over again in her column! Which tends to go over less well in the US than in the UK. Still, it was so hard for the WSJ to find a good yoga-as-business quote that they ended up using this one, from Claire Missingham (pictured):
Finance "is the antithesis of what yoga is about in terms of inner peace," says Claire Missingham, a yoga teacher in London. But Ms. Missingham, whose pupils have included bankers and hedge-fund managers, says it can be highly beneficial for them. Yoga traditionalists say practicing yoga should be about more than just gaining physical benefits: It's a way of approaching life, including work. "Yoga teaches you to embrace fear and cultivate patience," says Ms. Missingham.
That's the Claire Missingham who happens to work at Gaudoin's Triyoga Soho! Way to keep it all in the family, WSJ.