Today we’d like to introduce you to Melody Morton-Buckleair. They and their team shared their story with us below:
Melody
“Know what moves you, and you will move others.”
Melody is an experienced (20 years) business owner who has certified over 500 instructors in the Houston area. She began the PeakPilates certification and education center in Houston in 2002, has a PeakPilates Comprehensive Certification, and is a Level 3 PeakPilates Teacher Trainer and Master Instructor. Melody is also certified Pre/Post Natal Pilates through The Center for Women’s Fitness, BootyBarre, BuffBones, and PinkRibbon trained Instructor. Melody’s passion is to empower others through movement. In a post-COVID world, building immunity through movement is cost-effective, efficient, and the priority in our world today. She is focused on operating and growing her business as a way to bring life, energy, and vitality to her students and the community.
A Houston native, she moved to Paris and then moved to Denver for some real-life experience before college. After returning to Texas, Melody graduated in 1993 from the University Of Houston Clear Lake with a Bachelor of Arts. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she pursued acting, modeling, and fitness. While in LA, she dove into the burgeoning world of pilates and yoga in Santa Monica and Venice, CA.
Message from Melody…
After years of living in LA, and studying everything from yoga, dance, and acting to the fine art of waiting tables and managing restaurants, I moved home to Houston to work with my mother, who had built a successful Skincare business. With Mom as my business partner, my ideal was to create a place of transformation, whether it was reshaping an eyebrow, reshaping a body, or the most complex transformation of all – reshaping a life.
What’s always amazed me about Pilates is that it’s being driven, powered, and expanded by women. Women! Ordinary women are fueling an entire industry and ask only that we train ourselves to be open to empowerment. Pilates offers us the opportunity to transform our bodies and our minds. It offers us confidence, clarity of vision and the overwhelming joy that comes from a dream realized. Women are embracing this philosophy. I see them every time I walk in my studio, in my instructors, in my clients, in my mother, and in myself.
Pilates is power. The power to change and the power to improve – not only ourselves, but our families, our employees, our community, our world. In Pilates, I have found my good space. And I now offer The Good Space to anyone willing to come forth and embrace it.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think the road less traveled is one by entrepreneurs… having a dream an idea and putting that idea into reality is the biggest obstacle but once that first hurdle met, and all your skin is in the game then it’s just a matter of solving the problems as they arise. Besides the typical business growing pains with overhead cost, staff issues, membership trends, and even severe weather, i.e., Harvey 2017, all of those pale in comparison to the roadblock of COVID. As a business who touches people for a living literally to make corrections and to teach proper form, the pandemic shut our doors and flat-lined our cash flow for months. Recovering has taken years, and quite honestly is a miracle that we survived. Harvey was a minor roadblock to Covid. I think you also have to stay relevant in your industry and stay flexible with instituting some of the newer trends (i.e., contemporary Pilates with music, which has more of a fitness goal rather than a mind/body goal in class) to keep new clients of all age groups coming into your door.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Pilates is a movement system. It takes the body through a progressive pattern of movement in relationship to gravity that challenges the core muscles, builds strength and stamina, and stretches the entire body. Pilates focus on the breath, challenges the movement pattern and defines Pilates as a mind-body movement system. Basally, it’s like yoga in the sense you focus on breath and move in a sequence that progresses the body from lying down, to seated to kneeling, to standing. The Good Space specialty over the last 21 years has been in education and training instructors in the classical methodology through PeakPilates. I am proudest of the fact that after so many years, we still have clients coming who started with us in 2002. That says it all. What sets us apart from other trendy studios is at our core we are teaching the health benefits of the movement system to our clients from the inside out. Our approach is holistic and authentic Pilates. In today’s market, much of the original work Joe Pilates taught about his movement system is getting lost and not approached in classes. The intention, and goals of the exercises we teach are taught to imbue the body with conscious control, breath technique, and precision of the exercises. We teach it, others do not, so really only one side of this movement system is getting passed on and that’s what sets us apart from all the other studios.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Trust the process and your gut instincts.
Pricing:
- Intro Packages start at $44
Contact Info:
- Website: The Good Space Pilates Studio, www.thegoodspace.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheGoodSpace/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegoodspacetx/
