Gabi Macra's journey from the basketball court to the yoga mat

Gabi Macra was a top Canadian basketball player that never really thought about the “life after basketball” before dealing with a major injury towards the end of her college career.

Instead of following any sort of traditional path, she headed East to Japan where she came to teach English. She loved her experience there and now reflects on the immense value of learning how to teach and coach others helped her in the following years.

Instead of heading back to Canada, she headed to London where she had a successful career and journey as an actuary. She was a leader in her company but reached a point where she was dealing with health challenges and finding that her career was no longer giving her the fulfilment that it once was.

She ended up deciding to take some time off and told her boss that she was leaving. However, she ended up staying another 18 months as she helped the team transition with some other internal changes. Just knowing she was leaving enabled her to approach everything completely different and think about how she could best serve her team while also taking care of her own health.

She finally took the leap in 2018 and after several months of sabbatical, including some time in Bali, she realized that becoming a Yoga Therapist was something she was ready to commit to over the next few years. While preparing for that program, she also created a learning internship for herself in London (stealing this from Lydia Lee’s podcast episode!) by taking 8 people interested in Yoga and creating a customized program for them. Her only goals: to learn a ton about how she can serve people and learn what to do next.

What we covered:

Her drive and motivation as a basketball player
Her experience living and working in Japan after university
Starting her actuarial career and what she enjoyed about work
Becoming successful but questioning her role as a successful worker as the center of her life
Her decision to take a sabbatical and leave the company (and how she ended up staying for 18 months but doing so with a completely different mindset)
Her recent creative projects, “learning experiments” and decision to start a long-term Yoga therapist training program

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