Melanie C Klein is Changing Individuals and Communities through Coaching, Teaching, and Influencing
Melanie C. Klein uses her roles as an empowerment coach, thought leader, and influencer to help others embrace radical self-acceptance, supercharged confidence, and authentic empowerment. She is a successful writer, speaker, and professor of Sociology and Gender/Women’s Studies.
In 2014, Melanie co-founded the Yoga and Body Image Coalition, a natural outcome of her decades of hard work. She works 1:1 with clients who benefit from her unique skills and framework. She believes in offering guidance to entrepreneurs, leaders, and individuals from all walks of life.
Melanie’s 25+ Years of Experience
Over 25 years of experience formed Melanie into the coach she is today. During this time, she’s worked in social justice and social advocacy, using a framework informed by intersectional feminism in theory and practice. Her background also includes extensive work in media literacy education and challenging the larger cultural narrative by diversifying representation in media.
Melanie put her advocacy into practice through the Yoga and Body Image Coalition, where she ensured the diversity of representation in the images used and stories told. She also worked as co-author and editor on a number of yoga and meditation-focused books. Because of this, the yoga and wellness spaces are significantly diversified when compared to the landscape a decade ago.
In 1996, Melanie began practicing yoga and meditation. She completed her yoga teacher training in 2001 and Thai Yoga Therapy training in 2002. Around that time, she became a certified massage therapist. This training contributes to her expertise in the areas of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.
Melanie holds two degrees in Sociology with an emphasis on sex and gender and systems of power and privilege. For nineteen years, she’s worked as a Sociology and Gender/Women’s Studies professor. Her current work focuses on 1:1 client coaching.
From Academia to Private Coaching
The transition from the academic sphere to the private sphere wasn’t an easy one for Melanie. When she first started doing 1:1 coaching, she questioned herself. She wondered how she could exist in both spaces and worried about how she would sustain and increase growth in both her integrity and authenticity in this new arena.
As she grew her business, she had to resolve and let go of her preconceived notions, stereotypes, misconceptions, assumptions, and projections. By doing this, she deepened her own personal development work. This allowed her to expand her vision and sense of confidence, ultimately benefiting her clients as well as her students and readers.
To provide the best coaching to her clients, Melanie is always checking in with herself to make sure she’s on track. Her positive attitude is apparent in her response to new challenges. When a new challenge or speaking engagement makes her nervous, she just smiles and accepts it as an opportunity to push herself to her next level of being.
This is the mindset she brings to her coaching practice. She helps individuals optimize their personal and professional success by offering them increased confidence, clarity, healing, action-taking, money mindset shifts, and overall empowerment. Her work leads to radical individual transformation and collective liberation of communities.
The Work of Yoga and Body Image Coalition
Melanie co-founded Yoga and Body Image Coalition in 2014, although it is the culmination of over 25 years of empowerment work. She created the community platform from her deep desire to share the various ways yoga practice can offer peace and healing with our bodies and ourselves and improve our body image. Additionally, the platform was created to offer a space for conscious community and connection, to amplify marginalized voices, and collectively educate and agitate the mainstream wellness industry to increase the diversity of representation in front of and behind the camera.
Melanie and the members of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition have been committed to challenging, deconstructing, and making over the stereotypes, outdated scripts and one dimensional images in the mainstream wellness community. As a result, this landscape looks much different than it did 15 years ago.
Sharing Freedom with Others
Melanie once struggled with guilt, blame, shame, and the idea that she wasn’t enough. She found freedom and peace from these things through a combination of intersectional feminism, sociology, mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. When she experienced that freedom, it fueled her desire to share her experiences and expertise with others.
Today, Melanie shares the freedom she found through teaching, advocating, organizing, writing, speaking, mentoring, collaborating, curating and publishing anthologies, and coaching. Through her work, others can step onto the path of creating fulfilled lives and contribute in meaningful ways to making the world a more beautiful and equitable place.