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Unless you’re fortunate enough to be a yoga teacher with a mentor, chances are most of your yoga education has come from structured trainings. But there’s much about teaching yoga that you learn by experience. I’ve certainly come away with an education after teaching yoga around the world for more than a decade. And I’m offering it for you to steal.
10 Yoga Teacher Cheat Codes You Won’t Learn in YTT
Consider the following reminders your informal mentor.
1. Be Reliable
Being punctual and professional will get you plenty of brownie points with your potential employers and students. If studios or partners know they can rely on you to represent them and turn up consistently as your best self, then you’ll be first person they call when teaching opportunities arise.
If make-believe yoga teacher Jackie (whose professional email is probably jackieheartsdisco84@hotmail.com) often needs last-minute subs because she “gets caught in traffic” and “has given too much of themselves,” they might be pretty low on the list of people who are considered for additional teaching gigs.
2. Define Success for Yourself
Don’t get distracted by how other people define what it is to be a successful yoga teacher. Start to look for intrinsic fulfillment rather than external validation. That is, look at what makes you deeply contented rather than what makes you look successful to other people.
Perhaps your idea of success would be teaching yoga at locations around the world. Maybe it’s building long-term connection with students who consistently attend your classes. Perhaps it’s a teaching schedule that lets you spend time with family or one that allows you to buy a Porsche…although if the later is your intended direction, you’ve quite possibly chosen the wrong career path.
3. Don’t Worry What Others Think of You
The burden of worrying what other people think of you is a heavy one, so begin to drop that futile weight. Begin by acknowledging that, unless you are literally standing in front of them, most people probably aren’t thinking about you all that much anyway. They’re more likely to spend their mental capacity ruminating about what others think of them!
Next step is to accept that you’ll likely have a far greater effect on the world if just a few people resonate with your teachings deeply—and lots don’t resonate at all with them—than if lots of people are mildly indifferent to you.
4. Know Your Why
You’re of course entitled to use marketing tools as a yoga teacher to let people know your teaching exists. But before you add to your toolkit, make sure you know your “why.”
Are you using your role as teacher to share the teachings of yoga? To get people’s bodies on mats so your classes are at capacity? To link with brands and find more income opportunities? To inspire via the poses or your life experiences? To keep a journal of your practice and your life?
Once you know your why, then make sure you use those tools in a manner that aligns with that. Don’t compare your marketing to those who are using it for different reasons. That also means not wasting your energy talking negatively about how other people use marketing tools. You don’t know their why. (Unless, of course, they are using it in a way that’s harmful to others. Then complain away!)
5. Don’t Neglect Your Administrative Work
If you’re teaching full time, then you’re probably juggling multiple roles as yoga teacher, content creator, mat cleaner, marketing director, accountant, and so on. Amongst all of that, your email inbox will be lurking in the background, creating an ever-enlarging shadow of doom hanging over you.
Don’t underestimate the power of sitting down for an hour and hammering through that inbox. It might not seem like the most urgent or productive thing, but addressing that source of overwhelm may well be the best thing you can do for clarity of your mind and internal calm.
Also, I can’t tell you how many opportunities and connections I’ve lost over the years simply by not responding to emails in a timely fashion!
6. Teach A Lot
If you want to become a better yoga teacher, one of the most essential things you can do is teach yoga more often to more unique individuals. The benefits of this will be multiplied when you take time every single class to reflect on what just took place.
Perhaps you choose to write down in a journal what you learned. Maybe you ponder how you could have done things differently on the train home. Make sure you consider questions like did the cues land well? Did each pose make sense in the flow? Did I intelligently adapt for individual students? Did I or students get distracted by the music? Did I have to rush Savasana?
Make sure you give yourself appreciation for what went well as much as what could improve.
7. Stop Trying to Please Everyone
Avoid being a people pleaser and wearing an ever-changing mask in the hope that everyone will like you. Once you’ve found your style of teaching, delivery, and sequencing, stay with that and present yourself consistently to the world. Better to have some people love your style and some people hate it than everyone think it’s just okay.
That said, do make sure you stay professional and if nobody is coming to your class, perhaps make some effort to please at least some people!
8. Let Yourself Be Human
We’re all fallible, imperfect human beings. If you make a mistake of any kind, own it. It will make you seem more human to your students. The people who come to your classes will trust you more and you’ll be offering them the example that it’s okay to make mistakes. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll be able to drop people-pleasing and avoid those futile ongoing thoughts about that mistake you made in your sequence two weeks ago.
9. Be Grateful for What You Have
You’ve surely heard of gratitude practices and, hopefully, plenty of you have incorporated them into your personal lives. Each evening, the wonderful sound therapist Holly Husler and I share three things we are grateful for that day and one thing we appreciate about it other. It’s a transformative practice. Make sure you extend your gratitude to your professional life, too.
The student-facing part of life as a yoga teacher can be where we are most hard on ourselves or where we constantly look forward to what we need to achieve next. Take time each day, week, month, and year to take stock on all you’ve achieved and the change you’ve helped make in the world
10. Make Your Own Luck
Some of your teaching career and the opportunities that present themselves to you will be by a product of hundreds of variables outside of your control. Don’t get caught up by the injustice of that sort of luck.
But remember that you can influence how likely you are to be “lucky” by working hard on the things you can control. That includes teaching lots, launching a podcast or being a guest on other teachers’ podcasts, going to other teachers’ classes, write blogs, giving back, etc.
In hindsight, maybe these cheat codes aren’t so much cheats at all. They each demand considerable intention, time, contemplation, mindset shifts, and effort. Then again, as we continue to learn from our long-term yoga practice, any change worth cultivating takes consistency and dedication. Teaching is no different.