3
Clarify Your Vision
If You Find This Book before you embark on a teacher training, wonderful! You can enter your YTT clear-eyed about the role that yoga and the teaching of it can fill in your life, and after YTT you can start to craft the career you want. But at any and every point in your teaching journey, it’s helpful to assess where you are, where you want to be, and how best to help yourself and your students. In this chapter, you’ll be prompted to think through what brought you to yoga and what you can bring to it, to articulate the cardinal rules you believe about yoga and teaching, to question and crystallize those rules, and to set or revise a vision for your work as a professional yoga teacher.
recognize your backstory: find your why
As I mentioned in the preface, I come from a family of educators, and I came to yoga right after seven years of graduate school, during five of which I was teaching English writing and literature. This backstory informed my desire to teach yoga, because I could see myself pretty easily in the seat of the teacher. It also informed my vision of the kind of teacher I wanted to be, in part because I knew the kind of teacher I was in the college English classroom: a guide who had rather recently learned to analyze the same texts the class was reading, and whose fresh experience was re-formed in the process of teaching. Similarly, I began as a yoga teacher working with people like me: endurance athletes who felt tight and tired and wondered whether yoga might both ease their pains and develop their mental strength. Having recently recognized the ways yoga helped my own training, I was equipped to help students who had a similar backstory. I could have had a parallel career as a prenatal yoga teacher, or a yoga-for-parents teacher, as the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting was also very fresh for me as I began teaching.
Lately, I’ve been working in yoga for healthy aging (more on this in my Lifelong Yoga, cowritten with Alexandra DeSiato) and doable core moves based on my own love of taking creative Pilates classes that put a contemporary spin on the classical moves—this became my Core Strength for Real People video series. Again, my own interests and experiences have informed my teaching. And so should yours! As we know, you need to be you, not Bryan and not Sage. Your authentic backstory will give you a sense of your why and point you to what kind of teacher you want to be.
Write Your Backstory
Consider and list the experiences you have had that brought you to yoga—was it a pregnancy, a desire to get in shape, a need for downtime and centering, or something else? Write a little about these experiences.
Now think of experiences you’ve had in the seat of the teacher. These need not be in a classroom setting; perhaps you’ve been a scout leader, a team captain, or a babysitter. What attitude did you adopt in these situations? What kind of teacher do you have experience being?
Finally, write about what kind of teacher this backstory has set you up to be.
find your who and your what
Now that you’ve reflected on the path that’s brought you to this point, think about who your students are. This is a useful exercise whether or not you are already teaching.
Find Your Audience
While you’ll often be adapting to teach the students who are in the room, especially if you’re teaching open classes in person, you’ll find the greatest ease and success by spending some time envisioning your ideal audience. This way, you can take next steps toward working with the people who will most benefit from what you have to teach and how you teach it.
Write a little in response to these prompts: Who are your students? Whom do you naturally relate to? Middle school teachers, for example, are a special crew. With whom do you share your happiest social events? Is it gardeners, athletes, chess players, children, your elders?
Only once you are clear on your audience can you see what best to teach them. To paraphrase the master teacher Cyndi Lee, your role is not to teach your students what you know—it’s to teach them what they don’t know.
Find Your Content
To determine what your students need to know, first determine your audience. Then ask yourself, “What is a problem this audience has?” To drill down more: Where does this audience exist, what activities do they do—or how and why are they inactive—and what patterns do people in this audience develop in mind and body? How can these patterns become a problem? How can yoga solve that problem?
For example, let’s say your audience is long-haul truckers. They spend many hours each day sitting with their arms reaching forward, and with their left arms on the windowsill and their right hands on the wheel. They use their right legs and their left legs in different ways to operate the clutch and gas pedals. Think of the imbalances this work accrues, and how most truckers don’t have the time for or access to gyms or trails to get in a post-drive workout or hike.
In this example, you might design a beginner-friendly but active practice that gets the truckers moving and draws their attention to how the right and left sides of their bodies might feel different, and how the front of their bodies may seem tighter than the back. This practice would include some passive backbends to stretch the front, and some active backbends to strengthen the back.
Aha! Suddenly this example doesn’t seem so esoteric. You may not find yourself teaching a room full of long-haul truckers, but you will likely have a room full of students who spend much of their day sitting at a desk, and sitting in a car or train on the way to and from work. Their needs will be similar.
Beyond the physical, what are the mental demands on your audience? Do they need to spend a lot of time focused on one thing—what in yoga we would call dharana (intense concentration)? Or do they need to spend a lot of time in presence, aware of many things at once? We’d call that diyana (meditative awareness). Depending on these demands, you might include various breath exercises, teach mantra, explain and challenge drishti (focused gaze), or make other choices to give your students what they need.
If you’re teaching an open class, you may not have a very clear grasp of who your audience is week to week. But if you watch your students closely, you’ll be able to see trends. If you teach at a gym, for example, you may have a wide range of students. But depending on your class time and title, you may find that your students tend to be weightlifters, or cardiac rehab patients, or moms taking advantage of the free childcare to take some time for themselves. Once you identify these trends, you’ll be able to ask yourself what problem this audience has, and how you can offer yoga to solve it.
Find Your Message
The lessons yoga has taught you are the very ones you’ll be teaching your students. Write a little about your three or four biggest takeaways from yoga. I imagine you’ll find they are big life lessons—not “it helps to flex your foot in x pose” but “you’re capable of more than you think” or “we all hold way more tension than we are aware of, and stillness is often the best way to realize this and to dissolve it.”
Now, could you distill these lessons to a short phrase like, “Find the balance between effort and ease,” or “Find the right breath for now,” or “Do less,” or “Hang on”? These will be your guiding principles and messages as a teacher. Come back to them often.
what are the rules?
New yoga teachers like rules. This makes sense: If you were in your first semester of cooking school, you’d want to know the rules, too! But once you’re versed in what has been presented to you as the rules of alignment and sequencing (and you’re about to see that I believe there are very few hard-and-fast rules), you’ll need to begin an educated questioning of these rules. In what cases do they admit exception? Why are the rules imposed in the first case? Who came up with them, who enforces them, and what would happen if they were broken?
This goes not only for alignment and sequencing but also for every element of your class. To guide you about when to follow and when consciously to break the rules, consider the context. The cooking analogy holds up here.
Are you teaching at a studio with a specific style, and if so, what is expected of you? This would be clearly communicated in a manual and in your training. In the cooking analogy, this is like working at a franchise. Part of the appeal of McDonald’s or Starbucks, for example, is that you can walk into one anywhere and expect to order the same familiar items and to receive them prepared in the same familiar way.
But if you are cooking at your own place, and especially if you are given free rein either explicitly (you have created and are hosting a class of your own) or implicitly (you are an independent contractor—we’ll cover this later on), you’ll have much more room to improvise your recipes and cook based on what is in season and what your students’ palates crave. You’ll still need to follow the few rules that universally help with student safety, just as you’d need to follow food safety laws regardless of where you’re cooking. But you’ll have a lot more freedom of expression.
Yoga spent centuries as an oral culture, passed from teacher to student. Many of the rules have been repeated this way for generations. As a student and a new teacher, you will find yourself repeating them. This is only natural: You respect your teachers, you trust that what they say is because they have your best interests at heart, and you know you have your own students’ best interests at heart, too. But once you have gained some comfort with the basic elements of class, undertake a reasoned investigation of what rules you’re conferring on your students, and whether they apply. Don’t simply repeat things because they’re what you’ve heard. Instead, offer them because they have been proven through your own study and practice. Your experience and your curiosity should guide you.
For example, you’ve likely heard that in tree pose, students should never rest their raised-leg foot against their standing-leg knee. Why not? Try it now. Did you feel your chakras spin in the wrong direction? Of course not. If your knee isn’t capable of handling the light stress of a foot resting against it, you’ll be in trouble when you step off a curb and torque it, or when an enthusiastic dog or child runs into you.
Similarly, you may have been taught your feet should be in a particular arrangement for Warrior I, and another very particular arrangement for Warrior II and similar poses. (To further confound things, different styles can dictate different but exact placement of your feet.) Why? Have you challenged your teacher for a response? Have you considered how unique morphology—each individual’s different skeleton, especially the intersection of the pelvis and the femur at the hip joint—might demand a different alignment? Start asking questions like this of yourself, your teachers, and, when appropriate, your students. How does it feel to try things a different way?
Safety in Class Is Like Food Safety
New teachers are often invested in “the rules,” wanting to make sure they get everything right. Similarly, new parents are terrified about caring for their fragile infants, but they quickly learn that babies are durable. So are your students. As long as they aren’t wildly flailing to kick into a headstand, they are likely safe, and a slight deviation from the Platonic ideal of a pose may actually be safer for a student, given their unique body. No one wants to feel like a failure in a yoga class; an overemphasis on the “right” way to do a pose can set up students, especially new students, to feel like they aren’t good at yoga.
Once again, a food analogy comes to bear. Imagine you are preparing a buffet. There are some important food safety rules to follow to prevent poisoning your guests: Wash vegetables well; cook poultry and pork to indicated temperatures; keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold; don’t leave anything out at room temperature for very long. Within the context of these rules, you’re setting out what you think will be palatable to your guests. And they can choose what to put on their plates.
Perhaps one of these guests has a food allergy. It would be important for them to avoid eating the foods that they are allergic to, and it would be up to you as the cook to answer any questions they have about the ingredients and preparation so they can make an informed decision. If the party is small and you have advance notice, you can prepare an alternative, just as you would if you were teaching a private lesson and knew your student had some injuries to work around. But in the context of a large gathering, there will be enough other offerings on the table that a guest with an allergy can skip the items that would sicken them and still leave satisfied.
My Actual Rules
In my experience over many years of teaching, virtually everything I once believed to be a clear-cut truth about yoga has proved to be more nuanced. Through years of study of yoga, anatomy, and exercise physiology while working to keep an open mind, here are my currently held beliefs.
1. Be clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing. Constantly ask why. To have an efficient and specific practice, you should be able to justify any movement, exercise, or technique you are doing. “For fun!” is a fine reason.
2. No movement is inherently bad or wrong. Doing any movement too much will lead to injury. Find the appropriate dose of any stress you choose. Too little and there won’t be change; too much and you will break down.
3. Students are responsible for caring for their needs. Everything I mention as a teacher is a suggestion; students must make their own choices about whether to take any shape or movement, and students must choose the right amount for their own bodies.
And that’s it. Three rules!
Articulate Your Rules
What do you consider the actual rules or cardinal rules of yoga, and in particular, of asana practice? List them.
Now to each item on the list, add a reason why you believe these. It’s OK to write, “I think your raised-arm palm should face forward in triangle pose. Why? Because my teacher said so.” Only by questioning the origin of your long-held beliefs can you make informed choices about whether they are true now.
Finally, do some research on whether they hold up. Are there peer-reviewed studies that support your beliefs? Do different styles take alternative approaches that contradict your rules? What would it be like to try these approaches? Be open.
imposter syndrome
A creeping sense that you are a phony goes hand in hand with the destabilization that comes from questioning your beliefs. Our yoga teacher trainees often ask me, “When did you stop feeling like a fraud?” The question makes me smile, because it presumes that I’ve ever stopped. Some days, I still feel like I’m not experienced enough, or perky enough, or whatever enough to lead my students. And I do it anyway. If I taught only when I was in the perfect mood to teach, I wouldn’t teach at all.
Imposter syndrome is real, particularly for women. My best advice is to fake it until you make it. With luck, you’ll feel more authoritative over time. But recognize that some days you won’t. On those days, do it anyway. It can help to imagine you are playing a role—because, in a way, you are. Don’t expect to feel perfectly authentic; do focus on what your students need: a teacher to guide them in breath and movement.
You don’t need to know it all, you just need to have a plan and guide your students. Teaching yoga isn’t brain surgery or landing a jet plane. Keep it simple, smile, and leave lots of time for students to go inward. Don’t fill every moment with the sound of your voice out of a desire to prove your worth! Instead, issue a clear direction, then be quiet and let the students enjoy their practice.
On the other hand: Often students say they want a 6:00 AM class, but they really mean they want to be the kind of person who shows up to a 6:00 AM class. (More than once, we’ve added early classes to the studio schedule because of student demand, and then … crickets.) The same thing can apply to yoga teacher trainees. They want to be the kind of person who would wholeheartedly embrace yoga and float through teacher training. They want to be the kind of person who will confidently fill the seat of the teacher. Taking a good look at your motivation and setting realistic expectations will ensure that you get the most out of your teacher training experience and, as your career progresses, your experience as a professional yoga teacher. You will feel more authentic to your vision when you are able to articulate your vision with clear intentions and goals.
With the recognition that teaching yoga is, for most of us, a way to give back and a side gig that complements our primary work, you will want to make wise plans about how your career can grow as a complement to your other commitments. Keep your eyes wide open about the time you have to devote to teaching and the income you will need to receive. This will guide you to smart choices about what jobs you take. This workbook exercise will help.
Clarify Your Intentions and Goals
Being very clear on both intentions and goals will help you make choices in any situation, from running a marathon to designing your career. I consider intentions to be about the inner process—the feelings you want to have as you undertake and complete a project, from running a marathon to finishing yoga teacher training to leading a single class. Intentions are about the process. Goals, on the other hand, are about the outcome. These might include hitting a particular time in the marathon, or earning a certain amount per class as a yoga teacher.
Take some time to journal about and list your intentions for becoming a yoga teacher. Ask yourself:
▸ What feelings come up for me around the role of yoga teacher?
▸ What qualities does a good yoga teacher demonstrate?
▸ How do I want to show up for my students?
▸ How do I want my students to feel after class with me?
Given what you’ve written, write yourself a mission statement, an overarching declaration of your intention as a teacher of yoga. Here’s mine:
I use the privilege of my education and varied experiences by sharing freely from what I have learned to benefit my students.
Now consider your goals, remembering that these are external, public, and measurable. These might build on the goals you noted in chapter 1, or you might have already thought about going in new directions. Ask yourself:
▸ Given my other work, health, and family obligations, how many hours a week can I spend practicing yoga?
▸ Given my other work, health, and family obligations, how many hours a week can I reasonably spend teaching yoga?
▸ How many of those hours would be spent leading a live class? How many hours would be spent online and creating content?
▸ What would it take, either in money or in benefits (like free gym membership or free studio classes), for me to feel like my time is fully valued?
▸ Recognizing that I have to start somewhere, how long am I willing to work toward this fair-value goal?
▸ And, most critically:
▸ What is the first next step toward this goal?
Your answer to this next-step question will begin to structure your action plan. Perhaps it’s researching teacher trainings, or a new studio you want to apply to teach for, or asking for a raise. Write out this step, and the next, and the next, until you hit a natural endpoint. (For more on project management along these lines, read David Allen’s Getting Things Done.)
As you did in chapter 1, set yourself reminders to check in on these goals. Review them at least quarterly or—better yet—once a month. When you do these regular checkups, you might find that a goal isn’t relevant anymore, so revise as necessary. Sometimes a big goal needs to be broken down into smaller parts. And sometimes a goal needs to be postponed while you focus on the smaller next steps that will eventually take you there.
One of your goals likely includes furthering your career as a yoga teacher. I imagine you’re planning to start teaching or developing a presence online, or you want to up your game, or you feel like you’re stagnating and want a fresh infusion of energy for your teaching. Let’s take a look at how you can define and promote yourself so students find you and can benefit from what you have to offer.