A Lucky Few People make yoga a full-time job. I wouldn’t even strictly count myself among them, as some of my income is from my ownership of other businesses, and I count on my husband’s benefits for my health insurance.
How will you know when you’re ready to make the move to being a full-time or almost full-time yoga teacher? You won’t. If you waited until you were completely ready, you’d never start! But you’ll feel more excited about the possibilities than scared about what might not work out.
Since you won’t be literally teaching yoga forty hours a week, making it a full-time job means you need several revenue streams. This is not just classes, not just private lessons—and not just things you do in person. This is why monetized asynchronous online content matters. Even if you were earning a good living traveling the world, teaching workshops a dozen weekends of the year, you’d want a diverse set of income streams, since one deep vein thrombosis or bad inner-ear infection preventing you from air travel could wipe out your annual pay.
Even if teaching full-time isn’t your goal, it’s smart to find ways to diversify your offerings. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket that depends upon your body holding up, especially if you teach a very physically demanding form of yoga or movement. Move some of your eggs into other baskets, like teaching meditation, training teachers, and other, less physical pursuits.
Set Your Vision
If you think you’d one day like to go all in on yoga as your primary source of income, whether you’re still looking at teacher trainings or feeling fed up with your day job, take some time first to dream and then to have a clear-eyed look at whether your dreams will stand up to reality. These prompts will help; write a little in response to each. Then talk about what you wrote with your partner, a parent, an adult child, a good friend, your mentor, your therapist, your life coach, or any trusted counselor. Don’t forget to include an accountant on this list!
▸ If you didn’t need the money, how would you spend your days?
▸ If you knew you would get a yes, what would you ask for in your current yoga-related work? What about other local opportunities? National and international opportunities? If you were sure to succeed, what would you reach for?
▸ When in your yoga workday are you happiest? What pays your soul the biggest dividends?
▸ What part of your yoga workweek pays you the most money per hour?
▸ Is there dissonance or harmony between your answers to the two previous questions? If the former, what could you change?
▸ How much do you need to earn to cover your expenses? How much do you need to earn to cover your expenses and contribute to short-term emergency-fund savings and long-term retirement savings?
▸ What is the difference between where you are and where you need to be?
▸ What real-world opportunities can you seize or create to bridge that gap?
Balance is the key across all levels. If you’re going to be a full-time teacher in your local market, consider whether it is wisest to go all in at one studio, perhaps as their lead teacher, manager, or teacher trainer, or if it would be smart to have a combination of clients across a schedule that includes many studios, gyms, and private lessons. Going all in at one place, especially if it’s a bigger business or a regional or national chain, may mean you get health insurance, vacation time, and other benefits of being a full-time employee. It also means that your work is dependent on the health of that business, so consider its longevity and financial stability as you weigh any full-time job offer.
As you envisioned your ideal schedule in chapter 6, here you’ll want to carefully weigh the pros and cons as you consider your practical schedule. Write out what you earn at each venue, along with hourly payments and the amount of time spent traveling.
Think about your brand and your audience. Where are your students? Are they at senior living facilities, in which case you should travel to them? Are they private clients who value yoga in their homes and pay accordingly? Or do your students travel to you? Do you have a sizable online following, or would you like to build one?
Traveling to lead workshops and to teach at festivals seems pretty glamorous from the outside. But in reality, it’s a lot like being a rock star: You spend a lot of your time tied up in the logistics of getting from point A to point B (and trying to find a salad there!), where you’ll deliver the same playlist to a different crowd day in and day out. This can drive you to staleness, and as a response you may wind up trying to build on what you said the previous weekend in an attempt to keep yourself intellectually stimulated. But the students in the new town need to hear the basics again. Remember: You’re the only one who’s ever heard every word you say.
When you travel a lot, it’s especially important to keep your teaching fresh. Build a niche for yourself and continue to study in it. And take advantage of being in yoga studios to take classes at every destination, and to develop friendships. You may eventually get in the rhythm of visiting the same locations yearly, and this can make the world your yoga home, with friendly colleagues and students to visit at every port.
Constant or even periodic travel can be tough on your relationships and your home life. Your colleagues at your day job, your partner, your children, and your pets will all be affected by your travel schedule. Be sure you have the support network you need before planning an ambitious travel schedule.
Whether you stick close to home or roam, you will need to diversify so that you have income that is not keyed to your being physically present in a classroom. This might mean taking on some administrative work at a studio or for a yoga-related nonprofit. It could mean you spend several hours a week on content creation, making videos or writing useful articles for yoga students, yoga teachers, or both, in a way that you can monetize: charging for video rental, selling ads on a website, writing ebooks, and so on. Maybe you’ll develop a parallel expertise in machine Pilates, sewing yoga props, or something that complements your yoga work while expanding your student base and giving you more income potential.
Diversification Plan
Depending on your skill set and your passions, your diversification plan can go in many directions. Take a moment to make notes about what you might do to complement your regular teaching schedule. Then write the first next step to move toward your vision.
If a studio owner is doing their job well, much of their work is invisible. It happens behind the scenes and encompasses a range of tasks from securing and maintaining business licenses and fire inspections to stocking toilet paper. As a teacher, you may see studio owners as swans gliding serenely across the surface of the pond; in reality, they are paddling like heck below the waterline to get where they are going. Because the swans look so peaceful, you may be tempted to dream of opening your own studio.
If you do make moves toward studio ownership, go into it with your eyes wide open. Start by writing a business plan. This is a document than can be daunting to draft but that will force you to articulate the vision for your business, to face facts about how the finances will run, to project whether and when it will be profitable. Look at the business plan templates available online at sites like SCORE.org and see if your local chamber of commerce can put you in touch with a business mentor from SCORE or a similar group. (SCORE is a US-based coalition of seasoned businesspeople who volunteer as mentors; you may find a similar outfit if you live outside the United States.) Or look at your local business school to see if the students work with commercial-sector partners on projects like writing a business plan, developing a marketing strategy, or growing a customer base.
Do some research on your own, too. Your local library is a great place to start. The librarians can direct you toward popular, useful business books. Be sure to read Michael Gerber’s classic The E-Myth, available in a revised edition as The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. The E-Myth is the myth of the entrepreneur: the idea that you can go into business for yourself and do what you love all day long. In reality, as a practitioner, when you open up your own shop, the irony is that you’ll have very little time to do what you do best: Practice your craft. Instead, you’ll be serving as your own HR department, accounts payable and billable departments, marketing department, facilities and housekeeping departments, and so on, leaving you very little time and energy even to teach yoga, let alone attend to your personal practice.
Vision alone—even having a beautifully written business plan—is not enough to get you through the creation of a studio. To execute your vision, you need an array of support, from business partners to support services to a supportive spouse and children. You’ll want to line all of these up before you even start with staffing or day-to-day operations:
▸ Family and friends for support
▸ Lawyer for incorporation and contracts review
▸ Commercial Realtor to help you find the right space
▸ Accountant to direct you in bookkeeping (or do it) and tax preparation
▸ Banker to help with accounts
▸ Payroll service, or expect to have a lot of contact with your accountant
▸ Software service for the business
▸ Web and graphic designers
Just as it takes at least nine months to see if a class is going to put down firm roots, it takes a long while to see whether a studio will succeed. In your initial business plan, project operational expenses for at least three years, and be sure you have a clear source for the funding. It may take even longer than three years to see a profit. The clearer-eyed you can be at the beginning, the better you’ll be able to roll with the punches that small business ownership inevitably throws your way. Expect the unexpected, like a pandemic, and marshal resources and plan ways to adapt. Keep your mission and your goals top of mind, and be sure you give yourself a couple of days off each week and a vacation or two each year.
Training teachers is extremely gratifying work. There is nothing like getting to spend the day in the company of like-minded colleagues to develop a deeper professionalism and expand our tools for serving our students. Leading a room full of teachers in asana practice is a special joy, as we share an understanding of our bodies and a common vocabulary of movement, while at the same time being especially perceptive to subtleties and nuance in sequencing, cueing, and theming.
If you’d like to train teachers, start small by offering short workshops on a topic you’ve explored in depth. You don’t need to know it all; you do need to know something of value and how to convey it. Follow the advice from chapter 10 on developing a workshop. After running several shorter versions of a workshop, you’ll be confident and clear on how you can expand it into a full weekend or weeklong training. If you are in the Yoga Alliance network, register as an E-RYT as soon as you can (after one thousand teaching hours and two calendar years past your graduation). This means that other RYTs can count study with you, in workshops or in regular classes, toward their continuing education hours. You can also pay $20 per year to register as a continuing education provider (YACEP), then list your course in the Yoga Alliance’s continuing education directory.
In time, you might become involved in a full-featured yoga teacher training. Teacher trainings are a major undertaking. It helps to work inside someone else’s to see what parts you would like to handle yourself and where you need support. This might even be enough to convince you that teaching in a training is better than constructing one wholesale. If you do choose to create your own, first make sure you are not stepping on any toes locally, especially if you have been teaching inside another program. Your program should be distinct enough that you won’t be siphoning off students from a training that has employed you to your mutual benefit. This is good both from a relationship management perspective and for your marketing plan. If you get the all clear, you’ll next need to decide whether to affiliate with the Yoga Alliance. If you do, you will design a curriculum that meets their current requirements, detail it on an application, and seek their approval. This may take several rounds of back-and-forth over many months, so do not advertise a start date for your program until it has been cleared.
Whether or not you affiliate your training with the Yoga Alliance, look at their standards and application. This will help you develop policies that will keep you and your trainees clear and safe, including whether, when, and how to give refunds. As you enroll your trainees, be clear on what you want from them. Do you want them to have a particular background? A certain amount of experience as a student? Will you require references? Clear communication with prospective students about the demands of the program, your expectations, and what they can expect as next steps after training will save heartache down the road. Revisit the advice in chapter 2 for those choosing a yoga teacher training, but now envision yourself on the other end of the equation as the trainer, not the trainee. What matters most? How can you attract and enroll those who will ensure the best learning environment for all?
The first round of teacher training will likely be the hardest, as everything will be new to you. Slot in extra care for yourself during YTT weekends or weeks, and make notes after each session about what went well, what didn’t, and how you want things to go next time.
When you offer a teacher training, I hope you’ll use this book as a manual. It contains everything I tell my teacher trainees, everything I have learned throughout my career, and everything I, as a studio owner, wish teachers knew about how to treat themselves, their clients, their employers, and each other. The more professional each of us strives to be, the healthier the field of teaching yoga and mindful movement will grow. And the healthier the field is, the more people will benefit, teachers and students alike. Thank you for reading, and namaste.