Anytime I connect with a new-ish yoga teacher I end up giving a lot of the same advice, so I collected all of it in one place, right here in today’s podcast episode! Whether you are a new teacher or an experienced one in a phase of rebuilding (haven’t we all been rebuilding lately??) this episode has all my best pearls of wisdom, hard won over the last twenty years of full-time yoga teaching!

In this episode, you’ll hear:

why you should start a business bank account
the most important thing you can do as a new teacher
the difference between teaching and creating content
how important (or not) a website and branding is
what kind of teaching gigs I recommend for new teachers
how to get your first teaching jobs

This episode is sponsored by OfferingTree! Sign up at www.offeringtree.com/mentor to get 50% off your first three months (or 15% off any annual plan). With OfferingTree, yoga teachers put their schedule on a personally branded website where students can book classes and even pay or donate online. All of this can be set up in 10 minutes or less. OfferingTree supports me with each sign-up.

Recent Podcast Episodes

Featured

178: The Systems You Need to Make Yoga Teaching Sustainable

Teaching yoga involves far more than the hours we spend with our yoga students. Behind every yoga class we teach there is a significant amount of planning, relationship-building, scheduling, administration, marketing, and financial management. In this episode, I share the practical systems that have helped me build a sustainable yoga teaching career over the last two decades.

Following up on our recent conversation about the hidden labor of yoga teaching, this episode focuses on solutions. While we absolutely need collective action and systemic change to better support yoga teachers (and other freelance workers), there are also concrete systems we can put in place right now to make our work feel more manageable, organized, and sustainable.

177: The Hidden Emotional and Physical Labor of Yoga Teaching

As yoga teachers, we spend a lot of time talking about teaching techniques, sequencing, cueing, and professional growth. But there’s another side of this work that often goes unnamed: the hidden labor of teaching yoga.

In this episode, I explore the physical, emotional, mental, and administrative work that happens behind the scenes of a yoga teaching career. From building a business one class at a time to managing finances, marketing, commuting, continuing education, and emotional boundaries, much of the work that sustains a teaching career is invisible to students—and often unacknowledged within the industry itself.

176: Yoga Is Sold As Healing and Taught As Performance: What we need to move away from this paradigm

Have you ever been in a yoga class where the yoga teacher gives a long dharma talk about ahimsa, and then when the movement practice begins the teaching style feels very aggressive? Or maybe you have been that teacher yourself. I know I have!

I think there are really subtle and beautiful ways to teach the movement part of yoga in a way that has the deeper philosophical teachings embedded within it, but most of us were not taught to do that, and it is more challenging to do than you might think!

148: My Advice For New Yoga Teachers

Recent Podcast Episodes

For Yoga Teachers

For Yoga Students

Support

148: My Advice For New Yoga Teachers

Recent Podcast Episodes

149: What I’m Doing to Keep My Private Teaching Calendar Full

147: Foundational Business Practices Every Yoga Teacher Needs with Lauren Schoenfeld

For Yoga Teachers

For Yoga Students

Support