172: Why So Many Yoga Teachers Burnout (And What Actually Works Instead)
In this solo episode, I’m zooming out from the quick, in-the-moment burnout strategies I shared in Episode 171 and looking at the bigger picture. I want to talk about why so many yoga teachers are burning out—and what I’ve seen actually work instead.
My core premise is simple: the career model most of us were trained into doesn’t work for most people anymore. If you’re exhausted, underpaid, and questioning how sustainable this path really is, I want you to hear this clearly—it’s not you. It’s the model.
I’ll walk you through the structural issues I see over and over again, help you look honestly at the math of your teaching schedule, and introduce a shift that has made a huge difference for me and for so many teachers I’ve worked with: integrating private clients into your practice.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
Why the traditional yoga career path isn’t working
The real reason so many teachers feel exhausted and why it’s not your fault
The importance of doing the math: I’ll invite you to look at your actual hourly rate
How private clients can change everything and what makes private teaching different
The most common concerns I hear about teaching private clients
The different skills you need, and why they are learnable skills!
🎉 You’re Invited!
If you want to build a thriving private yoga practice, you need a slightly different skill set than most teacher trainings cover.
Teaching one-on-one requires you to think on your feet, build deep trust with students, hold strong professional boundaries, and manage the business side of your work with confidence.
That’s exactly what we focus on inside The Science of the Private Lesson™.
👉🏻 Email us for the code!
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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.
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.