Often people reach out and ask me, ‘I'm worried that my students are going to get bored. I'm worried that I'm teaching the same old stuff, that maybe people aren't coming anymore because I'm not being interesting enough. How can I keep my classes interesting?’
Keeping classes interesting is an important consideration for all Yoga teachers. Interesting classes means greater professional reward for you, a better experience for your students and a higher retention rate for your business.
But ‘interesting’ can be misinterpreted to mean ‘high tech’, ‘fancy’, ‘novel or unique’ etc. In this sense, striving to keep things ‘interesting’ can keep us striving for ‘bigger, better, faster, more’. Our class planning becomes onerous. We become addicted to additional trainings, trying to ‘qualify ourselves confident’. We start pouring over old books, lecture notes, posts in Facebook groups. We look to our competitors, their posts, their reviews. We doomscroll.
This can take us to a place of feeling pressured, competitive or inadequate. All bad.
Next week I’ll answer the specific question about how to keep your classes interesting. But to prime us for that article, here are two really important reminders to provide perspective and context for the larger conversation.
1. No one thinks about your classes as much as you do.
Recognise that most of our students are not thinking about yoga in between yoga classes.
Perhaps some of them have a home practice but for the majority of people in your Kula, yoga is something they do on a Wednesday night because they know it's good for them and they have a bit of fun. They go to bookclub every fourth Thursday night, they go to trivia on a Friday night and on the weekend they mow their lawn and play with their kids. You might be thinking about your yoga classes all the time. Your students just aren’t.
Understand that the level of emphasis you put on keeping your classes interesting is probably unique to you.
2. People are coming for yoga not a sound and light show.
Remember that your students are coming to you to learn yoga asana, maybe some pranayama, maybe some meditation, maybe a little dusting of philosophy. They're not coming to you for wild entertainment. They're not coming to you for Cirque du Soleil. They're not coming to you to have their mind blown and to achieve Moksha in 75 minutes. Take the pressure off yourself if you are expecting yourself to be wildly entertaining and trying to offer up a spectacle, an extravaganza of yoga asana sequencing every week.
No one else expects that of you, no one, not even your teacher trainer. I don't care who you did your teacher training with—I'm fairly confident that your teacher would much prefer you to teach a solid, reliable, intelligent class than anything that is whiz bang fancy pants. (That's a technical term, ‘whiz bang fancy pants’.)
Remember that no one has expectations as high as you may have for yourself.
Keep your eye out for next week’s article where I’ll be sharing my top three tips to keep your classes interesting. The good type of interesting, that is.
If you’re looking for more inspiration in the meantime, find my podcast ‘Abundant Yoga Teacher’ on Apple, Spotify of wherever you get your pods. It’s a weekly 45-minute business training for yoga teachers, with the occasional yoga joke thrown in for good measure.
Enjoyed this article? DM me on Insta and say hello!