how to become (almost) everyone’s favorite yoga teacher
This one mindset shift will change everything in your yoga career: remember, you are not the hero. Your students are. You’re the guide.
Once you adopt this perspective, you’ll:
- Center your students’ agency
- Feel confident in the yoga classroom
- Easily plan and teach useful yoga sequences that help your students progress
- Be brimming with ideas for private lessons, workshops, and retreats
And your career will flourish as a result. Here’s how:
develop workshops that help your students grow
Many yoga teachers wait far too long to offer workshops. This free email course will get you helping your students in sellout workshops.
double your income teaching yoga to athletes
Teaching yoga to athletes is easier than you think. You just need to embrace this mindset shift: yoga for athletes is not athletic yoga.
as featured in
by the numbers
11
books to help you perform at your best
12
online trainings for movement teachers
13
years offering classes & trainings online
14
years owning a yoga studio
21
years teaching yoga
28
years training educators
100+
videos in my virtual studio
from controlling students to centering them
I began my teaching career in the college classroom, en route to my PhD in English literature. Every semester, I wrote a syllabus and judged my success as a teacher on my students’ performance: did they understand my assignments? Did they discern and achieve the criteria I’d set for them?
Those standards carried with me as I moved into teaching yoga. For at least the first half of my two-plus-decades teaching yoga, I came into class thinking I needed to stick to the agenda and direct a performance. If I did my job “right,” all the students would be in lockstep, following my careful cueing to the letter. That was what I figured was success.
Then my own yoga practice kicked in and showed me this wrong-seeing approach was causing suffering for my students, and for my career as a yoga teacher.
Now when I look out in the studio and see everyone doing something different, I celebrate. That’s how I know my message has really landed: every student in the room is paying attention to what they need from their practice. By centering students’ agency and reminding them of their own main character energy, we help students progress toward connection, union, yoga.
And that’s how you become (almost) everyone’s favorite yoga teacher: by remembering it’s not about you. It’s always about the practitioner.
“Yoga with Sage has eased my stiff body from thousands of hours of air travel and helped me relax after the intensity of close games.”
Hall of Fame Coach Roy Williams
my student for 10+ years
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latest from the blog
- Why Your Students’ Blank Expressions in Yoga Class Are a Good ThingAs yoga teachers, it’s easy to feel uncomfortable when we look out into a classroom and see nothing but blank expressions on our students’ faces. “They hate this!” you tell yourself. But what if these quiet faces were a sign of true connection, rather than disengagement?
- Affirmation: I Don’t Get Hung up on My Students’ ExpressionsYoga teacher affirmation: I don’t get hung up on my students’ expressions.
let me plan your next class
Feeling uninspired when it’s time to plan? I’m here to help!
Give me your email and I’ll send you my go-to class plan with ideas for every minute. This is the class I teach when my energy is low—but it’s the favorite of my students from 20 to 80 years old! I’ll even give you tips on how to adapt it for various class formats.