One of our teachers at Carolina Yoga Company also teaches business classes at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. There, she told me, she tells her students that customer satisfaction follows this formula: Satisfaction = Perception − Expectations. Satisfaction is a result of what the consumer perceived they received minus what they expected to receive. Satisfaction is positive when your students’ experience is equal to or better than what they thought they would get, and negative when their expectations exceed their reality.
One way to manage expectations is by writing a very clear class description that lets students know what they will experience in the class. At Carolina Yoga Company, each class description also includes ratings of challenge and chill on a scale from 0 to 5. Restorative Yoga then gets a challenge level of 0 and a chill level of 5, while Flow Yoga has a challenge of 3 or 4 and a chill of 2. Flow and Unwind has a challenge of 3 or 4 but a chill of 4, because it ends in a restorative pose. Adding such a scale might help you manage students’ expectations.
And when everyone is on the same page, everyone wins.
Read more advice like this in The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook!