I just spent two hours in my favorite kind of conversation: a crossover. Sara Joelle came on Yoga Teacher Confidential to talk about storytelling for yoga teachers. Then I went on her show, Point of the Story, to talk about something that started with my husband telling me—very, very kindly—to stop whining.
Two podcasts. One question I want every yoga teacher reading this to sit with.
Why not me?
There’s a second question that comes right behind it, and most teachers skip it. Together, they make up a two-step mindset that will move you off the sidelines and into the work you’ve been waiting to do.
The first question: why not me?
The story I told Sara is the one I tell whenever someone asks how I got my first book deal.
On a walk, I was complaining out loud—again—that I wished there were a book explaining yoga as a complement to endurance sports. My husband, Wes, finally stopped me. He said, in so many words: shut up. You have a PhD in English literature. You work in publishing. You’re an endurance sports coach. Why don’t you write that book?
I sat with it for a few days. Then I turned around at my desk, looked at the books on my shelf, noticed they all had the same publisher’s logo on the spine, and spent twenty minutes writing a short pitch to VeloPress. I sent it and went back to editing. A few hours later, Velo wrote back asking for a full proposal.
Hours. Not weeks. Not months.
I reached out cold to a colleague who had published with VeloPress, asked if I could see her successful proposal as a model, reverse-engineered what had worked, and wrote my own. They bought the book.
The whole arc, from “shut up” on the couch to a signed deal, was remarkably fast. Because once I decided why not me, I stopped waiting and started doing.
I almost didn’t ask. Women—Southern women in particular—are trained to be demure, to not take up too much space, to just be a good girl. The price of that training is steep. You sit on the sidelines watching people with thinner credentials do a worse job at the work you could be doing, simply because they were the ones who asked.
A saying I internalized from my running days: the only thing worse than a DNF is a DNS. Did Not Finish is bad. Did Not Start is worse. You can’t finish a race you never entered. You can’t know what you’re capable of if you never let yourself try.
For yoga teachers, the DNS pile usually looks like this:
- The workshop you’ve been outlining for two years that you haven’t pitched to a single studio
- The private-lessons shingle you haven’t hung out because you don’t feel “ready”
- The retreat you’ve imagined a hundred times that’s still living in a Google Doc
- The yoga-for-athletes program you could pitch to the local high school but haven’t
- The book you keep telling your friends you should write
Why not you? Genuinely. Why not?
If the answer is “I’m not ready,” that’s a story. If the answer is “I’m not credentialed enough,” that’s almost always a story, too. If the answer is “imposter syndrome,” I’ll gently push you to look harder. Imposter syndrome is a real feeling—and also, sometimes it becomes a convenient excuse for staying small while watching someone less qualified take the spot that was yours.
The second question: why me?
If “why not me?” is what gets you to write the email, “why me?” is what gets you the yes.
This is where so many yoga teachers stall out. They get past the mindset hurdle and then write a pitch that’s all about themselves: their training lineage, their certifications, their personal story, their love of yoga. None of that answers the question the person on the other end of the email is actually asking: why should I pick you?
When I emailed VeloPress, I led with a problem they had—a gap in their catalog—and made the case that I was the person to fill it. PhD in English literature, so I could write. Background in publishing, so I’d be easy to work with. Endurance sports coach, so I had the technical expertise and the built-in audience. I solved a problem for them. They said yes.
I owned a brick-and-mortar yoga studio for fifteen years, and the same dynamic ran on the receiving end of pitches. Yoga teachers emailed me constantly wanting to teach at the studio. The ones who got yes were not the ones with the longest training history. They were the ones who wrote something like: “I can teach prenatal and yoga with weights, which means I can sub almost any class on your schedule.” They led with the problem they could solve for me.
So here’s how I want you to answer “why me?” the next time you’re staring at a blank email.
For a workshop pitch:
- What gap on this studio’s calendar are you filling? A Saturday-afternoon void, a topic the regulars keep asking about, a population the studio isn’t currently reaching?
- What specific group do you serve uniquely well? Athletes, postpartum students, midlife women, teens, students recovering from injury?
- What makes you easy to work with? Reliable on dates, willing to promote it yourself, bring your own props, easy on the contract?
For a private-lessons offer:
- What specific outcome do you deliver? Helping athletes use yoga as a complement to training, supporting post-surgical recovery, building a sustainable home practice for an anxious student, working with someone who finds group classes intimidating?
- What lived experience makes you the right guide for that person? Your own injury history, your decades of teaching beginners, your work with one specific population, your recovery story?
- Why are you the easiest yes? You’ll come to them, you’ll record the session, you’ll send a follow-up sequence, you’ll communicate with their physical therapist?
The thing you’ve been treating as your disqualification is almost always the thing that qualifies you. The yoga teacher whose own knee has been replaced is the right guide for the student who just had knee surgery. The teacher who came to yoga in her fifties is the right guide for the new student who feels too old to start. The teacher whose own anxiety practice is hard-won is the right guide for the student who can’t sit still.
A 25-year-old who can put her foot behind her head cannot teach a 55-year-old man how to move. But the teacher who has lived in an aging or healing body absolutely can. Your limitations are your superpowers when you point them at the right student.
The paradox that ties it together
“Why not me?” is, on the surface, a self-centered question. And “why me?” sounds even more so. But the only way to answer “why me?” well is to decenter yourself entirely. You have to climb out of your own head and into the head of the person you’re pitching—the studio owner, the prospective private client, the publisher, the team coach, the corporate wellness director—and ask what problem they’re trying to solve. Then you make it easy for them to see you as the answer.
This is the same paradox that runs through the rest of your teaching life. The class is not yours. It’s your students’ experience. The yoga teachers who get out of their own way and genuinely center their students become the teachers students keep coming back for. Decentering yourself is the antidote to imposter syndrome, and it’s the engine of a great pitch.
Get your mindset right by asking why not me. Get your students’ question—why her?—answered in their language, not yours. That’s when you start cooking with gas as a yoga teacher.
One more thing: use the anger
If the motivation behind “why not me?” isn’t inspiration for you, that’s fine. It wasn’t, mostly, for me. Mine was anger (I’m pitta through and through, and my emotions all resolve to anger). When I see someone doing the work less well than I know I could do it, I get pissed. That anger subdivides into jealousy (someone has something that should be mine) and envy (someone has a quality I wish I had). Both are data. Both are pointing somewhere.
The next time you feel that little flare of “ugh, that should be me” while scrolling another yoga teacher’s workshop announcement, don’t push it down. Ask what it’s pointing at. Then go answer the two questions and write the email.
Listen to the episodes
If you want both halves of this conversation, listen here:
Yoga Teacher Confidential E77 — Storytelling for Yoga Teachers with Sara Joelle
Point of the Story Ep 64 — Your Limiting Beliefs Are Lying To You with Sage Rountree
Sara wrote a beautiful recap of our conversation on her Substack: Your Limiting Beliefs Are Lying To You (And Someone Less Qualified is Cashing In).
If you’ve been sitting on a workshop, a private-lessons shingle, a retreat, a corporate pitch, a book—go ask yourself the two questions. Then write the email.
The only thing worse than a DNF is a DNS.
