The question people type into a search bar is “should I become a yoga teacher?” The question they ask at 3:00 a.m. is different: who am I to teach this? I’ve been teaching yoga since 2003 and training yoga teachers since 2011, and nearly everyone I’ve trained walked in carrying the second question. So let’s set both on the table, because the answer to the first one lives in five smaller questions, and the second one turns out to be a good sign rather than a stop sign.
1. Do you watch the students around you, or just take the class?
Most dedicated yoga practitioners go deeper into their own practice, and that’s a beautiful path. A smaller group starts noticing everyone else’s: who claims the back corner, how the teacher greets the nervous first-timer, which cue made a stranger’s shoulders drop away from her ears. If you’ve caught yourself studying teachers instead of only taking their classes, that attention is the raw material of teaching yoga. A training doesn’t create it so much as teach you what to do with it.
2. Can you say a cue out loud without apologizing?
Not well, and not yet; just out loud. Try it in your living room: “Inhale, reach your arms up.” If you can say it to an empty room, you can learn to say it to a full one, and that learning is exactly what practice teaching is for. Your voice will get clearer, your pacing steadier, and the apology will fall away, because you’ll be too busy watching the people in front of you to worry about how you sound. (It goes faster when someone is watching and telling you what they see.)
3. Do you want to serve the students in front of you, or perform for them?
This is the question that sorts the two kinds of yoga teachers I meet, and it has nothing to do with how advanced your practice is. The performing teacher builds a class around what they can do. The serving teacher builds it around what the real humans on the mats need today: balanced, useful, and repeatable, so they leave feeling whole. If the second one sounds like you, even a little, you’re already thinking like a teacher. The poses you can’t do yet have very little to do with whether you can teach.
4. Is there a training that fits the life you have?
Time is the objection I hear most, and it deserves a real answer instead of a pep talk. The Comfort Zone Yoga 200-hour online yoga teacher training has one fixed appointment a week: a live call on Google Meet, about two and a half hours, on a weeknight the cohort sets together. Everything else, the lectures, the reading, the practice teaching, runs on your own clock, whenever your week has room for it. This fall, three of the eight students have joined calls with their children in their laps. They’re welcome exactly as they are, and it has been one of my favorite parts of the cohort; there’s a mute button for the moments a parent wants one.
I built the training for adults with full lives, because that’s who has always shown up wanting to teach. A full life isn’t a reason to wait; it’s the life you’ll be teaching from. If a training you’re considering can’t tell you plainly what the weekly load is, ask, and if the answer is vague, keep looking. I wrote a guide to how to choose an online yoga teacher training if you’d like the longer version.
5. What would you do with the first next step?
Nobody decides to become a yoga teacher in one afternoon. You take a first next step, then another, and somewhere along the way the question answers itself. So the last question is only this: if I handed you one small, free, useful step toward teaching, would you take it this week?
If yes, take this one. Find Your Teaching Voice is a free short course inside the Zone, and it’s one full unit of my 200-hour curriculum rather than a preview of it. You’ll find your own teaching message and get a feel for how I teach, before you spend a dollar.
About that 3:00 a.m. question
Who am I to teach this? I’ve heard it from nearly every yoga teacher I admire, usually right before they signed up. It’s a big green flag: it shows you understand what you’re taking on. A good training doesn’t answer it for you. Rather, it hands you the tools to answer it yourself: a clear, repeatable way to build a class, real practice teaching with people asking the same question you are, and feedback from someone who has watched a lot of first classes.
The next Comfort Zone Yoga 200-hour online yoga teacher training meets live February–April 2027. Applications open October 19, and the waitlist gets first word plus the early-bird rate. Join the waitlist for the February 2027 cohort, and if this isn’t your season, that’s fine. The waitlist is a good place to keep thinking about it.
