I’ve spent thousands of hours watching myself teach yoga.
I edit my own podcast—this very one you might be listening to right now. I edit my YouTube videos. I record and edit all my course lectures. I’ve read every single one of my own audiobooks and even edited one of them, sitting in a recording and editing booth for hours making tiny adjustments to pacing, tone, and emphasis.
My movement library has over 140 videos and counting.
By now, I’ve logged hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours reviewing my own teaching.
And here’s what I know: most yoga teachers avoid this practice like the plague.
The very thought of watching or listening to themselves teach makes them want to crawl under their mat and hide. I get it. I really do. That first viewing is rough. You will cringe. You will think, “Do I really sound like that? Do I really look like that?”
But here’s the thing: self-assessment is the single most effective—and completely free—tool you have for evolving as a teacher.
Why Self-Assessment Is Module One in My Mentorship
In my Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing mentorship program (we call it MMM for short), I work with yoga teachers over six months to develop all five competencies of my S.E.R.V.E. Method.
And you know what the very first module in MMM is? Self-assessment.
Not sequencing theory. Not cueing techniques. Not theming your classes—though we do get to that.
The first step is self-assessment.
Because here’s what I’ve learned in over 20 years of teaching yoga and training yoga teachers: you can have all the knowledge in the world, but if you can’t see yourself clearly—if you can’t identify what’s working well and what needs refinement—you’re going to stay stuck.
What you’ll learn in that first module will be worth the price of your entire investment in the program. That’s why it’s Module One. Not Module Six. Not a bonus at the end. It’s where we start, because everything else builds on this foundation of being able to see yourself clearly.
The Problem with Teaching in Real Time
When you’re teaching, you’re in the flow of it. You’re reading the room. You’re making micro-adjustments. You’re focused on your students’ needs and experiences.
All of that is exactly as it should be—your students are the heroes of their yoga experience, and you’re there as their guide.
But here’s what inevitably happens to us as yoga teachers: we develop blind spots.
These blind spots aren’t just about verbal tics or whether you said “um” too many times. They’re deeper than that. They’re about patterns in how you show up, patterns you can’t see when you’re in the midst of teaching because you’re too close to it.
Maybe you consistently underestimate how long students need in a pose because you’re ready to move on. Maybe you unconsciously favor one side of the room with your attention. Maybe your voice quality changes dramatically between the active portion of class and savasana, but you have no awareness of it.
These patterns shape your students’ entire experience of your class. And the only way to make them visible is to step outside yourself and watch.
Video gives you objectivity. It lets you compare what you felt happened with what actually happened. And that gap between feeling and reality? That’s where your most valuable insights live.
The Multi-Pass Review System
The multiple viewing passes I recommend aren’t just about managing your emotional reaction—though that’s part of it. They’re actually a structured system for different types of observation.
Pass 1: Emotional Purge
Watch just the first 5–10 minutes of your recording. Let yourself react naturally. Cringe all you want. Write down whatever you’re feeling—the good, the bad, the uncomfortable. Get it out of your system.
This isn’t wasted time. This is you building tolerance for seeing yourself. And that tolerance is necessary before you can move into constructive observation.
Pass 2: Strengths Inventory (Full Recording)
Now watch the full recording with one specific question: What am I already doing well?
This is where you create what I call in The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook your “Strengths Inventory.” You’re literally making a list:
- Moments when you really connected with a student
- Cues that landed beautifully
- Transitions that felt smooth
- Your genuine care coming through in your voice
- Your body language radiating warmth and welcome
- Times when you made a skillful adjustment in the moment
Write these down. Be specific. Don’t just say “good connection”—write “made eye contact with the student in the back corner when I cued child’s pose and saw her relax into it.”
Why does this matter? Because when you’re working on areas for improvement in your next pass, you need to know what to preserve. You need to protect your strengths while you’re developing new skills.
Pass 3: Targeted Observation (Area of Focus)
This is where your pre-recording intention comes in. Watch the recording again, but this time with your laser focus on the one or two specific things you wanted to observe.
If you’re tracking filler words, you might literally tally them. If you’re watching for pacing, you might use a timer and note how long you hold each side. If you’re observing positioning and movement through the room, you might map your path on paper.
Take detailed notes. Be as specific as possible. “I said ‘and then’ 23 times in the featured poses section” is more useful than “I use too many filler words.”
Pass 4: Student Experience (Optional)
If you have students visible in your recording—and they’ve given permission for this—watch the recording one more time with your attention on them, not on yourself.
How are they responding to your cues? Where do they look confused? Where do they light up? When do they seem to disconnect?
This gives you invaluable information about how your teaching is actually landing, rather than how you think it’s landing.
The Keep/Drop/Add Framework
After you’ve done your multi-pass review, it’s time to close the loop by connecting observation to action.
In MMM, we use a specific framework adapted from the classic “Roses, Thorns, and Buds” reflection model:
Keep (Roses): Based on your strengths inventory, what do you want to actively preserve and continue doing? Write it down specifically.
Drop (Thorns): Based on your targeted observation, what do you want to eliminate or refine? Be specific about the behavior and your strategy for changing it.
Add (Buds): What new elements do you want to experiment with in your next class? These might be alternatives to things you’re dropping, or they might be completely new directions for growth.
Then—and this is the crucial step most teachers skip—schedule your next recording session. Put it on your calendar right now. Three months out at maximum, one month out if you’re serious about rapid development.
Advanced Techniques for Deeper Insight
Once you’ve done this process a few times and you’re comfortable with the basics, you can add these more advanced techniques:
Embodied Review
A few days or weeks after you make the recording—enough time that the class isn’t fresh in your mind—roll out your mat, press play, and actually practice along with the recording as if you were a student.
Don’t think about what you were trying to teach or why you made certain choices. Just follow the cues and feel the experience in your body.
This will reveal things you’d never notice just by watching:
- Cues that made perfect sense in your head but are actually confusing in practice
- Timing that feels rushed or dragging from the student side
- Moments where you needed to give more information or less
- Transitions that feel awkward in your body even though they looked fine on video
Linguistic Analysis
When you transcribe even five or ten minutes of your teaching—either manually or using a tool like Descript or Otter.ai—you see patterns in your language that you’d never hear just by listening.
You’ll see how often you start sentences with the same phrase. You’ll see your filler words jump off the page. You’ll see where you contradict yourself or where your instructions could be tighter.
One technique I love: after you have your transcript, run it through a word cloud generator. The visual representation of your most-used words is incredibly revealing.
Teaching Identity Articulation
Take some time to articulate what kind of teacher you want to be. Not in vague terms—”I want to be a good teacher”—but with specific characteristics.
Start by identifying teachers you admire. For each one, think or write about:
- The tone they use with students in and out of class
- Their body language and physical presence
- How they interact with students
- What makes their teaching feel authentic to who they are
Then write your own teaching identity statement. Describe the kind of teacher you want to be in concrete, observable terms.
Now here’s the powerful part: compare your identity statement to what you see in your video. Where’s the alignment? Where’s the gap?
That gap isn’t a source of shame—it’s a roadmap for your development.
This Is How You Evolve Your Voice
Self-assessment through video recording isn’t a one-time exercise you do to check a box. It’s not something you do once, decide it’s painful, and never do again.
It’s a practice. A discipline. A commitment to ongoing evolution as a teacher.
When you approach self-assessment with intention, with structure, with specific lenses for observation, it stops being just a painful exercise in facing your flaws. It becomes a tool for conscious evolution.
That’s what the second E in the S.E.R.V.E. Method is all about: Evolving Your Voice.
Not overnight transformation. Not perfection. But steady, consistent evolution toward becoming a clearer, more skillful, more authentically yourself teacher for your students.
This evolution never stops. I’ve been teaching for over two decades, and I still record myself regularly. I still find things to refine. I still discover new layers of my teaching that could be clearer, more effective, more supportive of my students’ experiences.
That’s not a failing on my part. That’s the nature of being a dedicated teacher. Growth is a lifelong practice.
Ready to Commit to Your Evolution?
When we work together in Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, this entire self-assessment framework is where we start—because you can’t build sophisticated sequencing skills, you can’t develop confident cueing, you can’t learn to vary with intention until you can see yourself clearly enough to know what’s actually happening when you teach versus what you think is happening.
In MMM, I’ll review your video and mirror back what I see, and you can share your video in our community space and request feedback using the Keep/Drop/Add framework. The other teachers—the other chefs in our kitchen—will give you compassionate, constructive insights.
Or join The Zone, my free community for yoga teachers, where you’ll get monthly live calls and lesson plan templates.
Your students are counting on you to show up as the best teacher you can be. And you can’t become that teacher without seeing yourself clearly first.
