5 things I wish I knew before I took my Yoga Teacher training

Sometimes I feel that my path to becoming a yoga teacher wasn’t really something that I chose, but rather that it was something that chose me. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s as if I reached a point in my yoga practice where I couldn’t NOT do my teacher training. So with that feeling in my soul, I just followed and found myself on a yoga teacher training -without *really* thinking too much about how my life would change in the long term. ha!

So, I wanted to share with you today 5 things that I wish I had known before my yoga teacher training….

1. Work hours change, a lot.

Teaching yoga means that you are, for the most part, working when everyone else is not working. After work in the evenings; early mornings; weekends. It’s a very different type of “work” so it doesn’t always feel like how you would feel if you were for example, sitting at a desk at 8:30pm on  Friday – but your working hours do shift quite drastically.

The challenging part of this is navigating other functions/meet ups. In my regular yoga schedule, there is only one day of the week that I don’t teach late in the evenings – so if book-club/ friends birthday parties/ celebration drinks etc don’t fall on that specific day, I’m not able to make it (or I have to find cover = not earning).

Differing work schedules can also be quite a challenging thing for relationships – My husband starts work at 7am and is home sometimes late – this means that often – he is out the door to work before I’ve gotten up and I’m heading out to teach as he is arriving home. You really do have to make an effort to “see” each other. Your working hours can quickly over take your relationship hours and it’s something you need to manage for yourself and your personal relationships. (In fact, I was offered a really amazing role for a well established teacher training program, but it would have required me to be teaching almost all weekend, most weekends of the month and in the end I had to turn it down in favour of my relationship – which was a challenging thing to do – but I know I made the right decision for me!)

Personally there is also a tendency for me to work in all the traditional “non-work-hours” teaching yoga and then also try and work in all the “regular work hours” – which can very quickly lead to burn out.

2. Once you’re a yoga teacher, you can never “un-be” a yoga teacher

This is probably the “saddest” part for me personally as a yoga teacher – in the very simplest terms I had NO idea how much my personal practice would change once I became a yoga teacher – and this is something that I wish I had been properly warned about before starting on this path. (If you’re thinking about a yoga teacher training and you’re reading this, you’ve been warned!!!).

For most of us, we arrive at the place of wanting to be a yoga teacher because yoga has had some kind of life changing impact on us. Yoga is magic. It’s the sacred place where you come to be held, to rest, to be. When you complete your teacher training – the sacred place of yoga becomes “the classroom”, where you learn, you analyse, you dissect. Yes, there is a huge difference between “teaching” yoga and “practicing” yoga – but even in your own practice with other teachers, you are continuously absorbing new cues, information, sequencing, techniques so that you can grow and develop as a teacher. You become the magician honing the craft of magic, rather than the participant being captivated and held by the show.

Yes, it’s all part of the same thing, but it’s a very different experience and one that makes it very difficult to switch off and get to that “aaaaah” state that the magic of yoga brings. When I run my creativity and yoga workshops looking at the brain it’s what I sometimes refer to as “the yoga teacher problem” – being a yoga teacher attending a yoga class – often (not always!) our brains stay in the Beta or busy mind – (processing, analyzing, taking in aka “classroom mode”) rather than allowing ourselves to drop down into the flow of it all – to drop into the Alpha and Theta brainwave states – where all the subconscious stuff is released. Where the magic happens. I think there is a big misconception that “being a yoga teacher” is the same as “being paid to do yoga” – they are very different things.

I once went to a Lululemon event and was chatting to one of the organisers and she was telling me how much she loved yoga and I (very early in my teaching career) replied with, “you should do your teacher training!”

She replied with, “No, I love yoga too much.” And I didn’t quite get it then like I get it now.

3. Watch out for a LOT of admin.

There is a surprising amount of admin involved with being a yoga teacher. If you run your own classes in a venue you’ve hired – there is payments to venues, marketing, promoting, sorting payments from students, printing indemnity forms, filing forms. If you teach at a studio sometimes you are required to submit invoices. Invoicing for private clients, staying on top of payments from private clients/studios. Planning/hosting/advertising workshops/retreats, booking spaces, getting clients, sorting payments. Replying to emails. Finding cover teachers if you are away/sick. Social media/email lists if you use that as a tool. Doing taxes.

Basically all the things that make teaching yoga pretty “un-zen” – they are a pretty huge part of the business of teaching yoga. Make no mistake that if you choose to teach yoga as a job, then teaching yoga is a JOB.

4. You will always feel like you’re at the tip of the ice berg.

I don’t think there is any other practice where there are quite so many avenues or quite so much depth you can delve into from a teachers perspective. You could literally spend years honing and refining JUST your knowledge on anatomy and functional movement. You could also literally spend your whole lifetime just delving deeper and deeper into the philosophy, history and ancient texts of yoga. You could spend years delving into pranayama, meditation And if those couple of decades aren’t enough for you – you could specialize in restorative yoga, yin yoga, prenatal yoga, rehabilitation, kids yoga.

So just to summarise: there is literally a NEVER ending learning mountain that you embark on when start your teacher training journey! NEVER. ENDING. (Read that again). And just when you think you’ve learned everything you need to learn – you could go back and re-visit everything you thought you knew and you will no doubt get a whole new level of understanding of it all. I assure you, your “work” as a yoga teacher will never be done. Yes, most careers involve more learning and skill developing, but yoga teaching is really next level. Ha.

5. It can be challenging to stay inspired on the mat.

If you teach a fair amount you will very quickly feel like you are repeating the same thing over and over (and over and over). Even though students who come to your class, once a week say, may never feel like things are repeating themselves, you as a teacher will feel like you are saying the same things again and again and again- because there are only so many ways you can say “lift your arm up”. So it’s really good to have other sources of inspiration – sometimes that may mean taking another online yoga flow or diving into something completely outside the realm of “yoga” – like a course in creativity! Whatever it is make sure that you are filling up your cup! I also think that the more diverse influences/experiences and learnings we draw on, the more dynamic our teaching will be.

I’d love to hear from you! Are you on the yoga path?! Do you teach yoga? Have you done your teacher training and haven’t taught? Are you thinking about a teacher training?

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