Building Confidence as a Yoga Teacher
Below I have three tips to share with you on building confidence as a yoga teacher. I hope you find them helpful!
#1 There is No Right/Wrong
One way to build confidence as a new yoga teacher is to let go of the idea that there is a right practice and a wrong practice, or a right style and a wrong style. Usually, you will begin your teaching practice with a more specific style, for instance I teach Vinyasa flow which is a specific set of philosophies and practices. Over time as you develop your teaching practice, you might continue to explore that style, expanding, growing, collaborating with your students, hopefully making that style more accessible and inclusive. Or, you might start to branch out into other styles or lineages of yoga, other movement forms, meditation styles. There is no right wrong, there is no one path. Just a huge field of practices and ideas and possibilities to play in!
#2 You Won’t Know Everything
One way to develop confidence as a new yoga teacher is to understand that you won’t know everything. No one does, for a start. But, you will hopefully have a strong foundation you’ve built both with your practice and with your foundational yoga teacher training. From there, you will continue to build and grow, expand and explore. You will borrow ideas, be inspired by your students, create something new. You will always be learning as a yoga teacher, there will never be a point at which you know everything. And, that is the great adventure of teaching.
#3 You Don’t Have to Be Confident
You don’t have to be confident, or appear confident, or even feel confident to teach yoga. There’s room for all personalities and styles in teaching yoga. A lot of times you can’t actually see confident. You know there are teachers with lots of charisma and volume and swagger. That’s great, that’s one way to lead. There are also wonderful teachers who are quieter, less assertive, whose teaching is softer, has more questions in it, who teach through invitation and that’s lovely too.
Confidence comes in lots of forms, and it can be fickle and unreliable – so don’t wait for some magical amount or type of confidence to teach.
Focus on your students, teach from what you know, and find security and grounding where you can and let it unfold from there.
You don’t have to be confident to do anything – exhibit A – I am not confident about making videos! But I’m doing it because I have a message and I want to share it. So, I’m overcoming my insecurity and lack of technical skills and getting it done.