Teaching Your First Yoga Class – Cuing
Preparing Your Cues for Teaching Yoga
As a yoga teacher-in-training or new teacher, preparing your cues for your first classes can be overwhelming. But, there are some strategies that can help you to feel prepared, grounded, and empowered as a new teacher.
Watch the video below, or scroll down for the transcript notes and lots of strategies for preparing your cues for teaching.
Teaching Your First Yoga Class – Cuing
Teaching yoga can, at first, be overwhelming. Remembering your sequence, what cues you want to use, the props you want to integrate into class, and then moving, breathing, speaking, keeping an eye on your students, keeping an eye on the time – it’s all so much at first!
I want to first assure you that it gets easier. You find your rhythm and flow, your cues come more naturally without having to prepare them in advance, you will have more ability to adapt and adjust in the moment. But, to get there, you have to start here – with feeling unsure, unready, and with a brain full of everything you’ve learned.
What helps is some preparation, some mental rehearsal, and then getting out there and putting all you’ve learned into practice.
So, how do you prepare?
- Do you write out your cues in advance?
- Do you bring a script to class?
- How do you know which cues you’ll need, and when?
Let’s dig into this and lots more on feeling prepared with your cues.
To begin, let’s think about what learning and preparatory strategies work for you.
What Works for You?
You might have heard of the idea of people having specific learning styles – auditory, visual, kinesthetic – while these aren’t backed up by learning data (how we learn is more complex and varied), you might find that you have some learning and preparation strategies that work better for you
If you learn by writing
Write out your cues in advance as you study your poses, as you prepare your classes. Handwrite, make a spreadsheet, make a chart, draw pictures of poses and write out cues next to them.
If you learn by doing/speaking
Speak your cues out loud while you practice on your own mat. Talk to the dog, the cat, the wall – saying the words out loud while you breathe and move will help you not only remember your cues, but will help you with finding your rhythm of breathing, moving, and cuing.
If you learn by hearing
Listen to/watch the live class videos and have those cues coming into your ears on a regular basis.
For example, one of our grads had a long commute by car every day, and she used to put on a class on her phone and just listen to the cues as she drove – having those cues coming into her brains on a regular basis helped her to really integrate an remember them when it came time to teach.
If you like, combine methods – or use them all. All of these strategies will help you in your learning, processing, and embodying.
Particularly if you will be teaching in a language other than your first language the listening and speaking strategies are especially useful.
Mental and Physical Rehearsal
Consider your mental and physical rehearsal for teaching – not that teaching is a performance – but to prepare yourself for how you will coordinate your body, breath, and voice.
Doing some ‘dream teaching’ where you sit or lie down, relaxed, and imagine yourself teaching the class, doing the demos, using the cues, can be really helpful.
Should I Prepare a Script?
To the question about whether writing out a script to read from is a useful strategy – it’s not something I recommend using for an asana class. If we have our cues written down for the purpose of reading them out, we can end up with paper in front of our faces, reading from a script and not looking at/responding to our students. It can also be confusing if you step away from your notes and them come back and need time to find your place again.
Also, a script can be a real barrier between you and your students.
If having something written down gives you confidence, a kind of “emergency support system”, here are some tips that might be of use:
- Bring your sequence on paper
- Note down your flow, breathwork, asanas, transitions, and relaxation.
- Note down the time you expect each sequence to take
- If you aren’t sure your sequence will fit, organize your sequence so that you have essential poses, and then some additions you can slot in if there is time.
- You can have it written out, or in pictures – something easy to read when it’s on the floor and you are standing.
Your Body Remembers
When we are first teaching, we can imagine that we have to hold all of our knowledge in our heads. But remember that your knowledge also lives in your body. Trust yourself, and remember that if you forget a cue, demos can help you to not only instruct the movement but get back on track with your verbal cues.
This is where your deep practice matters. Your body knows what’s next, so you can follow your body. Let your body lead, and then ask yourself “what am I doing?”, and say that out loud as a cue. For example: in Triangle, you’ve stepped out to the side, what’s next? Ask your body – ah, arms up, hips rotated, hinge at the front hip – all of this can come through your body into your voice.
As a new teacher, you might find that you are just using cues you’ve memorized. That’s okay while you are practicing and developing your skills. There will come a time when you look up from your memorized cues and look at your students and see that they need help, and then your refining cues, corrective cues, etc. will be ready to come out.
3 Essential Cues
One strategy we teach in every teacher training is 3 Essential Cues.
We encourage students to develop 3 essential cues for each pose. If you only had 3 cues to guide students into an asana with breath, what would they be?
Write them down, make a chart, and speak them out loud when you do your own practice to get them ’embedded’ in your body/mind.
Your 3 essential cues are largely instructive cues – “do this, do that” cues. From there, you can start to explore further cuing layers like imagery cues, feeling cues, etc.
Then, when you are doing your practice teaching, use those essential cues, and when you are able, add some refining cues, corrective cues, imagery cues etc., based on what you are seeing your students need.
What If I Lose My Cues?
You will. We all do. After 3 decades of teaching I still sometimes lose my cues.
There will be times when you are in the midst of teaching and you just forget what you were going to say. I very well know the panic that we can feel when we’ve lost track of a word, or the breath, or our lefts and rights. You get this moment of panic. I just want you to know that it’s not an emergency.
You can take a breath. You can say “I forgot what I was going to say.” You can check in with your body. You can even ask your students, “where were we going next?”
If your mind really has gone blank and you really are in a panic, get your students into a safe pose – Child or Down Dog are good options – and you don’t have to cue that – just say “Okay, let’s come to Childs Pose”. Then, take a moment to breathe, ground, get back into your body. Check on your sequence. Think about what you can do next that will be comfortable for you and will make sense for where you are in your sequence.
Remember, no one is going to die from you forgetting your cues or your sequence. Calm your body down, re-set, and return.
Which is Left, Which is Right?
The most common cues we forget are our lefts and rights.
Years ago when I was teaching public classes full time I used to teach an 8-class day. It wasn’t ideal, it just worked out that way and I rolled with it for a few months. It was a very long day, starting with classes, then some privates, then corporate classes, then back to studio classes. And by the end of the day I would invariably forget my lefts and rights, so I’d rely on my students. If I lost track of left and right, I would call out “which leg?” and they would answer. It was lighthearted and connected us as a community. It gave them something to contribute to class. I was a memorable teacher to them – the one with the great sequences who doesn’t know her lefts and rights.
Teaching is a Conversation
Remember, teaching is not a performance – it’s a conversation. It’s not you on a stage performing perfection. It’s you guiding and supporting your students, and it’s okay for your students to contribute to that conversation.
The point isn’t to be perfect, it’s to be helpful. Your students are the point. Their safety, their learning, their experience is the point. So, if there is going to be a spotlight, put the spotlight on your students. What do they need in this moment? This is actually a great strategy to reduce your own nerves – when you keep the spotlight on them, it’s less harsh spotlight for you (and for some of us, it’s the very idea of that spotlight that can make use forget everything we’ve learned!)
Your First Goal – Find Your Ground
My hope for every new teacher is that they can find a ground to stand on. They that can feel grounded, supported, and empowered on their mat at the front of the class, and then from that space they can help their students find the same.
When you are grounded, you can access all the knowledge that you’ve built up, you can respond to what is happening in the moment in the room, and you can trust the words that are coming out of your mouth.
What makes all this happen? Practice.
I hope that you’ve found some strategies here helpful. Remember, the most important strategy is to practice. Get started where you are, let yourself be in the process of learning, and then let yourself flow.
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