3 Tips for Teaching Yoga Alongside your Day Job

Here are 3 Tips for Teaching Yoga Alongside Your Day Job!

If you’ve completed a yoga teacher training, it’s safe to assume that you love yoga so much, you want to teach and inspire others with this karmic gift! Whether your goal is to quit your day job and become a full-time yoga instructor or start out part-time, teaching yoga alongside your current employment has benefits and is a great way to get into the grove of teaching. Yoga instructors are taking on a big role! Teaching yoga while maintaining your regular employment gives you the unique opportunity to further connect with your students, keep balance in your own life, and explore teaching without expectations. Here are three tips to consider while embarking on your teaching journey.

1 ~ Purely Enjoy what you Teach

Not relying on teaching yoga for income can enhance the teaching experience for starting out teachers or even seasoned instructors. If teaching yoga is not your main source of income, the stress is relieved over whether you are landing unpaid vs. paid gigs starting out. The trials and tribulations of “making it work” can take the passion out of teaching for you and negatively affect the space held for your students. Being open to unpaid teaching positions can allow you to positively impact the community around you, increase your network, and lead to future paid teaching positions that are a right fit for you.

Busy time of the year and no one showed up for your class? That’s OK! Teach anyways! Because you are in it to teach regardless of who is attending. When you are not reliant on the income made through teaching yoga and you can take it completely out of equation, your exciting yoga teaching journey is allowed to unfold on its own. You can eliminate any anxiety over how many students may show up to your class and simply enjoy what you are teaching with no financial strings attached. Don’t underestimate the impact of teaching for individuals and more intimate groups!

2 ~ Practice what you Preach

Incorporating yoga teaching into your life serves as a constant reminder to practice what you preach. As a yoga instructor, you have the unique opportunity to inspire, enhance, and be a positive example in your students lives. Why not use this to further motivate you to keep up with your own disciplined lifestyle that you have committed to through your practice? The impacts that you have personally drawn out of yoga will continually flood your everyday life and could impact others as you teach.

Practice makes perfect! Practice keeping your mind, body, and soul balanced and healthy. Apply what you teach in your own life through your own personal and professional obstacles. Practicing principles used in yoga to help balance your own life will further allow you to assist students as they are on their continual journey to balance their inner selves and outer circumstances. Yoga instructors assist in beautiful transformations of self and others by being energetically present and mindful on a daily basis. Nurture your body, mind, and soul with balance, honor, and presence. Honor your students by showing up physically and energetically during your sessions!

3 ~ Give Space

When instructing yoga on top of your professional, personal, and other life commitments, you may be in touch with an idea of the stress and other challenges that your fellow students are bringing to the mat. This allows you to give that space for students to work through what they are shedding. Create the space for them to be, to come into alignment and allow their bodies intelligence to come to life. Through this process, people change their entire lives. By continually working on your own challenges and restoring your balance, you can uniquely understand your students needs. The space you create for your students to simply “be” can positively impact decisions, healing, and their own process. Give space for students so that they can use this sacred practice to peel away the day’s worries or shed deeper issues that they have been struggling with.

By Sarah Blanks

Apr. 16th 2017 – Apr. 22nd 2017