Facing Imperfection + Feeding Your Passion & Inspiration to Teach

Remember Why You Love It

Never let go of the first moment you fell in love with yoga. – Faith Hunger

Your teaching will benefit from cultivating a deep well of passion and inspiration.

• One of the fundamental sources of inspiration can be to focus less on yourself and more on the benefits others receive from yoga.
• When you’re overflowing with a desire to share, teaching can flow effortlessly. Let yourself remember the time a student shared with you how much class impacted her, how a quote or pranayama teaching you offered helped her find clarity, or how an asana adaptation you taught helped a student experience a newfound ease or empowering impact.
• Remember the ripple effect. When students leave class feeling grounded and balanced, they bring their fullness to their families, friends, colleagues, clients, and strangers in their community.
• Occasionally revisit what you love about teaching — what keeps you engaged. Whether you are excited by anatomy or philosophy, adjustments or chanting, remember to engage in what you love.

STUDENT THANK YOU

I practice yoga because it helps me relax, slow down my thinking, and I learn something positive every time I come to class. It’s very good for the spirit, body and mind. Thank you [to the teacher who visited the detention center] for coming! – Student at juvenile detention center, Yoga Behind Bars 

YOU’RE BRINGING GIFTS TO PEOPLE YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW!

Through your prayers, your practice and your potent sharing, you’re bringing balance to people of whom you’re not even aware. Just consider the people who live with your students; their lovers, children, parents, friends, co-workers. Remember that you’re helping more than just the people who’ve laid their mat down with you – there are countless more hearts you’re touching, bodies who will now let more light in because of what you do. Thank you. – Elena Brower 

BEING REMINDED OF WHY YOU LOVE SOMETHING

If you don’t get a chance to practice and be reminded why you love something, it doesn’t matter if you get paid $150 an hour, it’s still difficult to share it. If you’re not practicing, you have nothing to give. – Yoga International 

REMEMBER WHAT EXCITES YOU

Q:  What still excites you and keeps you engaged with teaching yoga? A:  I love studying all the neuroscience and western research on mind body practices that has been rolling out over the past decade. Another thing that keeps me excited and engaged is creating room for students to ask questions in class. When my students ask questions or share ideas, it allows me to teach spontaneously and creates an opportunity to relate how the practice can directly apply to our lives and to the actual moment we are in together. The spontaneity frees me up to make things more relevant and relatable. – Teach.Yoga, Jillian Pransky Interview 

Imperfections, Struggle, Perceived Failure

Most successful people throughout history are also those who have had the most failures. That is no coincidence. – Tal Ben-shahar

Overcoming Perfectionism

• It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that perfection is the goal or that you must “get it all together” before you can share authentically.
• However, with experience and courage, we come to realize that, in fact, personal challenges are the ground for application of the teachings, and this leads us to becoming better teachers.
• A simple example is experiencing injury that induces you to learn more about anatomy and physiology and how to adapt your practice to accommodate your injury. What you learn, why you learn it, how you apply it, and how you evolve in your view of students experiencing injury makes you a better teacher.
• We come to see life’s challenges and suffering not as obstacles on a path toward perfectionism, but simply as the path.

Failure & Perseverance

Let’s say you find yourself struggling to do something new related to your teaching. For example, perhaps you’re trying to incorporate a new technique or learn more about anatomy. Or maybe you want to begin leading workshops, or to find more balance in your life. How can you respond to your personal struggle?

• Persistently remind yourself that struggle, “failure” and perseverance mark every path to fulfillment. Success is not a straight line!
• And as for persistence, remember, “The difference between good and great is immeasurably small. Sometimes all it takes is a bit more perseverance and you find yourself at the next level.”

I WILL NOT WAIT UNTIL I’VE GOT IT ALL TOGETHER

I will not wait ‘till the time is right or until I’ve “got it all together” to share my heart. I will not waste one second in perfectionism… This imperfect platform… allows me… to share myself. I am creating here because I must. Because it heals me. I implore you to take your life and hold it in both hands and make it yours. Bring all of yourself and all that you dream. Bring it to life. – Carrie-Anne Moss 

PERSONAL CHALLENGES MAKE MORE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

I have no problem with yoga teachers keeping their personal problems to themselves, because that’s what healthy boundaries are. We are there to serve our students and not just talk about our own issues, especially if they’re unresolved. For myself, it is a constant struggle to find a balance between over-sharing and being authentic in my teaching. What I’m concerned about is the idea that as a yoga teacher we have to achieve some kind of perfection in our own lives and that our faults somehow reduce our capacity to teach. In fact, I think it’s the other way around: our personal challenges make us more effective teachers because we are forced to apply the teachings in our own lives. – Jivana Heyman 

DON’T LET ROLE MODELS GET IN THE WAY OF REALITY

Impostor syndrome. It’s rampant…Everyone who is doing important work is working on something that might not work. And it’s extremely likely that they’re also not the very best qualified person on the planet to be doing that work… Yes, you’re an impostor. So am I and so is everyone else… Isn’t doing your best all you can do?… Time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading and from doing work that matters. – Seth Godin 

FULFILLING POTENTIAL MUST INVOLVE SOME FAILURE

When we hear about extremely successful people, we mostly hear about their great accomplishments—not about the many mistakes they made and the failures they experienced along the way. In fact, most successful people throughout history are also those who have had the most failures. That is no coincidence. People who achieve great feats, no matter what field, understand that failure is not a stumbling block but a stepping-stone on the road to success. There is no success without risk and failure. We often fail to see this truth because the outcome is more visible than the process—we see the final success and not the many failures that led to it. When I acknowledge that fulfilling my potential must involve some failure, I no longer run away from risks and challenges. The choice is a simple one: Learn to fail, or fail to learn. – Tal Ben-shahar 

THOSE THAT STRUGGLED PERFORMED BETTER LATER

If you want to get stronger, over time you have to lift heavier and heavier weights. If you want to increase your endurance, you have to run farther than you are used to. It takes effort and struggle to improve physical performance, and as it turns out, this is true with mental performance as well. There is only one problem. Mental struggle doesn’t look like a three-mile run through the woods. It looks like failure.

In a study of seventh grade math students… students were divided up into two… groups. Both groups were given a set of complex math problems to solve. The first group was instructed to work cooperatively with fellow students to solve the problems. The second group received direct teacher instruction… The group that worked without direct instruction was ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to solve the problems. After they had failed, the teacher provided an explanation of what they did wrong… What happens next… is a bit more unexpected. Both groups were given a post test that included problems similar to the ones covered previously in addition to problems that were structured quite differently… The group that struggled and failed performed significantly better on all types of problems on the post test. They retained more knowledge and exhibited greater flexibility in applying their new learning to different types of problems. – Keith A Howe 

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD & GREAT IS SMALL

You may not know that paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit and does not ignite at 450 degrees. Now imagine yourself lost in a forest, cold, needing warmth. You invest energy by rubbing two sticks together, causing friction in hope of igniting some paper and leaves. You create heat by your efforts and even raise the friction area’s temperature up to 450 degrees without successfully creating fire. Sadly, you quit in discouragement, not knowing that the activation energy is 451 degrees. However, if you push a little harder and create a little more heat and raise the temperature one degree, the chain reaction occurs and the fire ignites—burning without more effort, burning by itself. The difference between good and great is immeasurably small. Sometimes all it takes is a bit more perseverance and you find yourself at the next level. This process of giving that little extra builds upon itself and forms the foundation for great performances. – Michael Lardon