What Is A Successful Yoga Teacher? 

What Is A Successful Yoga Teacher?

While I was doing my yoga teacher training (ytt), I remember a student asking the question: What makes a successful yoga teacher post ytt? In this blog, I will discuss a few of the most important factors that make a successful yoga teacher.

Definition 

There are good and there are great yoga teachers; but a truly successful yoga teacher is one who can teach yoga class effectively, connect with their students with their true self and help their students to grow on a personal level.

In addition to this, they have great business skills, marketing and management abilities. And lastly they are certified with a yoga body, like the Yoga Alliance.

Qualities 

From the above, here are the top qualities: 

Knowledge: Success in yoga  requires a strong personal style, but you have to know how to teach yoga. The pranayamas, the yoga poses, the mudras – everything. And you have to do it better than other yoga teachers and mix in being able to draw on the yoga philosophy poignantly at any given time, in a yoga class.

Physical Ability: I am not saying that you need to be lifting weights, running 20 miles a day and teaching 10 yoga classes a day; that’s not what I mean; but you need to be in decent physical shape.

So you are able to display and show how to do certain yoga poses. Which might require some advanced stretching and contortion. If you’re not able to show what you’re teaching to students (be it a yoga class or a yoga teacher training), you will be less effective and thus you’ll be less successful as a yoga teacher.

Passion: A successful yoga teacher is someone who is passionate about the practice and is dedicated to helping their students grow and improve.

Your Human: A majority of people teaching yoga are very sensitive, dyslexic and/or special needs and they gravitate to yoga because it helps them to understand themselves better and helps to relieve their pain of being marginalized/scapegoated as groups.

Having said that, yoga teachers understand that they are human like anybody else and don’t promote themselves as being something above or special to the very students they teach. Doing that demonstrates such a teacher has personal issues and shouldn’t be teaching yoga. And by treating their students like equals makes you even more successful as a yoga teacher.

In Sum

Being a yoga teacher successfully, has a lot more to do than just knowing the poses, It’s about having some physical ability to demonstrate poses, a strong passion and even more importantly, they are human to the students you teach.