You’re Not the Hero: How Centering Your Students Transforms Your Teaching

In this episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential, yoga teacher trainer and studio owner Sage Rountree discusses the powerful shift in mindset that will revolutionize your yoga teaching career. Are you unintentionally messing up by placing too much emphasis on yourself in class? Learn how to make your students the heroes of their own practice and watch your teaching career flourish.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The misconception many yoga teachers have about their role in class
• How focusing on your students’ journey can alleviate your imposter syndrome and build your confidence as a yoga teacher
• Practical ways to center students' agency and become a better guide

Have you experienced a shift in your teaching mindset? Share your story with Sage on Instagram at @sagerountree.

Links:

• Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
• Gary Kissiah, “Should You Ask About Injuries Before Class?”
• Sage's website for yoga resources
• Get the free greatest-hits lesson plan

For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:

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Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Explore my continuing education workshops and 300/500-hour teacher training programs. It's all at sagerountree.com.

Transcript

​[00:00:00]

Can I tell you something? Your students aren't coming to your class for you.

You're just the guide and your students are the heroes. Here's what happens when you instead see yourself as the hero: you wind up working way harder than you need to. It's tougher to plan your class. 

It's tougher to teach your class and your career won't grow like it could. But once you start to see your students as the heroes and yourself as the guide, and once you center your students agency and make them the center of the classroom, everything will change for the better. 

Another way to put this as advice that your mom might have given you. 

No one is thinking about you. They're all busy thinking about themselves. Nowhere is that more true than in a yoga class where students have showed up in order to receive some kind of connection and union and yoga with themselves? It really has very little to do about you. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential, where we share the [00:01:00] secrets of what goes on in the classroom so that we can become better yoga teachers. I'm Sage Rountree. 

I have more than 20 years experience as a yoga teacher, more than a dozen years of studio ownership and yoga teacher training under my belt. And I've seen a lot in that time. I'm here to help you feel more confident in front of the classroom so that you can be capable and relaxed. And your students will benefit from these efforts. This season, we're talking about how you can be a more confident yoga teacher. 

I feel like the number one reason why people have imposter syndrome, why they spend way too much time in planning is that they suffer from this misconception that they, the yoga teachers are the reason why class is happening. That they, the yoga teachers are the hero of the yoga classroom. Unfortunately 200 hour yoga teacher trainings might even contribute to this misunderstanding. 

So in today's episode, let's talk about how to [00:02:00] center your students. What centering students' agency can do for your students and for your teaching and for your career and ways that we can move from wrong. -seeing from avidya from this cause of suffering into more openness and freedom and possibility. 

Once we keep our students. And their agency front and center. 

In this episode, I'll explain the critical mindset shift that will change everything for your career. We'll explore where you got this wrong idea, how you can change it and what it's going to open up as possibilities moving forward.

Here's the problem. Your 200 hour yoga teacher training might have mistakenly given you the sense. That everything you do in the yoga classroom matters because you are front and center. The focus of the classroom, think about the things that we cover in a 200 hour yoga teacher training. And I think you'll see so much of it is about what you [00:03:00] should be saying in the classroom, how you should be saying it in the classroom, what poses you should be doing in the classroom and how you should be doing them with in many YTTs an emphasis on more sophisticated or advanced poses. Now none of this is really going to serve your students. 

When you show up to teach real people in the real world. It's giving you the mistaken impression that you are the hero of the classroom and you were there to save the day for everyone and guide them toward yoga. In actuality, your students are going to guide themselves. Your students walk into your yoga classroom, into their yoga practice with big, main character energy. And we want to enable that we want to enhance that. 

We want to make them the heroes of the classroom. We as yoga teachers are there simply to be their guides. 

Because as your mom probably told [00:04:00] you, no one is thinking about you. They're all too busy thinking about themselves. If you can remember that everything in your class planning and your execution is going to go way smoother. 

There's a business book called Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And it's all about this very concept. 

So if this is vibing with you, I encourage you to check out the show notes, get the book and see how this shift in your mindset will make your messaging so much easier for you. Yoga class. Let's think about guides versus heroes, the classic example, and this comes right from Building a StoryBrand is Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

So often as yoga teachers, we feel like we are the hero that we are the Luke Skywalker when really we're Obi-Wan. Or maybe we're Yoda. And we're simply there to guide the hero as the hero figures it out for themselves. You might remember back in Star Wars that Luke wasn't able [00:05:00] to like pull the spaceship out of the swamp on the training planet, where he had gone with yoga—ah, with Yoda. Okay, easy mistake. On his first try, he had to stumble. 

He had to fail and Yoda was giving him lessons, but not pushing him in a particular direction. Yoda was building Luke's faith in himself and his understanding of how he could harness the force to be a better hero. Yoda wasn't out there saying, look at me, look at my sophisticated sequencing. Look at my mastery of the force. 

Yoda was a humble guide and that's how you will be able to change things in your yoga classroom for the better. By positioning yourself as a humble guide there to serve the journey of the hero. 

Another way you could think about this is that you are not the actor on the stage. Your students are each the actors on the stage, and each of them has the biggest part. 

Each of them is the lead actor. [00:06:00] You as the teacher of a yoga class are instead the stage manager you're waiting off in the wings, you've got a script, you know, the way that the run of show should go and you're there to feed people lines if they forget, but you're not there as the stage manager to micromanage their performance, to make your students look or act in a particular way. And that's, I think this is what makes this a really good analogy. 

Is that a yoga class, a live in-person yoga, yoga class at a studio or a Y or a gym or a location that you have rented to teach your class is almost like a live performance, but the audience is the students themselves. Not that you're the actor. They are both the actor and the audience. And they're having this interaction with themselves while you wait off in the wings. With your run of show, just to keep things on track. The magic is happening out there with the [00:07:00] actor and the audience who are connected in this role of yoga. 

It's both the student. And the student is both the actor and the audience at the same time. 

I know it's really common to think of yourself as the hero in the yoga classroom, because I used to think I was the hero in the yoga classroom. And unfortunately what I've come to realize is that for the decade or so that I was operating under this misconception that I had this wrong seeing idea about my role 

I may have been acting more like an anti-hero than a hero that is to say I had misguided ideas about what I was doing there. I would draw attention to myself when it didn't need to be turned to me. And I would just generally get in the way of the actual hero's journey of the student's progress toward connection, union and yoga. 

Here's what being an antihero might look [00:08:00] like. 

Number one, it is micromanaging your students' experience, putting a huge emphasis on alignment and getting people to do things your way. Do you see how your 200 might have encouraged you toward this kind of mindset in that we practice issuing cues that land with our students and getting our students to follow directions. 

But this can have a shadow side where we get really over-invested on making our students follow directions. 

Have you had a bad dream about teaching yoga? I got to say, I still have them all the time, even after more than 20 years of teaching and usually my bad dreams about teaching yoga involve the students not following directions, sometimes things take a bizarre turn. Um, I've had a dream where I got physically violent toward a student for not following my directions. 

That was horrifying. Another dream I have is that I am teaching that class in a dress or a skirt or something that is inappropriate [00:09:00] for the moves. I'm demonstrating like a three legged downward facing dog. I'm a little worried about what that could mean, but I figure it means I feel like I'm under prepared or I'm exposing myself or vulnerable in front of the classroom. These dreams, I think still stem from a little of the residual anti-hero energy. 

I must still be carrying around with me. If you are in the newer stages of your yoga teaching journey, you may be having these dreams.not only while you're sleeping as nightmares, but as the actual events that are happening in class. I'm here to tell you remember, like your mom told you no one is worrying about you. 

If you flub a cue, if you forget a sequence, it just doesn't matter. If you can successfully keep your students connected to themselves as both the actor and the audience of their own experience of their own practice. It's really not about you. Remember your student is the hero and you are there simply as the guide. [00:10:00] Another way that antihero energy might manifest is in trying to get all of your students to do the same thing at the same time. 

For many years, that was my definition of success in the yoga classroom. It was that people would follow my cues, that they wouldn't look confused, and we don't want our students to be confused, but we also don't want them to be following our instructions to the letter. We want to give them room to take their practice in whatever heroic destination they need to take it. To make their own choices to center their own agency and to get what they need from their yoga practice. So while for the first 10 years or so of teaching yoga, I figured I needed to look out in the room and see all of my students doing exactly what I said in precisely the order in which I cued it with their fingers aligned just so and their arms and shoulders aligned just so now, when I look out into the room and I see 18, [00:11:00] 20 different bodies doing 18 or 20 different things, I understand that I have actually fulfilled my purpose as a guide. At getting my students into wherever they needed to be at giving them the permission to get themselves into wherever they needed to be, to have the best experience for their practice on that day. That's how you are the Obi-Wan or the Yoda to your students. 

Remember they are the Luke. 

The problem that we have here is wrong-seeing. Let's make a quick detour through yoga philosophy. You'll remember from your study of the yoga sutras, that there are five kleshas. The kleshas are obstacles to enlightenment. The kleshas are the root causes of suffering. And while there are five of them, there's one that is kind of the ur-klesha, the über-klesha, the umbrella klesha. 

It's avidya. A- is a negative [00:12:00] prefix. It means not. And Vidya is a cognate for vision. So avidya is wrong-seeing. It's misconception, it's improperly understanding. What we're doing when we try to center ourselves in front of the yoga classroom as the teacher is wrong-seeing our role as thinking that we're the hero or even acting as an anti hero instead of being the guide to the students. And once we through our practice, come to see the truth of things as they are. 

Once we get clear seeing, then we can serve our students to our maximum ability. And a whole bunch of really wonderful things start to happen. You will fast track your students' progress. They will get exactly what they need from their yoga practice, the reasons they come to yoga for balance, for connection, for healing, for recovery, all of that will happen faster when you [00:13:00] support them. 

Instead of trying to insert yourself too much into the process of yoga. 

When you see your role, clearly you'll have a way less emphasis on alignment. Now, depending on the school of yoga that you have studied in the style of yoga that you are teaching, you might still cleave to some alignment rules, or you might start to understand you don't have X-ray vision and you can't see exactly how your students bones operate at the joints. 

You don't understand the lived experience of being in your student's body. Once you can accept that and be okay with that, that you don't yet have all these siddhis, superpowers where you do have X-ray vision. Then you can start to think, oh, maybe these alignment rules are just kind of passed down—not willy-nilly, 

they, they may have worked for somebody that isn't necessarily a 21st century body. At some point in the past, but they may not be directly relevant to each of [00:14:00] these heroes that I have in front of me. Each of these heroes that I have in front of me in the yoga classroom has their own unique journey and gets to make their own unique decisions and to figure things out through trial and error. 

What is the best for their own unique bodies? All along the course of the practice. Then you have so much less to memorize and so much less to say, to distract your students from their inner experience, you get to let them do the practice of yoga with a whole lot less talking and a lot fewer cues about alignment. 

When you're cueing alignment less, you then don't need to think so much about anatomy, which can be really overwhelming for you, especially in the first few years of your yoga teaching. Since we recognize that each student has a unique set of experiences and an unique way of being in their body moment to moment, breath to breath. We trust our [00:15:00] students to make decisions that work for them. 

And we don't micromanage their alignment. We don't over obsess about their anatomy. To that end. We don't see our role as yoga teachers to be the hero and fix things. Y'all that's way beyond your scope of practice as a yoga teacher. Even if you are a physical therapist, a nurse. A nurse practitioner, a medical doctor, you aren't teaching your yoga class in those roles, wearing those hats. 

If you were you'd be paid really differently and you probably wouldn't be working in a group setting, it would be a one-on-one setting. In the context of a yoga class, we're there to guide not to correct. Not to prescribe, not to treat. We are simply offering suggestions for our students to choose from. And letting them then figure things out for themselves. 

 I'll link in the show notes, a wonderful essay by a lawyer named Gary Kissiah. 

Who's [00:16:00] explains that once you have asked at the start of class whether people have injuries, you are then are responsible, you have a duty of care for making sure that they don't exacerbate their injuries. That's not something that you need to be taking on . It's way beyond your scope of practice as a yoga teacher. 

So let's drop that. That's one less thing to think about in class. It's freeing up some extra energy. And it's in service of putting our students agency front and center. It's not your job to fix them. It's not your job to control them. It's simply your job to remind them of the power that they already have. 

Just like Yoda reminded Luke of the Force that was already within him. 

Similarly when we center our students, when we trust our students agency, we then have much less a need to control them with manual assists. Again, in the first few years of your teaching experience of your teaching career, you may feel like, oh, I need to [00:17:00] do it all. 

I need to do creative sequencing and I need to do a metaphor for a code queuing and sophisticated themes in my class. And I definitely need to walk around and put my hands on. Every student wrong. That's round seeing you don't need to do that. In fact, you may choose never to do that. And in choosing never to do that, you're freeing up a whole lot of mental energy. 

And again, centering your students by not controlling them. You're also avoiding a whole lot of potential pitfalls where you have to get consent every time you put your hands on. And even then there can be a very strange dynamic at play. So once we sent her our students, once we see them as the heroes, we don't need to put our hands on them. 

We let them do what they need to do and guide themselves into the poses. We're not there to do it for them, just like Yoda, kind of like lived in Luke's imagination, but he wasn't physically present with Luke on the plane, into the center of the death star. 

When you center your [00:18:00] students instead of your own hero energy and your ego, you will wind up helping your students by recognizing how important repetition is to their yoga practice. It's to serve your own ego that you feel like you need to construct a completely fresh class. Every time that you teach, that is not the best way for your students to learn your students need repetition. 

They need familiarity. They need to see things several times before they start to feel their way into the best expression of the poses for themselves. If you're fortunate enough to have a student come back to class with you, it's because they liked what you did, the last class that they had with you. 

It's because they want more of the same. They don't want it to be a completely fresh and new experience every time. If you can remember that your students are the heroes and you are simply the guide, you will see the benefit of repetition and you will serve your students [00:19:00] with a foundation of consistency in their practice. 

That's going to serve them so much more over time than you trying to entertain or prove yourself to yourself by making things exciting and fresh every time.

When you center your students and make your sequences more simple and more repetitive, you're going to save yourself so much mental energy. You won't have to spend hours memorizing the moves. 

You already know the moves. It's like building a capsule wardrobe. You've got the same basics that you're going to wear day in and day out. And you're simply changing things out just a little bit with accessories. You've got the closet full of say black t-shirts. And jeans and you know, you're always wearing black t-shirts and jeans and you can dress it up or down.

You can go for a different wash of your jeans for a different fit of your t-shirt, but at its heart, your class will have the same um, consistency as a capsule wardrobe might, and then your students will know this is what I'm going to get from you. This is how I [00:20:00] can progress in my own practice. Because that teacher is a reliable guide to me, the hero. 

When you recognize that you're the guide and not the hero, you won't be intimidated to teach private lessons. Because it's not about you, it's about how you can help the student, how you can guide the student. The same thing goes for yoga workshops, which can be such a powerful way for you to help your students solve real life problems with yoga. You get to go a little bit deeper in a workshop, and in that workshop, you get to serve the hero as the guide, instead of making it all about yourself. You could even teach online once you were centering your students' agency and realizing that it's not about you, because you don't have to be physically present to control your students, to micromanage your students, to impose your antihero energy on your students. When your students come first, when they're the heroes and you're simply the guide, the [00:21:00] whole world of teaching opens up to you in fantastic new ways that will help your students more directly. 

When you center your students and see that you're the guide and not the hero, you need to demo less in your in-person classes, which means that you will be saving yourself some energy. And you will be able to help your students even better because you won't be showing things all the time. You'll get to look at them and see how their journey is progressing. 

When you center your students as the heroes and position yourself as the guide, your marketing comes so much easier, your messaging becomes clear because it's not about you. 

It's about the students. It's about the benefits that they will receive when they go all in on their yoga practice. It makes it so much easier to invite people to your class because you can get excited about the benefits that they're going to receive. It makes promoting your class way easier. It makes promoting your workshops [00:22:00] way easier. 

It makes promoting and booking private lessons way easier. And each of these is a different revenue stream for your career that will help it grow and become sustainable in really helpful ways. 

Best of all: when you see yourself as the guide and your students as the heroes, you will feel confident walking into the classroom because you'll know that you aren't there to perform. You're simply there to stand off in the wings. And keep things on track lightly and to let the actors take over, let the heroes. Take the stage. When you have this confident energy. You will transmit it to the whole classroom in really useful ways because you're not thinking, oh, everybody's looking at me, everybody's counting on me to say important things and to make things exciting every time. 

No, you know, I am simply here to serve. Your students will read that energy. They will respond in [00:23:00] kind and their practice will get totally fast tracked as a result. 

Here's an affirmation to help you remember. I am not the hero. I am the guide. 

I am not the hero. I'm the guide. Now there is one place where you are the hero. And that is the hero of your yoga career. While during your teaching, you are simply there as the guide, during your planning and your promotion, you have to take on some of that hero energy, some of that main character energy, so that you can reach more people with the benefits of yoga. In this case, you are the hero and I am here to serve as your guide. 

Here are some of the ways that I can serve you as your guide. One is this very podcast you're listening to. Another is my YouTube channel. That's at Sage Rountree with no D in my last name, Rountree another is [00:24:00] the many books I've written on yoga, yoga for athletes and teaching yoga. You can find all of those at my website, sagerountree.com. 

Again, no letter D in Rountree. 

There you'll also see that I offer a host of both online and in-person continuing education workshops, which people can take à la carte or put altogether for a 300 slash 500 hour yoga teacher training. It's really focused on the central concept of remembering that when we are serving our students as yoga teachers, we are not the heroes. We are simply the guides. The whole training of our 300 and 500 hour program is to center our students to lift up their agency and to help them. 

Meanwhile, let me guide you with a lesson plan for your next class. 

If you come to the show notes or click over to my website, you can sign up for the greatest hits lesson plan that I'll send you. It's my back pocket go-to. It's [00:25:00] like that capsule wardrobe, suggestion that I have for you of something that's really adaptable for a wide range of ages. I've taught it to students from teens to eighties, almost 90 years old. And it can really suit them in a variety of circumstances.

You can tone it down for a gentle class. You can spice it up for a Vinyasa or flow class. I'd love to send it to you. So click on through and I will send it right over. Thank you so much for listening. You are a hero to me. I'm very grateful for your attention. I'd love for you to tell your friends about this podcast, to leave a rating and review. And I'm really look forward to connecting with you. 

Remember all season long, we're looking at ways to build your confidence in class. See you next time.