Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher
Yoga Teacher Confidential is your backstage pass to the unspoken truths of being a yoga teacher. Sage Rountree, PhD, E-RYT500, dives into the real challenges and rewards of teaching yoga, offering expert advice and secrets to help you build confidence, connect with your students, and teach with authenticity. Sage draws on her two decades of experience teaching yoga, running a studio, and training teachers to share practical insights you can use right away. You'll also hear advice from her books, including Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses, The Art of Yoga Sequencing, and The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook. Whether you’re navigating imposter syndrome, mastering classroom presence, or refining your skills to teach specialized niches like athletes, this podcast empowers you to lead your classes with clarity, grace, and ease.
Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher
Teach Your Niche: How Specializing Makes You a Better Yoga Teacher
Want to become (almost) everyone’s favorite yoga teacher? The secret to thriving as a teacher is to specialize—teach your niche. When you focus on what you love, your enthusiasm shines, your confidence grows, and you connect deeply with your students.
Chapters:
1.[00:00:00] Why Niche Teaching Matters
Teaching a niche helps you stand out and serve your students better.
2.[00:01:00] Passion Shines When You Teach What You Love
Learn how enthusiasm for your niche builds trust and connection with your students.
3.[00:01:59] My Niche: Teaching Yoga to Athletes
I talk about my own niche and how focusing on recovery and mental presence has shaped my teaching.
4.[00:06:06] Find Your Blue Ocean
How to create a unique space in a crowded yoga field with “blue ocean” thinking.
5.[00:06:48] Yoga for Athletes Is Not Athletic Yoga
Why athletes—and most students—benefit from restorative yoga focused on recovery and mindfulness.
6.[00:07:40] Comfort Zone Yoga
Why finding comfort with comfort is transformative for students and teachers alike.
7.[00:09:00] Affirmation: Teach Your Niche with Enthusiasm
Embrace your niche with this reminder of the value you bring to your students.
👉 Learn how to specialize and thrive as a yoga teacher with my free workshop: Double Your Income Teaching Yoga to Athletes
For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:
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.
Can I tell you something? When you try to be everyone's favorite yoga teacher, you wind up being no one's favorite. That's because you can find yourself bending over backwards. Maybe, literally trying to be a generalist who does all things for everyone. When you instead lean into the things that matter to you, you find your authentic voice and that's how you become almost everyone's favorite teacher. It's also how you'll grow confident in the classroom by teaching what you know and love. Your passion for the practice shines through and everyone wins when you teach the things you like best when you teach your niche. I'm Sage Rountree. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential sharing the secrets of becoming a truly great yoga teacher. In this first season, we've been exploring confidence. Your confidence comes from your knowledge of and enthusiasm for the material you teach. Have you ever talked to someone about their hobby? I spent 30 minutes at a lunch table at Kripalu hearing about curling the sport and 90 minutes in a barn and France getting every single detail about endurance, horseback racing. Have you heard of this? They go 100 K or more on a horse. And they have vet checks. You have to have the vet clear the horse at these waystations check that their heart rate is okay. That their hydration is okay. When someone talks about what they know and love. All you need to do is ask a question every once in a while, and they run with it. It's like batting a balloon in the air. You don't have to do very much to keep the conversation alive. When someone is talking about their niche, their passion, then their enthusiasm is infectious. I've heard this called the first date story, what you could talk about in an authentic and appealing way. What's yours? Mine is the power of yoga for athletes. And in my signature program, teaching yoga to athletes, I lead you through how to assess the ways your students are using their bodies and point you toward how to offer them balance. Because here's the key yoga for athletes is not athletic yoga. It's yoga for recovery, mobility, balance, and mental toughness. It's teaching yoga beyond the poses, leading the latter limbs of yoga. In the program. I give students a movement assessment tool. I call it the rubric, but it's a way to tell how people are using their bodies. And this works for every kind of movement, not just for, like, a position on a football team. It helps you think through what your students do with their bodies and their minds and how you can come up with yoga to complement it, whether they are truck drivers or knitters or a school children or athletes. We also think through the mental demands of the sport. Is there a ball, is there a clock? Are there other players or competitors on the field at the same time? Is there an audience as for a team game or is the athlete alone as in a trail ultra marathon? All of this teaches dharana and diyana, focus and presence. You've probably learned these as concentration and meditation, but I like focus and presence. When I talk about dharana and diyana, focus and presence, I move my hands forward and back for focus and side to side for presence. By the way, did you know there's a video version of this podcast where you could be seeing me move my hands? You can watch it on YouTube or now on Spotify. Anyway. Focus, some athletes and some people in general, need focus, single pointed concentration swimmers, for example, stare at the black line of tile at the bottom of the pool for hours on end or an archer or a darts player, it doesn't even have to be Olympic sports, is focusing on the bullseye of the target. Other people need presence. The awareness of many things at once. Think of a soccer player on the field with the ball and other players and a goal and a clock and chanting fans. It's a lot to handle. But, you know, so it's driving, we need presence for that. When we learn to think through exactly what the demands are for the students we serve, whether they are athletes or senior center class participants. We help them take yoga off the mat or out of the chair and into the world. We change lives, not to put too fine a point on it. We make the world a better place. So to become almost everyone's favorite teacher to go broaden your appeal. Ironically, you have to focus on becoming one person's favorite. To become really deep in one thing, you have to be crystal clear on who you are helping. There's a term in marketing, ideal customer avatar or ICA. And it's useful to think through exactly who that platonically ideal student is for you. If you get stuck, you could ask a GPT to think it through with you. When you get super clear on somebody that you can help solve problems with yoga, whether it's in a workshop or in your regular class, or in some kind of yoga related content that you're generating, that's how you teach your niche and really become the best teacher. You can be. The irony is by going very narrow, you wind up having mass appeal. Come get the free workshop for teaching yoga to athletes. Even if you aren't interested in working for athletes, I'll tell you stories from deep inside my own niche, she was sense of what it feels like to really know your niche, as well as give you tips on how to charge what you're worth, which is really critical for your longevity as a yoga teacher. The workshop now comes with a private podcast, 10 episodes at present, taking you even further into this fantastic niche. I know you like podcasts! Along the way in the private podcast, we explore the concept of blue ocean. That's what will make you stand out in your field. Not trying to teach a, sorry, but run of the mill Vinyasa flow class. Are you familiar with this term blue ocean? It's having a clear niche. You're passionate about where you can be a big fish in a small pond, where you can be in the blue ocean. Instead of fighting with the sharks, you could be swimming with the dolphins and learning to distinguish who you are by focusing , on who your ideal customer avatar is and how you can help them solve problems with yoga. That is going to make you a, an island of one out in the blue ocean. Maybe teaching athletes is in your future, but you don't have to be an athlete to teach athletes. I have never been a linebacker. Learning to teach athletes is really learning to teach beyond the poses. It's finding ways to translate yoga's benefits into recovery, relaxation, and doing less. Athletes get their workout in their sport. In fact, it would be hubris to show up, to work with a team, expecting to whip them into shape. Inside teaching yoga to athletes. I tell you never to do this. Instead you focus on mobility, recovery, restorative, yoga, mindfulness, and breath awareness. Hmm. Doesn't that sound a lot like gentle yoga. It does. And isn't gentle yoga, a great practice for almost everyone. It is. Did you know, I have a new virtual studio platform. The timing was perfect because my old courses encountered a fatal error. What a dramatic term, just after I'd gotten everything set up on the new platform. The name of this new virtual studio: Comfort Zone Yoga. It's focused on teacher development, because I want to make the front of the room your comfort zone. And that's what this podcast is trying to do too. But this also applies to athletes and to many people. Now some, if not most folks come to yoga because they want to explore their edge, they want to grow. They want to find comfort with discomfort. You know, we talk about the growth zone being what's beyond the comfort zone. And yoga teaches us that, how to keep our act together even as things get progressively more intense. But athletes and other quote, unquote peak performers already have this skill. They may be too good at it. Too good at pushing, too tightly wound. They need to work, not uncomfort with discomfort, but instead on comfort with comfort. Comfort with comfort means being okay with just being okay. One definition of comfort zone is where you can operate without fear of failure. I loved it when I read that, because that's what I want for
you:operating without fear of failure in your yoga class. And the way you get there, the way you build confidence and comfort in front of the classroom. The way you become almost everyone's favorite teacher is by getting as specific as possible about who you teach and exactly how you help them. Teach your niche. An affirmation for you. My enthusiasm for the yoga I teach creates a better experience for my students. My enthusiasm for the yoga I teach creates a better experience for my students. For more on how to specialize in yoga for athletes or anyone. Click to the link in the show notes, you can sign up for the teaching yoga to athletes, on-demand workshop and get an invite to the private podcast, but you'll also learn a lot about how you can help people solve problems with yoga. Thank you so much for listening to Yoga Teacher Confidential. I am Sage Rountree and I will see you next time.
