Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher

53. The Mindset Shift That Transforms Your Teaching

• Sage Rountree • Episode 53

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After 52 weekly episodes—a full year of this show!—one truth has emerged: the teachers who struggle most are still practicing yoga while trying to teach it. In this anniversary episode, I explore the irony at the core of our profession: yoga is an inward practice, but teaching yoga demands we look outward.

I share my personal journey, the common struggles I see in teachers, and the shift that changes everything: moving from practitioner to teacher. You’ll learn practical ways to reframe your pre-class rituals, simplify sequencing, practice pausing, and redefine your success metrics.

By the end of this conversation, you’ll see why confidence doesn’t come from more certifications or perfecting your practice. It comes from service, from focusing fully on your students, and from letting go of the pressure to be perfect.

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

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

And come explore my mentorship program, my Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education workshops and 300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at ...

Can I tell you something? After 52 episodes of this podcast, that's a full year of weekly conversations about confidence sequencing, student relationships, and every teaching challenge you can imagine. I've noticed something that keeps coming up. It's a pattern that shows up in almost every struggle you've shared with me. Every DM I've received every question that comes up in our comfort zone yoga community, and once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. It's the reason why some teachers feel like frauds even after years of teaching. It's why you might spend three hours planning a one hour class, yet still feel unprepared. It is why that blank look on your student's face sends you into a spiral of self-doubt. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential, sharing the secrets of what goes on inside and outside the yoga classroom so you will feel confident, capable, and relaxed when you walk in to teach your next class. Today for our one year anniversary episode, we're going to talk about the beautiful irony at the heart of teaching yoga. The pattern that once you recognize it, will change everything about how you show up for your students. Here's what I've noticed. After a year of these conversations, the yoga teachers who struggle most are still trying to practice yoga while they're teaching it. Let me say that again differently. You are standing at the front of the room, but you're still on your own internal journey. You are still looking inward when you need to be looking outward, and that's the problem because here's the beautiful, maddening irony at the heart of teaching yoga. Yoga is an interior practice of connection, but teaching yoga requires you to flip your focus completely outward. Think about how you came to yoga. For me, as I've shared before, I actually hated my first class, but when I finally connected with yoga during pregnancy, it was my mat, my breath, my journey inward, my connection with my baby. The transformation was so profound that I decided to teach to share this gift. I bet your story is similar. You fell in love with how yoga made you feel. Maybe it helped you through a difficult time. Maybe it gave you strength you didn't know you had. Maybe it finally quieted that constant chatter in your mind. But then you stepped in front of your first class and everything you thought you knew about yoga got turned inside out. Suddenly, it wasn't about your experience anymore, but nobody told you that. Nobody explained that teaching yoga and practicing yoga or fundamentally different activities. This pattern, this confusion between practicing and teaching, it shows up everywhere. Way back in episode one, our very first conversation together, I told you, you are not the hero. Your students aren't coming to class for you. They're coming for themselves. But at the time, I didn't fully articulate why teachers struggle with this concept. Now I see it clearly. It's because you are still practicing while you're teaching. Your strengths as a practitioner can actually become blind spots as a teacher. Your beautiful practice, your deep understanding of alignment, your ability to hold a handstand for five minutes. None of that matters if you can't see what your students need. These strengths keep you focused on your body, your experience, your journey. Then there's the whole issue of reading the room. You're scanning these neutral faces with blank expressions and immediately thinking you're boring them or confusing them. You are reading their expressions, trying to figure out if you are doing okay, when actually they're just concentrating on not falling over and repose. They're not thinking about you at all. They're on their own internal journey, which is exactly where they should be. Imposter syndrome hits hardest when you're measuring your teaching against your practice. Can I do this pose perfectly? Do I know enough philosophy? Have I studied with the right teachers? But those are practitioner questions, not teaching questions. Teaching yoga is meant to be a conversation, but you're only hearing one side of it. If you're focused on your own experience, you are talking at your students instead of with them. You're so busy monitoring your own performance that you miss the subtle signals they're sending you about what they need. This pattern, this inward focus, when you should be looking outward, it's actually been taught to you. Think about your 200 hour training. What did you spend most of your time doing? Probably deepening your practice, learning to refine your alignment, studying philosophy for your understanding. Practicing teaching on fellow trainees who already knew what downward dog was and could do it with their eyes closed. The assumption was that if you deepen your practice enough, you'll naturally be able to share it with others. But that's like saying if you become a really good solo pianist, you'll automatically know how to conduct an orchestra. The skills are completely different. A pianist needs to perfect their own technique. A conductor needs to bring out the best in others. Even the way we talk about yoga reinforces this confusion. We say, take your practice to the next level, and then wonder why teachers feel like they need to be the most advanced practitioner in the room. We say, teach from your own experience and then wonder why teachers spend the whole class in their heads. So here's the shift and it's what every confident teacher I have talked to this year has discovered. Your practice is what qualifies you to teach, but your teaching is not your practice. Your teaching is an act of service. It's a performance of sorts. It's a facilitation. It's everything except an internal journey. When you stop asking, how do I feel at the front of the classroom and start asking, what do they need? That's the moment you become a teacher instead of a practitioner who happens to be at the front of the room. This shift changes everything about how you approach your classes, your sequence planning stops being about what poses you want to practice, and becomes about what will serve your students that day. You don't need to entertain yourself with creative sequences. Your students want predictability. They want to know what's coming. That's what creates a sense of safety. Your cueing stops being about proving you know, all the Sanskrit and all of the anatomy, and becomes about helping them understand where they are in space. Your students need clear, simple direction, not a dissertation on the biomechanics of external rotation. Your energy management shifts completely. You don't have to be in the perfect mood to teach. You don't have to have your life together. You just have to show up and serve. Some of my best classes have been when I felt terrible, but focused entirely on my students' needs. Your confidence stops depending on your abilities, and starts building from their transformations. Every time a student finds a modification that works for them, every time someone leaves class looking more peaceful than when they arrived, that's your real success metric. And here's what's wild. The more you focus on your students instead of yourself, the more confident you become. It's completely counterintuitive. We think confidence comes from knowing more, practicing more, getting more certifications, but actually confidence comes from being useful. It comes from seeing what's needed. It comes from serving. It took 19 years of teaching, but this finally happened in my class: I had a student in yin yoga go into the first pose, a reclining fish pose, and stay there for the entire 60 minute class. I had heard that this could happen, but it did take 19 years for me to witness it in person. Occasionally she'd lift her head and look around, and that's how I was sure that she was meaning to be there, and that class is when I realized, really felt, really integrated this idea: my students know more about their bodies than I ever will. My job isn't to be the expert on their experience. It's to offer options and let them choose, even if that choice is never to leave the first pose. So how do you actually make this shift? Let me give you some concrete practices. First, change your pre-class ritual instead of centering yourself on your mat. Spend those minutes connecting with your students. Learn one new name. Ask someone how their week was. Notice who looks nervous. This primes your brain for external focus. Second, simplify everything. Use the 6 4 2 framework from my book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing. Repeat your sequences. Your students won't get bored, I promise. When you are not worried about remembering what comes next, you can actually watch your students and respond to what you see. Third, practice the pause after you give an instruction. Stop talking. Just watch. See how your students interpret what you said. Notice where they struggle. This is the conversation you're having, you speak, then you listen with your eyes. Fourth, reframe your success metrics. Stop measuring your class by how you felt teaching it. Did someone who looked stressed at the beginning look more peaceful at the end? Did someone find a modification that worked for them? Did someone go into the supported phish pose and never leave until the end of class? That's your real report card. Here's an affirmation for today, and really for this whole journey we've been on together, I don't have to be perfect to be effective. Say it again with me. I don't have to be perfect to be effective. You know what? Let me give you another one, especially for this anniversary episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential. My teaching is not my practice. My teaching is my service. One more time. My teaching is not my practice. My teaching is my service. Write that down. Put it where you'll see it. Before you teach, let it remind you to look outward, not inward. Thank you for being here for this entire first year of Yoga Teacher Confidential. We have already covered so much ground together, and every episode has been circling around this central truth. The best teachers are the ones who've learned to get out of their own way and focus on their students. If this resonates with you, if you're ready to make this shift from internal to external focus, come join us In the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, we have a whole community of teachers who are discovering that the secret to confidence isn't about perfecting their practice. It's about serving their students. You can find all 52 episodes from this past year at sage roundtree.com/podcast. Join our free community, the Zone at comfortzoneyoga.com. And when you're ready to go deeper, check out my program, Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, a mentorship membership where we work together on making following all of this advice, practical and sustainable for you. Here's to year two, where we'll keep exploring what it really means to be a guide and not the hero of the yoga class. Find me at sagerountree.com, on the socials @sagerountree, no letter D, including on YouTube, where I'm focusing on regularly posting not just this podcast in video format, but also fresh exclusive videos. Let me know how you're enjoying the podcast, and as a birthday gift, the podcast asked for your five star rating and review on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube. Thank you so much for listening over the last year. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time with more secrets to help you become almost everyone's favorite yoga teacher.

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Sage Rountree

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