Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher

70. The Planning-Confidence Cycle: Finding the Middle Path Between Overplanning and Winging It

• Sage Rountree • Episode 70

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If you've ever spent three hours planning a sixty-minute yoga class—or shown up with nothing but vibes and hoped for the best—this episode is for you. I'm unpacking what I call the Planning-Confidence Cycle: the exhausting trap that keeps yoga teachers bouncing between meticulous overpreparation and chronic underpreparing.

Here's the thing: neither extreme gives you what you actually want. Overplanning leaves you too in your head to see your students. Winging it leaves you uncertain whether your class is even balanced. And both feed the anxiety that keeps the cycle spinning.

The ancient yoga teachers understood this tension deeply. In this episode, I'm exploring how sthira and sukha (steadiness and ease) and abhyasa and vairagya (practice and nonattachment) offer us a framework for finding the middle path—where preparation enables responsiveness instead of rigidity.

You'll learn practical steps for breaking the cycle: recognizing your tendency, embracing the power of repetition, developing a framework you trust, and experiencing your sequences before you teach them.

Plus, I'm inviting you to join the February Lesson Plan Challenge inside The Prep Station—four weeks, four complete lesson plans, practiced in your body and ready to teach.

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? For the first few years I was teaching yoga, I swung like a pendulum between two exhausting extremes. Some weeks I would spend three hours planning a single 60, 75 minute class color coded notes. Backup sequences, contingency plans for every possible student who might walk through the door, I would research transitions using VHS tapes. Yep. Remember those? It was the early 2000 aughts. I would sketch out timing for each pose. I'd write out my cues word for word, and then I would lie awake the night before mentally rehearsing the whole thing. Other weeks I'd show up with nothing but vibes and a vague idea that we'd flow and see what happens. I'd tell myself I was being intuitive or responsive to the room, but honestly I was just burned out from the week before. Neither one felt good and neither one served my students the way I wanted. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher. Today we are talking about what I call the planning confidence cycle, the trap that keeps yoga teachers bouncing between over-planning and winging it, and how yoga philosophy offers us the path out of it. Plus, I've got an invitation for you at the end that might just transform how you approach lesson planning for the rest of the year. Let me paint the picture of what the planning confidence cycle actually looks like, because I think you'll recognize yourself in it. It starts with doubt. You doubt your ability to plan an effective class. Maybe you just finished your 200 hour training and you're not sure you learned enough about sequencing. Maybe you've been teaching for years, but you still feel like you're faking it. Maybe you had a class recently that fell flat and now you're second guessing everyth. That doubt leads you to do one of two things. Option one, you overcompensate. You spend hours researching, scrolling Instagram for sequence ideas, stitching together bits and pieces from different teachers trying to create the perfect class. You write everything down, you time it out. You plan for every contingency. By the time you're done, you've invested three or four hours into planning the class that you haven't even taught yet. Option two. You avoid planning feels overwhelming. So you just don't, you tell yourself, you'll figure it out. When you get there, you'll read the room, you'll be spontaneous, and maybe sometimes that works, but deep down, you know, you're not really being intuitive. You're being avoidant. Here's the thing. Either way, this affects how confidently you teach. When you overplan, you're too in your head during class, you're worried about forgetting something. You're so attached to the sequence. You mapped out that you can't actually see the students in front of you, someone struggling, and you don't notice because you're mentally rehearsing the next transition. Someone's ready for more and you don't offer it because it's not in the plan. You're teaching to your notes, not to your students. When you under plan, you're uncertain whether what you're offering is balanced or effective. You're hoping vibes will carry you through secretly praying. No one notices. You're making it up as you go. You might forget to include twists. You might realize halfway through that you've been in standing poses for 25 minutes. In a gentle class, you feel scattered and your students feel it too. And here's the kicker. This is where it becomes a cycle. The lack of confidence you feel during teaching feeds right back into your planning anxiety for the next class. If you over-planned and still felt uncertain while teaching, you think I need to plan even more next time. If you winged it and felt lost, you think I need to be more prepared. Either way, the anxiety grows and the cycle continues. Most yoga teachers I work with are stuck bouncing between these two extremes. Some weeks you are the meticulous planner with spreadsheets and color coded cue cards. Other weeks, you are completely winging it because you burned yourself out the week before and neither approach gives you what you actually want. Confident teaching that serves your students while preserving your time and energy. Sound familiar? Mm-hmm. I see you nodding. I've been there and I want you to know there's another way. And here's where yoga philosophy offers us something beautiful because this isn't a new problem. The tension between structure and freedom between effort and ease between doing and being the ancient teachers understood this deeply and they gave us language for navigating it. In Patanjali Yoga Sutras, we find the phrase, the seat should be steady and comfortable. Stir is stability, steadiness, effort, structure. sukha is ease, comfort, softness, freedom, and here's the key insight. Every pose should have both, not all effort, not all ease, both held in balance. This applies to your physical practice. Of course, in Warrior two, for example, you need the strength and stability of stra to hold the pose, the engaged legs, the lifted arms, the steady gaze. But you also need the ease of sukha, the softness in your face, the relaxed shoulders, the breath that flows freely. Too much stir and your rigid straining exhausted. Too much sukha, and you collapse. Lose the integrity of the shape. But here's what I want you to see. This same principle applies to your teaching and specifically to your lesson planning. Think about the over planner, the teacher with the color coded notes and three backup sequences and cues written out. Word for word. This teacher has too much sthira. There's so much structure, so much effort, so much rigidity that there's no room for responsiveness, no space for sukha. The class feels tight. The teacher feels exhausted before they even begin. And ironically, all that planning doesn't create confidence. It creates more anxiety because now there's more to remember, more that could go wrong. Now think about the teacher who wings it, who shows up without a plan and hopes for the best. This teacher has too much sukha. There's so much freedom, so much softness, so much going with the flow that there's no grounding, no stability, no steer. The class feels scattered. The teacher feels unmoored and uncertain, and that lack of preparation doesn't create freedom. It creates the anxiety of a different kind. The answer isn't to swing from one extreme to the other. The answer is the middle path. Finding that sweet spot where effort meets ease, where structure creates freedom, where preparation enables responsiveness. There's another pair of Sanskrit terms that illuminates this beautifully. Abhyasa and vairagya. abhyasa means consistent, dedicated practice. It's showing up again and again doing the work. It's the discipline of repetition, the commitment to the process in teaching terms. This is your dedication to having a plan, to preparing thoughtfully for your students to knowing your sequences well to doing the homework. vairagya means non-attachment, releasing your grip on specific outcomes. It's the wisdom to know that you can control your effort, but not the results in teaching terms. This is your willingness to set the plan aside when the room needs something different. It's teaching to the students who actually showed up, not the students you imagined when you were planning. The balance between abhyasa and vairagya is the balance between showing up prepared and letting go of attachment to how you thought the class would unfold. You do the work of planning, you know your sequence, you've practiced it in your own body. That's abhyasa. And then when you walk into the room and you see who's actually there, you release your grip on the plan so you can be present with your students. You trust that your preparation has prepared you to adapt. That's veia. This is where confidence lives not in perfect preparation because there's no such thing and not in improvisation because winging it isn't the same as being responsive. Confidence lives in the balance in the middle path in sthira and sukha. Absa anvairagyaga held together. So how do you actually find this middle path? How do you break free from the planning confidence cycle and start teaching from that balanced, grounded place? Let me give you some practical steps. First, recognize which extreme you tend toward. Be honest with yourself. Are you spending more time planning classes than teaching them? Do you have notebooks full of sequences you've never actually used? Do you feel like you can never be prepared enough? That's too much sthira. You need more ease, more trust, more willingness to let go, or are you chronically under-prepared? Do you avoid planning because it feels overwhelming? Do you tell yourself you're being intuitive when really you're being avoidant? Do you often feel lost or scattered while teaching? That's too much sukha. You need more structure, more preparation, more grounding. Most of us lean one direction or the other. Knowing your tendency is the first step to finding balance. Second, embrace repetition. This might be the most counterintuitive advice I give, but it's also the most powerful. I teach the same lesson plan for an entire month, not because I'm lazy, not because I've run out of ideas, because repetition serves my students. When my students practice the same sequence week after week, they build body memory, they build confidence. They stop having to think so hard about what comes next, and they can drop into their bodies. They start to notice their own progress. Oh, that post felt easier this week, or I could balance longer. Today. They get the gift of familiarity in a world that's constantly demanding novelty. And here's what repetition does for me as a teacher. It frees me up to actually teach when I know my sequence so well, I could teach it in my sleep. I'm not in my head trying to remember what comes next. I'm watching my students. I'm noticing who's struggling. I'm seeing who's ready for more. I can read the room and respond, not because I'm winging it, but because my preparation has created the space for responsiveness. This is Abbi in action, consistent practice that creates mastery and it creates the conditions for vairagya, the ability to adapt without anxiety. Third piece of advice, develop a framework you trust. One of the biggest sources of planning anxiety is the fear that you might leave something out. What if the class isn't balanced? What if you forget twists? What if you spend too long in one position? A good framework eliminates that anxiety. The 6 4 2 framework, I teach six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions. The 6 4 2 gives me confidence that every class is balanced no matter what. I don't have to overthink it. I don't have to second guess myself. The framework has my back. When you trust your framework, planning becomes easier. You're not starting from scratch every time. You're not scrolling Instagram, hoping for inspiration. You have a structure that works and you simply fill it in. Fourth piece of advice, experience your sequence before you teach it. This is part of my serve method. The first E stands for experience. Don't just plan your sequence on paper. Practice it in your own body. When you've actually moved through the sequence, you know where the transitions feel awkward, know how long things actually take, not how long you imagine they'll take. This is preparation that builds genuine confidence, not the false confidence of having everything written down, but the real confidence of having felt it in your body. Now I want to invite you into something special if you have been stuck in the planning confidence cycle. If you're tired of spending more time planning than teaching or tired of showing up, underprepared and hoping for the best. February is your month to break free. Inside the Prep station, my membership for yoga teachers, we're running a lesson plan challenge for the entire month of February, and here's what makes it perfect. February has exactly 28 days, four straight weeks, no leftover days, just four clean weeks to transform your relationship with lesson planning. Each week in February inside the prep station, I will serve you one complete lesson plan in bite-sized manageable chunks. Week one, a balanced focused class. Week two, a gentle class, week three, a flowing class, and week four, a yin class. Here's how it works. Each day, you'll practice one quarter of that week's lesson plan along with me following along. Day one, you'll practice the opening and warmup. You'll feel how I would set the tone, how the centering lands, how the body begins to wake up. Day two, the standing or more active sequence you'll experience the flow, the transitions, the way we move through space. Day three, the mat work. You'll feel the shift in energy as we come down to the floor. The way the body opens after the standing work. And day four, the finishing poses. You'll experience the finishing poses. Cool down final stretches, transition into stillness, and on day five or over the weekend, if you want, you can practice the whole thing from start to finish. Experiencing it just as your students will. By the end of each week, you'll have a complete lesson plan that you have experienced in your own body. Not just read on paper but actually felt, you'll know how it moves, or the transitions, what cues make sense. You'll feel confident and ready to teach it. And you can bring these four lesson plans into your own teaching for the next several months. It's a whole quarter or more of class plans. Done four different styles, four complete sequences ready to teach. Here's the other beautiful thing. This is something you can do with friends. Invite a teaching buddy to join you. Maybe your bestie from yoga teacher training. You can practice together over resume. Discuss what you noticed in our asynchronous chat area. In the prep station. Ask me questions, support each other. Learning is better together. Now I've scheduled this challenge for February intentionally. Many of you are doing 30 day challenges right now in January. Maybe like me, you're doing my friend Jenny Rawlings 30 day yoga snack challenge or something similar to jumpstart your practice for the new year. That's wonderful. Keep feeding yourself, keep nourishing your own practice. And here's what I want you to think about. Your practice is the foundation for your teaching. What you experience on your mat is what you have to offer your students. The lesson plan challenge in February lets you take your own practice and apply it directly for your students. You experience it first in your body, then you share it with confidence because you know how it feels. This is the serve method in action. Structure your sequence, experience it as a student. Repeat it with purpose, vary it with intention. Evolve your voice as a teacher. The prep station costs only $39 a month, and it's packed with resources to help you plan confident, balanced classes without burning out the movement library. With over 140 sequences and follow along videos, the custom GPT assistant trained on my books and methods, monthly snack and chat live calls where we practice together and connect as teachers fresh sequences and theme seeds every month, and EU included three per month. 36 per year if you are ready to break the planning confidence cycle. If you're ready to find your middle path between over planning and winging it, join us for the February lesson plan challenge. Visit www.comfortzoneyoga.com/prep to sign up. I'll drop the link in the show notes. Here's what I want you to remember. The planning confidence cycle isn't a character flaw. It's not a sign that you're not cut out for teaching. It's simply what happens when we haven't found our balance yet, when we are oscillating between too much stirah and too much sukha, too much effort and too much ease, too much structure, and too much freedom. The ancient teachers knew this tension. They lived it just like we do, and they gave us frameworks for finding the middle path, steer and sukha, steadiness and ease, effort and softness, structure and freedom. Abhyasa and vairagya, showing up prepared and releasing attachment to how it unfolds, doing the work and trusting the process. You can apply these principles to every pose and you can apply them to your teaching life. This is where confident teaching lives not in perfect preparation because perfection doesn't exist, not in wicking it, because that's not actually freedom. Confidence lives in the balance in the middle path, in finding your own sweet spot between structure and responsiveness. You already have what you need to be a good yoga teacher. The frameworks exist, the support exists. You just need to find your balance. If you found this episode helpful, I would love it if you would rate and review the show. It helps other teachers find us, and it helps me know what's resonating with you. Find me at sagerountree.com, on the socials at Sage Rountree, no letter D and at comfortzoneyoga.com. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. 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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