Every yoga teacher teaches from a question. Most have never once said it out loud.
Yours might be ’what if they realise I don’t know enough?’ Or something blunter, like ’is everyone bored?’ It’s run under your classes so long it stopped sounding like a question. It just feels like teaching now. You take it for the weather.
It can’t be deleted. Habits don’t work like that. But it can be out-practised, and that starts with hearing it.
When to use this
- When the same doubt fires however well the class went
- The third time you rewrite a class plan that was fine the first time
- Before teaching with another teacher, or your old trainer, in the room
- When kind feedback keeps bouncing off
Attention follows the question
A question is an instruction to look. You can feel it on your own mat. Ask ’where’s the tension tonight?’ and the body files its report: the jaw, that shoulder that never fully lets go. Ask ’where’s the breath already easy?’ and the same body answers differently. Neither one is wrong. The question chose which you got. Work on self-talk says much the same: the questions we keep putting to ourselves steer what we notice, and what we notice becomes what we believe is going on.
Run ’is everyone bored?’ under a class, then, and boredom is the harvest. The flat face by the radiator. The one who slips out early for a bus. The question gathers its own evidence and hands it back as proof. It’s been marking its own homework for years.
And these questions are usually old. A throwaway comment on a training course. A studio owner’s raised eyebrow in your first year. It got written in early, and nobody’s read it back since.
The most common question has a name
If yours is a version of ’when will they realise I’m not really qualified for this?’, it has a name. In 1978 the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named the impostor phenomenon after studying accomplished women, high achievers with strong records who still couldn’t take their own competence to be real. The detail to hold onto: it ran through people doing genuinely good work.
Sit with that a moment, because it takes the authority out of the question. Impostor feelings tell you how seriously you take the work. About the teaching itself, they say nothing reliable. Teachers with twenty years behind them still hear the question on a bad night. Qualifications don’t end it. Experience doesn’t either. What shifts things is hearing it as a question rather than a fact, and then declining to let it run the class.
Choosing the steadier question
You can’t delete a habit like this. You out-practise it, the way you’d out-practise any movement pattern: choose the replacement on purpose, and put it where the old one used to sit.
A steadier question clears two bars. It faces the students, not your performance. And it’s answerable tonight. ’Am I good enough?’ clears neither. No finish line, and aimed the wrong way. ’What does this room need from me in the next hour?’ works. So does ’who here needs to be seen tonight?’
Then watch what moves. The impostor question stands you in the middle of your own class, auditioning. The steadier one walks you back to the side of the room, teaching. Students, the same. Your skill, the same. The person teaching them, not quite.
Action steps
- After your next class, before the kit is even packed away, jot down the question that ran loudest under the hour. Today, if you’ve taught today.
- Repeat for two more classes and look for the repeat offender.
- Write it out in full, exactly as it runs, untidied. Then check where it points: at you, or at the room.
- Write your replacement. Facing the students, answerable tonight. Put it at the top of your class plan where you’ll see it every week.
- Expect the old question to fire mid-class anyway. It will. Name it silently, come back to the one you chose, and count the faster noticing as the win.
Related resources
- What counts as a good class — rewritten
- The inner critic has a job description
Other caring professions build in supervision: a regular, honest conversation about the inside of the work, held with people who do it too. Teaching deserves the same. The resources YogaPros keeps for its members exist for this side of the work as much as for the paperwork.