There’s no money in yoga. Five words, repeated the way people mention rain. And that small sentence has quietly cost more teaching careers than any quiet term ever has.
Nobody pushes back, because pushing back would sound naive, and anyway the person saying it has usually been teaching longer than you. By your second year you’ve heard it enough to stop noticing it’s a claim at all. It has settled somewhere between fact and furniture. And the beliefs that sit in the furniture are the ones that make your decisions for you.
So: an audit, both columns. What believing the line may already have decided on your behalf, and what the evidence about teaching careers actually says.
When to use this
- The week somebody says it near you and it lands
- When a fee review or a new class idea keeps sliding, on the grounds that there’s no point
- Before you decide anything about next term with that sentence still in the room
What the sentence has already decided
Beliefs like this don’t sit still. They vote.
Part of the trouble is that the sentence costs nothing to say. It sounds like realism, and it asks nothing of anyone who repeats it. Claims like that tend to travel further than the checking does. You can carry it for years without once checking it yourself.
So look back over the last two years for the fingerprints. The beginners’ course that never launched, because it wouldn’t fill. The fee that’s stayed put for three years, so as not to upset the room. And somewhere in there, probably, an invitation as well, turned down before the diary was even open, on the grounds it wouldn’t have led anywhere.
None of it felt like a decision at the time. That is the point. Research on how people weigh change shows you rarely audit a belief you inherited; you protect your present self from small risks and leave your future self to absorb the cost. A sentence taken in during year one can still be declining invitations in year ten.
So the first move is simply to see the record. Write down what the sentence has already decided for you. Real things, with rough dates where you can manage them. Do it and you’ll probably find two or three entries you didn’t expect.
What the evidence shows
Now the other column, because an audit needs both sides.
Teaching yoga, for most of the profession, is part-time by design. It runs alongside other work and around families, in the evenings and the early mornings. That shape is how a teaching life usually gets built, and it can hold a real livelihood when there’s structure underneath it: classes that keep their regulars, and fees reviewed on a calendar instead of in a crisis.
The sentence has the profession’s own history to argue with, too. The professional body behind this work has been here since 2006, long enough to watch teaching careers cross their tenth year and carry on. But nobody handed those teachers a packed room. They built structure and stayed.
And the strongest counter-evidence is already in your hands. A class that’s held its regulars through two winters, or a venue that asks for you by name. The record itself: trainings finished, and the hours you’ve taught year on year.
The audit, on paper
Take one page and rule two columns.
Left: what has this sentence decided for me so far. The real entries, however small they look now. Ten minutes, no editing.
Right: what has believing it kept me safe from. Be fair here. Disappointment, mostly, and the awkwardness of asking for things. A belief that costs this much is usually guarding something, which is why it’s lasted.
Then read the two columns side by side and write a single line at the bottom: the decision I would make this term if the sentence were not true. One decision. The course finally launched, or the Thursday finally accepted.
Take that line seriously. It came from the teacher you are with the sentence out of the room.
Action steps
- Today, write the sentence in quotation marks at the top of a page. Quoting it moves it out of the weather and back into claim territory.
- Spend ten minutes listing what it has decided for you so far, with rough dates.
- Add the fairness column: what believing it has protected you from.
- Write the one decision you’d make this term if it weren’t true.
- Put a date on that decision’s first small step, and tell one person who will ask you about it.
Related resources
- What you charge is a sentence you wrote
- The quiet month
One more entry for the evidence column: this profession keeps records. The standards its professional body verifies are built on what a teaching career accumulates, the hours and the years in the room. Sentences about scarcity age badly next to a record like that.