How Can You Know If You Are Ready to Teach a Yoga Teacher Training

Summary: Very few teachers feel ready to teach a yoga teacher training before they launch. Confidence is not necessarily a sign of readiness, nor is feeling imposter syndrome a sign that you should wait. Here’s how you can really tell if you’re ready.

Here’s the truth: very few people feel ready to lead a yoga teacher training before their first YTT training. Feeling nervous is not necessarily a sign that you should wait to launch, and feeling confident isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re ready!. In fact, feeling nervous (and excited) is usually a good sign because it means that you are invested and keen to give your students an excellent experience.

While there isn’t a perfect checklist for evaluating readiness, here are some practical signs that can help you evaluate if you are ready to move forward.

Ready to Teach Teachers? How to Know You’re Ready to Lead a YTT

Your Students Ask You To

One of the best signs that you may want to think about running a yoga teacher training is if students ask you, “Hey – are you running a teacher training?”

Here’s why: your students recognize your skill and they want to learn to teach like you. But just as importantly, they think they’d like to hang out with you for 200 hours in a room and learn. Being a great yoga teacher is not the same thing as being a great yoga teacher trainer; the later requires the emotional intelligence to manage group dynamics, connect personably to students, and impart your skills. If your students are asking you about YTT, they see you as someone who has teaching skills as well as EQ.

Teaching Experience Is Not the Same As Training Experience

Here is the part that some teachers skip: teaching a vinyasa class and helping someone learn how to teach a vinyasa class themselves are two very different skills. One is about guiding a room of students through a practice; the second is about guiding education.

If you are a great teacher but new to leading education, a solid YTT curriculum is essential to your success. A well-structured instructional design gives you a scaffold of support to lean on while you are still finding your footing as a trainer.

Before you lead yoga teacher training, ask yourself honestly:

• Can I break down the mechanics and logic of effective cueing and sequencing clearly and simply?
• Can I teach anatomy in a way that a beginner understands, not just a fellow teacher?
• Can I give feedback that is both kind and strategic?
• Can I be patient and maintain my poise at the end of an 8-hour day?

If your answer is mostly yes, that is a good sign you are closer than you think.

You Know You’re Secretly a Teacher Trainer When…

Here are some other signs that you’re secretly a teacher trainer.

• You love continuing education and keep learning
• You love to “workshop” and explain details of the practice to your students
• You have conversations about yoga and its many facets outside of class
• Mentoring someone else energizes you more than it drains you
• You try to live your yoga in your life – not leave it on the mat
• You’ve been daydreaming about leading a YTT

And if you have been day dreaming about leading a YTT, then you may also be thinking about what faculty you’d want to have along for the adventure with you. I wrote about choosing the right faculty a while back, and rereading it now, a lot of it doubles as a mirror: the kind of trainer you’d want to hire tells you something about the trainer you already are.

You Don’t Need to Know Everything

It’s important that you hear this: you don’t need to know everything. So many experienced teachers hold themselves back, thinking they need another decade, another certificate, another “something” before they’re “allowed” to lead a yoga teacher training. First of all, there is no end to what you can learn in the yoga tradition – that’s what makes it so much fun! There will always always always be more to learn. Knowledge alone is not what makes you ready; passion, humility, and a trustworthy curriculum are what’s required to put you in the trainer seat.

You don’t have to be the most advanced person in the room. You have to be the clearest one. And clarity, more often than not, comes from solid lesson plans and a system that you can trust.

Final Thoughts

Readiness rarely arrives definitely and with a bang. It’s quieter than that. It’s the little voice inside you that says, “Wow, I’d love to do that.” It’s in your own dedication to the tradition and the practice. It’s found when you have conversations about yoga and teaching – just for the love of it. It’s in the mentoring you’re already doing without noticing. It’s in that itch to dive deeper than you can in your weekly classes or a workshop. Feel familiar?

And you are hearing a little voice say, “Yes!” feel free to book a free chat with me to talk it through and see how I may be able to help.