What to do Immediately after Graduating from Teacher Training to Secure your First Teaching Job and Start Making Money

So, actually the most difficult time I’ve had myself as a yoga teacher is right after I graduated from my first Teacher Training.  You might be asking yourself what, how could this be?  You’re a certified yoga teacher now; you should be ecstatic about it.  Not so fast.  It’s one thing to complete a Teacher Training somewhere and it’s a whole other thing to get your first paid teaching job.

And I know some people are going to say, this is yoga, and your intention shouldn’t be to do a teacher training to make money.  True and false.  First, I’m assuming the reason why you chose to take a Teacher Training to begin with is because you are passionate about yoga and your passion for yoga is driving you to help people.  This must be your focus and the money will follow.

That said, I am the Co-Director of a Teacher Training program here in Palo Alto and I’ve seen hundreds of students graduate from the program, some end up becoming phenomenal teachers and other’s not so much.

These are the top 7 things you must do to get your first paid teaching job and keep it.

1. Start teaching Asana (Poses) to yourself every night for 66 days

The first and probably the most important thing I can tell you is do not wait to find your first teaching job to start (or continue) teaching.  One thing that happens with students that do this is they forget everything they’ve learned and develop the attitude that if I do get a teaching job handed to me on a silver plate, I’ll use that first one as a training ground.  Bad attitude.  This is called learned helplessness, I’ll wait for someone else to give me an opportunity to start learning.  No, provide your own environment for learning.

Here is how to do it.

Go through all of your teacher training documents and rewrite a separate list of all the poses you studied in your training.  They are important, it’s not good enough to just know them, as a student it is, but as a teacher, you must know how to teach them.  This means learning the correct alignment, learning how to instruct someone into the pose who has never done it before, and learning the Sanskrit name (you never know).  It’s always better to be over prepared than under prepared.

Take yoga classes and make notes of the poses you find the most recur the most often.  These are probably poses you want to learn.

Make one big long list of poses with at least 66 poses on it.  Why 66 poses?  Because it takes 66 days to form a new habit, not 21 days, but 66.

Now everyday in the mirror, get in the habit of teaching your self one pose on the list.   Look in the mirror, guide yourself into the pose and give yourself alignment queues.  Then write one thing new you learned about the pose while teaching it in a notebook somewhere.

Also, you should be recording yourself.  You must get over the embarrassment of hearing your own voice.  Not only will you learn about your natural tone and pace, but you’ll be able to use this as comparison tool when you go around these poses at second time.  Your goal will be to improve on how natural your instructions are.

Even to this day I record myself and I still find myself saying stupid things with the wrong words.  My recordings reveal that I tend to taper off at times and my voice can sounds whiney if I’m not careful.  No one is perfect, especially not me.  Get in the habit of doing this and it will pay off big time.

At the end of the 66 days, you will be a hundred times more confident teaching the most common poses you see in a yoga class no matter what style you plan on teaching. Simply doing this will give you a leg up on all other teachers who do nothing after they graduate but sit around and pray for their first job to happen.

As a bonus, and as a weekly reinforcement, make Sunday the day that you teach yourself one new pose and review the other 6 in the week. This will accelerate the learning process.

2. Establish Teaching Groups with your Teacher Training Class

The bottom line is you want to gather as much teaching experience as possible in as many different forms possible.

No matter how great your Teacher Training was, you will not be ready to teach immediately upon graduating.  In fact, you know you’ve graduated from a great training program if you’ve learned more that you don’t know rather than more about what you already know.

The responsibility of a new teacher is to fill in the gaps and a new teachers success is determined by how quickly he or she can develop fluency in teaching common yoga poses and room presence. And room presence generally comes from being confident in what you teach and that doesn’t happen without practice.

Hopefully, you’ve made some friends. Take advantage. Make a group of about 3-4 people and set a time to teach each other 1 or 2 times a week. One person teaches and the others “take the class” and afterward give feedback.  Write down this feedback and be open to improvement. Practice teaching all different types of classes.  Use this environment as a training ground!

3. Take Classes

This one may seem obvious, but it’s apparently not. It’s funny, for some reason, when students become teachers; they stop practicing and start saying their teaching is their practice. Nonsense, what business do you have teaching Asanas (poses) to other people if you are no longer practicing these yourself?

While you are in these classes, try and instruct the poses to yourself in your head. Doing this will help reinforce queuing. The more you say them in your head the more comfortable you will get saying them out loud (like to yourself in the mirror).

Also, write down some notes after the class.  Write down things you liked about it and things you didn’t like about it. Doing this will help you formulate ideas for your own class.

4. Schedule a Time to Teach Friends, Family, Co-Workers One-on-One (for free)

Part of becoming a successful full time yoga teacher is not just teaching public classes, but learning how to teach people privately.  A private yoga session is taught much differently from a public class.  Start learning the difference.

In order to get started, it’s important to teach people one on one that you feel comfortable with.

Here’s why.

The learning experience come from the questions you are asked.  Make a list of all of the questions you are asked when you are teaching privately, you will get these questions in different versions and different forms over and over again.  It’s best to not know the answers around your friends than your first paying client!

Also, your friends and family are going to be comfortable around you and will ask you freely some difficult but honest questions.  This will give you some insight it what a good teacher-client relationship is like.

5. Learn Common Ailments and Injuries People Suffer From

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This will make you appear knowledgeable to a potential employer.  Being able to talk about common injuries that you’ve observed and help treat with your potential employer will go a long way to getting your first paid job.

This is another reason why scheduling privates with your friends, family, and co-workers is so important, it really is for now your only opportunity to ask new people about injuries they’ve had and general ailments.  Start to get comfortable with these, know them and how to deal with them, and you will be another big step ahead.

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Let me help you with a short list (general):

Yoga and Sport Related Injuries

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• Lower back
• Pinched nerves
• Knee sprains/tears
• Hamstring pulls
• Wrists pains/strains
• Neck and Cervical Spine

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6. Make a Business Card and Take Professional Photos

If you want to be a professional, you have to look like a professional. You need to do things to get yourself to stand out. Unfortunately, the Facebook photo of yourself attempting to put your leg behind your head at a party four years ago will no longer cut it.

Off topic interesting fact about me, the first time I ever put my leg behind my head was a party and its been so long I can’t remember if I was drinking wine or green tea. Hmmmm…

Back to the task at hand here, seriously get a business card made. I made mine from moo.com. It’s quick and easy and you can use a picture of yourself for a little logo to get started.

Now, a note of professional photos. This doesn’t mean you have to go out and spend thousands and thousands of dollars on multiple professional photo shoots. If you have the money, by all means go ahead.  What you can do if your budget is tight is go find a nice plain background ideally a nice wall somewhere.  A plain white wall looks good, as does a brick wall and use your iPhone to takes pictures.  In order to configure your iPhone to take self-portraits, you’ll need to download either an app that has a built in timer for your phone or an app that extracts still photos from videos.

For a self-timer app I use this:

GorillaCam: http://joby.com/gorillacam

For a still extraction from video app I use this:

Video-to-Photo: http://video-to-photo.com

These are both free, or they might cost a dollar. Highly worth the money, you’ll find them invaluable in your journey as a yoga teacher. Also, this is a great way to get comfortable in front of a camera and learn the proper angles to take photos. With enough practice you’ll be able to plenty of professional looking photos yourself. Have fun with it!

7. Network, Network, Network

One of the best ways to land your first paid yoga teaching job is to network, seriously network.  Let everyone know that you’ve just finished a teacher training and are looking to start and develop your career as a yoga teacher.  Another good reason to have business cards made.  You want to have them handy to pass out to people you meet.  You never know how far just one connection might take you!

Where is the best place to network?

You guessed it, a yoga studio.  This is another reason why you must keep taking classes.  Not only are you learning from the class itself, but it’s an opportunity to network with everyone at the studio.  Practice at multiple studios and make it a goal for yourself to meet and integrate into your local yoga community.  Often times, I’ve seen teachers get their first paid yoga teaching job by simply getting to know everyone at the studio.  Do this at multiple studios and your chances rise exponentially.

One other thing:  Your First Teaching Job May not be a Paid One

That’s okay.  If you get a chance to volunteer somewhere and offer free consistent yoga classes, by all means do it.  This is great experience for you and when are starting your career as a yoga teacher the most important thing you can do is to practice teaching as much as you can.  As I’ve said earlier, you want to build your teaching fluency as soon as possible.