- A social feed measures marketing and visibility, not teaching. Follower counts say nothing about whether anyone held a room.
- Comparison feels like research but runs on attention, and it sets your ordinary day against someone else’s most polished moment.
- The first years of teaching are when comparison bites hardest, because you are still deciding what kind of teacher you want to become.
- You already teach the counter-skill. Placing attention on purpose and bringing it back when it wanders is the same discipline pointed at a screen.
- Better signals belong to you: whether students come back, and what they ask you for. A week of that evidence beats any scroll.
Comparing yourself to other teachers online feels like research, but a feed only ever measures marketing, and it cannot show teaching at all. The way through is not to leave the platforms. It is to decide, on purpose, what gets your attention, and to track the quiet signals that belong to your own teaching. YogaPros counts a teacher’s standing in experience, not in followers.
By YogaPros — the professional body for yoga teachers since 2006, with more than 10,000 members across 100+ countries.
Why do new teachers compare themselves so much?
Comparison bites hardest in the first couple of years, because that is when you are still deciding what kind of teacher you get to become.
It happens right across the profession, and to new teachers most of all. Ten past ten at night, one scroll from putting the phone down, and there they are. Someone you trained with: forty thousand followers, a retreat in Portugal with a waiting list. You watch the reel twice. Your Thursday class has nine regulars. Twenty minutes earlier you were a teacher who had taught a decent class and got everyone home safe. Now you are somehow behind, in a race you do not remember entering. That turn is fast, and it is worth understanding, because it runs on something you can actually train.
What does a feed actually measure?
A feed measures marketing and visibility, and almost nothing about teaching.
You know it is a highlight reel. Everybody knows. And knowing it does not help at ten past ten, because comparison runs on attention rather than on facts. Research on social comparison has mapped this for decades: we compare upward, against the most polished version of the most visible people, and our own ordinary day pays for it. A feed is not a fair sample either. It is assembled by whatever holds attention, and the teachers you see most are the ones the sorting favours, which has plenty to do with posting and little to do with teaching.
The numbers measure the wrong thing anyway. Follower counts say nothing about whether anyone held a room. They do not show the student who could finally sleep, or the nine people who rearrange their week so they do not miss you.
How do I stop comparing myself online?
Decide on purpose what gets your attention, because attention is trainable, and you already teach the skill.
Yoga has treated attention as trainable for a very long time. Dharana, the practice of placing the mind somewhere on purpose and walking it back when it drifts, is part of the tradition you teach from. You lead a version of it every time you bring a room back to the breath. The same discipline works on a thumb and a screen. What you attend to grows, and starts to look like the whole truth. Feed the mind other people’s opening nights for twenty minutes every evening and it will build you a world where everyone is further ahead than you.
Staying on the platforms is fine. The change is choosing, deliberately, where your attention goes, and running a short, honest feed audit. The accounts that teach you something stay. The ones that reliably leave you smaller get muted. Muting is allowed. It is the same placing of attention you teach, pointed at a screen.
Is it bad to follow other yoga teachers?
Following other teachers is not the problem. The accounts that genuinely teach you something are worth keeping.
The trouble is narrower than “social media is bad for you.” It is the specific handful of accounts that reliably leave you feeling behind, and the twenty minutes each night you hand them without deciding to. Keep learning from the teachers who give you a real cue, a sequence idea, an honest word about the work. Let the rest go quiet. That is not hiding from the profession. It is the same care you would show a nervous student who kept measuring their week-three practice against someone else’s tenth year. You would tell them the comparison was not fair. It is not fair for you either.
What should I track instead?
Track signals that belong to your own teaching, not to anyone’s marketing. The strongest ones are quiet.
- Whether students come back. How many of this week’s students return next week. In this work, returning is the real applause.
- What people ask you for. A slower class, or whether there is another evening. A request is the clearest signal a new teacher gets.
- Whether your own practice happened. It is the well the teaching draws from, and the first thing to vanish when confidence dips.
Give these a full week before the next verdict on where you are. Gather the evidence the way you would want a nervous student to gather it, from what actually happened, over time. Then read your own signals before you open anyone else’s.
The feed will still be there in the morning, and so will the nine people who came back on Thursday. One of those is teaching. The other is just weather on a screen.
Members go deeper. YogaPros members can read the full version of this piece in the Learning Hub, with a downloadable one-page tracker for the three signals and a ten-minute feed audit. It is part of the Wellbeing & Mindset collection: practical support for the real work of teaching, not the marketing of it.