Halfway through a Wednesday class, a student stops following your cue and quietly does their own version instead. Nothing dramatic. Nobody else noticed. But somewhere under your teaching a question fires, and it’s the same one it always is. For a lot of teachers it runs something like ’what if they realise I don’t know enough?’ For others it’s plainer: ’is everyone bored?’
You’ve probably never said yours out loud. It’s been running so long it doesn’t sound like a question any more; it just feels like teaching. And it matters more than it seems to, because attention goes wherever a question sends it.
The work here is catching the question underneath your teaching, and then choosing a steadier one on purpose.
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 search. You can feel it in your own practice. Ask ’where is the tension tonight?’ and the body files its report: the jaw, the shoulder that never quite lets go. Ask ’where is the breath already easy?’ and a different report arrives from the same body. Neither answer is wrong; the question decided which one you got. Research on self-talk points the same way: the questions we habitually put to ourselves steer what we notice, and what we notice hardens into what we believe about how things are going.
So run ’is everyone bored?’ under an evening class and boredom is what you’ll find. The neutral face by the radiator. The early leaver with a bus to catch. The question harvests its own evidence, then presents the harvest as proof. It has been marking its own homework for years.
Most of these questions are old. A comment made once on a training course, or a studio owner’s raised eyebrow in your first year of teaching. It got written in early, and nobody has reviewed it since. That’s the real problem.
The most common question has a name
If yours is a version of ’when will they realise I’m not really qualified for this?’, you’re in well-documented company. In 1978 the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named the impostor phenomenon after studying accomplished women, high achievers with strong records who couldn’t take their own competence to be real. The detail worth keeping: the pattern they documented ran through people doing genuinely good work.
Sit with that for a second, because it cuts the question’s authority. Impostor feelings say something about how seriously you take the work, and nothing reliable about the teaching itself. Teachers with twenty years behind them still hear the question on certain nights; qualifications don’t end it, and nor does experience by itself. What changes things is recognising it as a question rather than a fact, and declining to let it run the class.
Choosing the steadier question
You can’t delete a habitual question. You can out-practise it, the same way you’d out-practise a movement habit: choose the replacement deliberately and put it where the old one lives.
A steadier teaching question passes two tests. It faces the students rather than your performance. And it can actually be answered tonight. ’Am I good enough?’ fails both: there’s no finish line, and it points the wrong way. ’What does this room need from me in the next hour?’ passes. So does ’who here needs to be seen tonight?’
Notice what moves when the question changes. The impostor question puts you at the centre of your own class, auditioning. The steadier one returns you to the side of the room, teaching. The students haven’t changed and neither has your skill. The teacher standing in front of them has.
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.