The students are unrolling mats and talking about their weeks, and somewhere behind your sternum a familiar commentary clocks in. They’re going to be bored tonight. The cover teacher last week was better. Minutes later you’re teaching, and part of you is still in that meeting.
Most advice about the voice comes down to fighting it. Push through it, or drown it out with something more positive. And most teachers have noticed what happens next: it gets louder, because now it’s certain nobody is listening.
There’s a steadier way to work with it, and it starts from an odd premise. The critic is a part of you doing a job. Badly, with terrible timing, but a job all the same.
When to use this
- In the minutes before class, when the commentary starts
- After a quiet class, when the voice moves from prediction to verdict
- Before teaching peers, mentors, or anyone holding a clipboard
- In any season where nerves you thought you’d retired come back
What the critic is for
Counsellors who work with parts-based approaches begin from a simple observation: the mind speaks with more than one voice, and the harsh one is rarely malicious. It’s protective. Its methods are dreadful and its manner is worse, but its aim is nearly always to stop something happening. Being caught out in front of a room, usually. Or repeating some older humiliation that predates teaching entirely.
Heard that way, the pre-class commentary changes character. “You haven’t planned enough for this room” stops being a verdict from a panel and becomes a nervous colleague trying, clumsily, to make sure you’re never unprepared. Annoying. Also, in its way, loyal.
You’ll notice the volume rises with the stakes: the first class back after a break, or the day someone books you to teach other teachers. A louder critic usually means you care more about this particular room, and it has noticed.
Research on self-compassion, much of it by the psychologist Kristin Neff, backs the shift. People who treat their own missteps the way they’d treat a colleague’s stay more motivated and hold up better under pressure than people who self-attack. The old fear that kindness breeds complacency turns out to be backwards. Being on your own side is a performance strategy, whatever the voice claims.
Write the job description
So interview it. Ten minutes on paper, kettle on.
What is this voice trying to stop happening? When did it start? For most of us that’s long before teaching, which is a useful thing to see in ink. What does it believe would happen if it went quiet for an hour? And what would it need to know to stand down?
Write the answers as an actual job description if it helps. Role: protection. Methods: worry and worst-case rehearsal. Hired: roughly 1998. Performance review: overdue.
If talking to a voice on paper feels strange, remember that you already work with parts all class long: the tight shoulder, the breath someone is holding without knowing it. This is the same craft, pointed inward.
Two things tend to happen when teachers do this. The voice quietens, because parts that feel heard stop shouting. And its one useful note gets easier to find. Sometimes the critic is holding a genuine flag (the playlist really does cut out before savasana) wrapped in forty layers of catastrophe. Take the note. Leave the wrapping.
It doesn’t get to teach
The interview is background work. The foreground is a boundary, and it’s kept in the last minutes before you begin.
When the commentary starts, name it once, without ceremony: that’s the critic clocking in. One slower breath out. Then put your attention where the work is, which is never inside your own chest. The faces arriving. The body on the mat nearest the door. The critic can ride along in the passenger seat; it doesn’t get the register and it doesn’t get the microphone.
Afterwards, protect the review. The critic loves a debrief. So before any accounting of what went wrong, write one sentence about what went well. Written first, it keeps the record honest.
Action steps
- Today, ten minutes with a notebook: write down the two lines your critic repeats most, word for word. Seeing them in your own handwriting shrinks them.
- Underneath, draft its job description: what it’s protecting you from, and roughly when it was hired.
- Before your next class, when it starts, name it once. Take the note if there’s a real one. Then attention out to the room.
- After class, write one sentence about what went well, before any other review.
- If the voice is loud in every room, not only the studio, and it sounds less like nerves than contempt, take that seriously. A conversation with someone qualified reaches places a notebook can’t.
Related resources
- The question you teach from
- You qualified. When do you feel like a teacher?
Every level of this profession has teachers who know this voice, twenty years in and letters after their name included. Progression here is recorded in years taught and hours trained; nerves have never been part of what’s measured. A CPD room full of other teachers is usually where that truth lands.