It’s late on a Sunday night, and you’re staring at a box on a studio’s website that says About you, 200 words. You type: “I qualified in 2019 and teach vinyasa and yin.” You delete it. You type it again. Everything true about the last fifteen years refuses to fit, so you file yourself under a date and two styles, and press send.
Or a student asks after class how you came to teaching, and you hand over the short version. Trained in 2019. Career change. The real story, the one with the decade of practice in it and the year everything cracked open, stays where it usually stays. Untold.
This piece is a practice for re-reading the arc you’ve already lived, and for telling it like it happened.
When to use this
- Writing or rewriting a bio, or an application to a studio
- Introducing yourself at a training, or to a room of new students
- When your career feels like it only began the day you qualified
- When you hear yourself apologising for the path that brought you here
The same facts make different stories
Psychologists who study how people make sense of their lives, Dan McAdams’ research on narrative identity most of all, describe the self as a story under constant revision. The events are fixed. The telling isn’t. And the telling does real work: it sets what feels earned, and what still feels possible.
The same ten years can be read as “I drifted into this sideways and I’m behind everyone who started properly”, or as “everything I did before teaching turned out to be preparation for it”. Both versions are faithful to the facts. They produce two different teachers at the front of the room. Research on how people narrate their harder chapters finds the same pattern again and again: those who can locate what a difficult period built in them come out steadier than those who read the same period as pure loss.
And most teachers tell their story short in one particular way. They start it at the training course. The office years, the decade of turning up to a Wednesday class through two house moves and a bereavement: all filed under before, none of it counting. It counted. It’s usually where the actual teacher was formed.
Re-reading the arc
Give it half an hour and a pen you like.
Write your teaching life in chapters. Five or six headings, nothing under them yet. The only rule is that chapter one begins before your training. The first class you ever took, perhaps. Or earlier, if you can feel the thread reaching further back.
Then one line under each heading: what was going on, and what it taught you that you still use in a room. The unglamorous chapters earn their place here. Eighteen months of covering classes in a cold church hall looks like a footnote until you write it down and realise it’s where you learned to teach whoever turns up.
Now read the page and look for the through-line. There almost always is one: the same care, showing up in jobs and years that had nothing to do with yoga. Teachers who find their through-line tend to stop asking whether they’re the real thing. You trained everywhere. The course made it official.
Told this way, the qualification takes its proper place in the story. A plot point rather than the climax. The climax hasn’t happened yet.
The version other people can see
The private re-reading comes first, and it’s for you. But a story has readers, and yours are practical ones: the student deciding whether to come back, the studio manager scanning applications at speed. They go on what they can see.
So bring the visible record up to level with the truth. Start with the bio: let its first line begin where chapter one begins. Then gather the record itself, training and hours in one place, counted properly, because years and hours are the profession’s own measure of an arc, and they’re the part a stranger can trust before they’ve ever met you.
Most teachers, counting for the first time, find they’re carrying more than they thought. That discovery changes how the story gets told, and often the teller with it.
Action steps
- Today, fifteen minutes: write five chapter headings for your teaching life, with chapter one set before your training began.
- Add one line per chapter: what it taught you that you still use.
- Rewrite the first sentence of your bio so it starts where chapter one starts. Keep it under twenty-five words.
- Count your training and teaching hours properly, and write the totals where you’ll see them.
- This month, tell the fuller version out loud once, to the next person who asks.
Related resources
- You qualified. When do you feel like a teacher?
- Gratitude with a spine
For YogaPros members, the Live CV is where the arc becomes a verified record: your training and your hours, year by year, checked and visible where students and studios already look. The story stays yours to tell. The record backs it up.