Somebody says it in the changing room after the six o’clock class, or across the table on the second weekend of training. There’s no money in yoga. It gets said the way people mention rain. Nobody argues, because arguing would sound naive, and anyway the person saying it has been teaching longer than you.
By the second year most teachers have heard it often enough to stop noticing it’s a claim. It has settled in somewhere between fact and furniture. And background beliefs are the ones that make your decisions for you.
The audit below covers both sides: what believing it may already have decided on your behalf, and what the evidence about teaching careers actually says.
When to use this
- The week somebody says it near you and it lands
- When a fee review or a new class idea keeps sliding, on the grounds that there’s no point
- Before you decide anything about next term with that sentence still in the room
What the sentence has already decided
Beliefs like this don’t sit still. They vote.
Part of the trouble is that the sentence costs nothing to say. It sounds like realism, and it asks nothing of anyone who repeats it. Claims like that tend to travel further than the checking does.
Look back over the last two years for their fingerprints. The beginners’ course that never launched, because it wouldn’t fill. The fee that has stayed put for three years so as not to upset the room. Somewhere in there is probably an invitation as well, declined before the diary was even checked, on the grounds that it wouldn’t have led anywhere.
None of those felt like decisions at the time. That is the point. Research on how people weigh change shows we rarely audit a belief we inherited; we protect the present self from small risks and leave the future self to absorb the cost. A sentence taken in during year one can still be declining invitations in year ten.
So the first move is simply to see the record. Write down what the sentence has already decided for you. Real things, with rough dates where you can manage them. Most teachers find two or three entries they didn’t expect.
What the evidence shows
Now the other column, because an audit needs both sides.
Teaching yoga, for most of the profession, is part-time by design. It runs alongside other work and around families, in the evenings and early mornings. That shape is how a teaching life usually gets built, and it can hold a real livelihood when there is structure underneath it: classes that keep their regulars, and fees reviewed on a calendar rather than in a crisis.
The sentence also has the profession’s own history to argue with. The professional body behind this work has stood since 2006, long enough to watch teaching careers cross their tenth year and keep going. Nobody handed those teachers a packed room. They built structure and stayed.
And the strongest counter-evidence is already in your hands. A class that has held its regulars through two winters, or a venue that asks for you by name. The record itself: trainings finished, and the hours you have taught year on year.
The audit, on paper
Take one page and rule two columns.
Left: what has this sentence decided for me so far. The real entries, however small they look now. Ten minutes, no editing.
Right: what has believing it protected me from. Be fair here. Disappointment, mostly, and the awkwardness of asking for things. A belief that costs this much is usually protecting something, which is why it has lasted.
Then read the columns side by side and write a single line at the bottom: the decision I would make this term if the sentence were not true. One decision. The course finally launched, or the Thursday finally accepted.
Take that line seriously. It was written by the teacher you are without the sentence.
Action steps
- Today, write the sentence in quotation marks at the top of a page. Quoting it moves it out of the weather and back into claim territory.
- Spend ten minutes listing what it has decided for you so far, with rough dates.
- Add the fairness column: what believing it has protected you from.
- Write the one decision you’d make this term if it weren’t true.
- Put a date on that decision’s first small step, and tell one person who will ask you about it.
Related resources
- What you charge is a sentence you wrote
- The quiet month
One more entry for the evidence column: this profession keeps records. The standards its professional body verifies are built on what a teaching career accumulates, the hours and the years in the room. Sentences about scarcity age badly next to a record like that.