Ten past ten, and you’re one scroll from putting the phone down. Then there they are. Someone you trained with: forty thousand followers, and a retreat in Portugal with a waiting list. You watch their reel twice. Your Thursday class has nine regulars.
And the evening quietly turns. Twenty minutes ago you were a teacher who’d taught a decent class and got everyone home safe. Now you’re somehow behind, in a race you don’t remember entering.
It happens across the profession, and to new teachers most of all, because the first couple of years are when you’re still deciding what kind of teacher you get to become. The scroll calls itself research. What it really measures, and the quieter signals worth tracking instead, is the business of this page.
When to use this
- The night a scroll ends in wondering why you bother
- The morning after, when the flatness is still hanging around
- Any week you catch yourself calling it market research
- Before you change your plans because of somebody’s highlight reel
What a feed measures
A feed is a highlight reel. You know this; everybody knows this. And knowing it doesn’t help at ten past ten, because comparison runs on attention.
Research on social comparison has mapped this thoroughly: we compare upwards, against the most polished version of the most visible people, and our own ordinary day pays for it. The comparison is rigged before it starts. Their launch photo is set against your nine-regular evening. Their best month, clipped and colour-graded, against your actual life.
A feed is never a fair sample either. It is assembled by what holds attention, and comparison holds attention beautifully. The teachers you see most are the ones the sorting favours, which has plenty to do with posting and very little to do with teaching.
The numbers measure the wrong things anyway. Follower counts say nothing about whether anyone held a room. They don’t show the student who could finally sleep, or the nine people who rearrange their week so they don’t miss you. Nothing on a feed shows teaching. It shows marketing, done by people whose craft may or may not be underneath it.
Attention is a trainable thing
Here the profession holds an advantage, because you already teach the counter-skill.
Yoga has treated attention as trainable for centuries. 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 applies to a thumb on a screen. What you attend to grows, and starts to look like the truth.
Research on attention agrees in plainer clothes: the mind rehearses whatever it is fed. Give it other people’s opening nights for twenty minutes every evening and it will build you a world where everybody is further ahead.
Staying on the platforms is fine. The change is deciding, on purpose, what gets your attention.
Signals that are yours
Comparison fails as research because it samples other people’s marketing. Research into your own teaching needs signals that belong to you. The strongest ones are quiet.
- Retention. How many of this week’s students come back next week. In this profession, returning is the real applause.
- Requests. What people ask you for: a slower class, or whether there is another evening. A request is the clearest signal a teacher gets.
- Practice. Whether your own practice happened this week. It is the well the teaching draws from, and it is the first thing to vanish when confidence dips.
Track these for a week before the next verdict on where you are. Gather evidence the way you would want a nervous student to gather it: from what actually happened, over time.
Then the feed audit. Ten minutes, honestly sorted: accounts that teach you something stay, and accounts that reliably leave you smaller get muted. Muting is allowed. It is the same placing of attention you teach, pointed at a screen.
Action steps
- Tonight, write your three signals down where you’ll see them: who returned, what was requested, whether practice happened.
- Give it one full week of evidence before any verdict on where you are.
- Run the ten-minute feed audit, and be honest about which accounts shrink you.
- When comparison lands mid-scroll, name the mismatch: their highlight reel, your ordinary Thursday. Then put the phone in another room.
- At the end of the week, read your own signals before you open anyone else’s.
Related resources
- One page that holds your year
- Your teaching story, told properly
It can help to know what the profession itself counts. YogaPros measures a teacher’s standing in experience: hours taught and years in the room, verified, alongside the standards you teach to. None of that appears on a feed, and every part of it is already yours to build.