A Sunday evening in September, the kitchen table, and the new diary open at a blank week. You copy the timetable across from the old one: the 6pm, then the 7.30. Same grid, same handwriting, one year on. Somewhere between one pencilled-in class and the next, a thought arrives sideways: you have planned next week hundreds of times. You cannot remember ever planning the year.
Most lines of work would have caught this by now. Somebody books a room and asks what went well and what didn’t, then writes down where you are heading. It can be tedious, and it does something quietly important all the same: once a year, the work gets looked at instead of just done. When you teach yoga, nobody books that room. Whole years go past, well taught and unexamined.
This piece is the review you run yourself, and all of it fits on one page. A single quiet sheet in your own handwriting: why you teach, and what this year is for. Written once and kept where you can see it. Read far more often than it is rewritten.
When to use this
- At the turn of a year, September as much as January
- The week after a training ends, while direction still feels clear
- When the weeks are fine and nobody, including you, has asked where this is going
Why a page works
The evidence for something this small is surprisingly firm. Decades of research on goal-setting show that written, specific intentions get acted on at far higher rates than intentions held in the head. A hope stays a hope; a line on paper becomes a decision you have already made once. Work on commitment devices adds the second half: a promise you can see keeps working on you, which is why this page lives on a wall or in a planning folder and never in a drawer.
Yoga holds the older version. A sankalpa is an intention stated plainly and returned to until it starts to organise what happens around it. This page is a sankalpa with a pen in its hand: written in your own words and read back on purpose, every time your eye crosses it.
What goes on the page
Seven fields, all short. If you have read other pieces in this series you will recognise some of them arriving home; if you haven’t, the page stands on its own.
- Why I teach. One or two sentences, in words you would say out loud. Everything else on the page answers to this line.
- What I am building this year. One line about the year’s work: the classes, the setting, the standing you want twelve months to add. “A settled Tuesday and Thursday, and my first daytime class” is a perfectly good answer.
- The question I teach from. The steadier inner question you have chosen to work under this year. If you have done that rewriting, the new question goes here in ink.
- My rules for a good class. Two or three conditions that are yours to control, such as preparation done and your attention genuinely in the room. Rules an empty Tuesday cannot break.
- Three signals I will trust. Your own measures of a good year: who keeps coming back, and the hours and years accumulating behind you. The third is often a sentence a student said that you wrote down the same evening. Signals that don’t depend on a full room or a feed.
- One intention per season. Four short lines. A teaching year has seasons; January fills, August thins, and each stretch does different work. Give every season one job: rest and planning for the quiet one, the new class for the full one. Yours will differ. The point is that a year is easier to hold as four smaller years.
- Review dates. Two, put in the diary before the pen goes down. Twenty minutes each, six months apart.
Writing it and keeping it
Give it one evening. Forty minutes, with last year’s diary and any course notes within reach, and a first draft that is rough and truthful. Nobody else needs to see this page, so write like nobody is marking it.
Then put it where your eyes already go: the front of your planning folder, or the inside of the wardrobe door. Photograph it for your phone if you like, but keep the paper original. Paper carries a weight a screen doesn’t. Amend in pen at the review dates and leave the crossings-out visible; they are the record of an honest year.
There is a printable fill-in version of this page with this guide, sized to live where your planner lives.
Re-read it when a season turns, and at the two dates in the diary. And on any Tuesday when the work feels like it is just happening to you. The page will not answer everything. It will remind you that someone is steering, and that it is you.
Action steps
- This week, one evening: forty minutes, one sheet, all seven fields in rough. Rough counts.
- Put the page where you will see it weekly, and the two review dates in the diary tonight.
- Read the season’s intention before the first class of each new season.
- At the mid-year date, amend in pen and keep the crossings-out.
- At year end, write the next page alongside the old one. The pile becomes its own record.
Related resources
- The question you teach from
- What counts as a good class — rewritten
An annual look at the work is ordinary professional practice everywhere else, and this page holds the half of it only you can see. Your Live CV holds the other half: the verifiable record of the same year — the qualifications, the training, the hours, the years. Read together, once a year, they are the closest thing this profession has to that meeting nobody books for you.