📯 I Lost My Job Teaching Yoga. Here’s What I Did.

I lost my job teaching yoga, here’s what I did-  it’s one for the yoga teachers.

I’ve worked in a lot of different places from the salubrious to the scruffy and I’ve also left places –  and been asked to leave. Sometimes your personal life changes, your workload shifts, sometimes you don’t like the working environment and this is normal evolution for anyone in any job or sector.

In the past I have had friendly and harmonious relationships with lots of studios and happily parted ways when the time has been mutually right. I’ve also been asked to leave a studio with packed classes and that perfect storm of popularity and demand for my work.

So from finding my feet in the business, always having independent classes and ultimately settling to work in one of my favourite places to teach, a grotty gym, I have learnt two ultimate and valuable lessons.

1. You can’t stop events happening but you can be prepared for them
2. Learn the lesson the first time, dont put yourself in postions where it can repeated

Learning not to put all my eggs in one basket, one studio, one area, one venue, one concept, one learning style, one teaching style, has been been something I’ve consciously done for many years now and it works.

I have my private clients, my public classes and my online digital products which buisness wise splits my risk and personally gives me variety and the fulfilment in the areas that I like best. It also allows for quiet times in one sector to be survivable not total destruction.

I have come to love the commercial gym environment and everything it brings with it from the unpredictability to the truly bizarre and the immense job satisfaction of creating dedicated yoga communities against all odds in these environments.

I have looked at and worked at a few big chains now and it’s always interesting to notice trends. Most of the commercial gyms are now moving towards a supermarket model of being open 24 hours or late, minimal staff and therefore service and a massive reduction in overheads with little to no classes despite demand.That shift has happened over the last couple of years and I have no doubt in one way or another it will impact the rest of the wellness world eventually but I’m not sure how yet. In talking with a friend recently my gut tells me there will be a massive swing back to local church hall and community centre no frills classes- many of which were lost post pandemic and they were the last dregs really as studio society had seen so much growth.

We will see but whether your business is completely online, a hybrid, public or private sessions its always worth a noticing what’s going on where the money is and how that affects people on the street and their spending habits. It will always have a ripple effect whether we realise it or not and being in deep in those non posh non snobby yoga environments with my sleeves rolled up often has allowed me to feel and see shifts in the collective almost before they bed in – and it means i can speak relevantly not retrospectively.

Anyone else kinda sick of expert teachers and coaches telling us what to do and they don’t even teach or rarely teach let alone put a shift in dealing with class sustainability and flux? Nah you need to have been in it over the last five years to ‘get’ it.

I digress, but this week at exactly the same time the members were notified, the instructors were also notified that they were on their last week due to modern refurbishment and permanent closure of classes within the gym.

I really felt for my colleagues because even though you know it’s coming you’re never sure when and it was a scrabble of handing out their phone numbers on scraps of paper and back of hands last minute.

So what did I do?

Well in all honesty not very much because my experience in unstable working environments has always been to have a contingency plan to hand.

So I implemented an adapted mine at the beginning of this year following my instincts not only for this personal change and job loss but also for the way my gut tells me the industry business is going.

I have already restructured my emails to include a landing space and information hub for local classes and gathered a couple of hundred emails to that list separate from my existing lists.

I had secured a new venue and at the beginning of the year started a new class there, also establishing a booking system, organised automated emails for sign ups and more just in case I needed to segway things over.

I know I am probably preaching to the choir when I tell you that just one of these things either cost an inordinate amount of money to get help with or eat an inordinate amount of your time to do yourself. If you’ve ever wrestled with booking systems or decided to try and automate your emails with a landing page, sorting systems and automatic replies with all the information you will know exactly what I’m talking about.

But as with many elements of teaching and life, competence builds confidence.

And none of this is because I’ve been clever or organised or had different information to anyone else. It’s because I’ve been burnt a couple of times in the industry so know to be prepared. Fool me once and all that. When you feel you’re in a friendly relationship with a studio and the wind is taken out of your sails or you have a great venue and they change their mind about terms and conditions, you learn to anticipate.

My anticipation (and in full transparency spending a lot of money on help) just saw my group class income increase by 60% instantly and using the same systems Ive invested in I sent an email yesterday 3.30pm and today by 12 noon it has given me 31 class sales. All I did was remind people of spaces available in April and what I do. We spoke about the powerful simplicity of just reminding people what you do in a previous email.

So if you are thinking, meh,is it worth it? Yes, it is.
Do we want more chat on my email investment and revamp? Let me know.

So my question to you today would be do you have all your eggs in one basket and is that a good long-term strategy?

Of course the flipside to that is I have spread myself a little bit too thin recently because of this anticipation strategy but now the balance will right itself as those couple of missing classes at the gym filter into my own schedule on my own terms.

Often people say I’m ‘lucky’ because I have a large private client bank, or assume I live in an affluent area (absolutely not) In the last two weeks alone I’ve seen five new clients book private trials but the reality is that is also something I have fine tuned and made a lot of mistakes with to get where I am now.

I cover all those pitfalls, the haunting cocks ups of the early days and all other aspects of building that section out of your business in my digital course CRAFTING CONNECTIONS £20

Crafting Connections – Yoga By Rose

I get so tired of hearing the talk of pivoting during the pandemic like it was a good thing, I think if you were self-employed and receiving little to no financial help unlike our employed colleagues or brick business owners it’s part of a massive trauma response that we keep smiling and telling ourselves how well we have done when most of us are still paying the financial cost of that time and terrified of any future interruptions to our timetable of work. If we learnt one thing from that whole period it’s surely to have another card up your sleeve.

I like to think I’ve done my best by everybody I’ve been teaching in that commercial gym by setting up an extremely cheap and accessible practice to port them over to but of course it won’t suit everybody and that’s okay. I know that in my time with them, all our work together on philosophy, acceptance, impermanence, reactions etc will help them long-term with what is a huge change for some of their lives.

However, it would be inappropriate of me to tell you as a teacher or someone working in wellness that we have to be okay about these massive career hiccups in the same way as I have hopefully prepared my clients. It’s just not possible.

When your hobby, your passion also becomes your income and you are dependable on it, it colours everything. I can always spot a studio or business that is subsidised by a trust fund/parents or another cash injection because they tend to ask for comments, reviews, likes and need more encouragement and confirmation that what they are delivering is important. Whereas the businesses who are passionate about what they do equally but also need that money to pay bills tend to focus on the practicalities of getting bums on seats because they don’t have the luxury of dwelling on how popular they are online.

Wherever you choose to teach whatever style you work with is much less relevant than the impact we have on the people in front of us. And that has to be that balance between doing your best and depleting yourself to create longevity of career.

We spoke about unnecessary energy leaks in last weeks teacher  newsletter

Another tip to help adaptability to changing work situations is invest. And I mean in equipment and independence – those certificates on the wall won’t provide mats, which frankly is the bare minimum to provide in a public class or attract clients because outside of your peers, noone cares.

Remember everything you invest in is *usually tax deductible so absolutely win win.

Finally we tend to talk of community in a proprietary way, like we own it. They owe us nothing and absolutely should do whats best for them but how could you connect with your community rather than just announce to them or give them things to buy? Its great to see walking meet ups, book clubs, run clubs, chair yoga and pram clubs all expanding studios community reach – how could you do that online, how would you do that as an individual teacher? People dont buy your product they buy solutions, experience, change.

So yes this week i lost my job teaching yoga but I gained by anticipating ,prepping and porting  over a community I had invested in with book clubs, walking meets, loaning equipment to take home, personal pain pointers and numerous chats and mini private tips after classes.They have spent years learning philosophy with me in an implicit  way and thats the real reason why both them and i will be ok with the inevitability of change.