Yoga Teacher Voice and How to Avoid It

As a yoga teacher, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given is to record one of my classes and listen back to it. While this was a little painful, I believe it’s so necessary for a few different reasons.

I grew up in a family of teachers and I had never realized that to a certain degree, when I address large groups of people, I would nosedive into a thing I like to call “Teacher Voice.” What is teacher voice? For me, it’s a slight step up from baby voice, where I sound like I am addressing people who don’t know how to tie their shoes and like to pull their friends hair. Basically, I was talking to my adult yoga students like they were children.  Not in normal conversations before and after class, but for some reason, the minute I started teaching I adopted this certain yoga teacher voice, thinking it was necessary. I was first recommended to record my yoga class when I was in teacher training and it was quite the wake up call to listen to that recording, and take my own yoga class. 

Not only did I notice the annoying tone that I was taking, I heard that some of my cues didn’t quite make sense, and I was using certain phrases way too much. When discussing this with my partner, he casually mentioned that he had noticed it too, and thought that I knew.  This confirmed my worst fear, that other people heard my “Teacher Voice.” He also told me that I had a lovely regular voice, and that I should teach my classes as if I’m just talking to a friend. 

 After the initial pain to the ego of learning that I still had quite a lot of work to do, I accepted that this was a growing opportunity and realized that figuring this out now would make me a better teacher in the long run. Fast forward almost 1000 hours of teaching later, and I recently had a friend record my class again. Lo and behold, there were new things that I was doing, new patterns that I had fallen into, new phrases that I was repeating far to often. Teaching is a journey and just like I grow and change in my personal practice, I grow and change in how I teach. There are still times when I will catch myself sounding a little too encouraging (good job children!) or a little too scolding and have to re-adjust my voice. 

I do realize that this advice can go both ways, there are some people out there that maybe speak harshly or in a monotone when they get in front of a crowd and therefore how they work on their voice might be different than how I worked on mine. Either way, listening to your class and making sure that it’s a class you’d like to take is my recommendation.