What does offering mean?
It’s what you’re putting out there into the world. The classes and the style of yoga you teach, the workshops you create. The retreat experiences you craft, and the online courses you launch to your ideal yoga students.
Teachers are struggling with tapping into their true purpose and what they’re meant to put out there. They also struggle with finding a process to create something that’s going to be well received by the community. The result being your classes, workshops and retreats won’t fill up.
Here are some things to keep in mind before you start creating your offering:
Know The Foundational Elements In Your Business
The foundational elements your business should be built on:
- who your ideal students are,
- what your niche is,
- what your message is and,
- why people should practice with you.
If you’re not super clear about those, hustle is going to be the name of the game! If you don’t have the answers, you will continue to struggle.
We need to stop focusing on the word hustle and instead focus on the word alignment. It’s not just alignment on the mat, it’s alignment in our business. When you are in alignment you know what you have to offer and who your ideal students are, what your niche is, what your message is.
When you know this and you’re in alignment with your purpose, everything flows as it should.
No yoga teacher should be hustling. When you are clear on who you’re serving and what you have to offer, alignment is the name of the game and not hustle.
Find Your Niche And Your Ideal Yoga Students
What is yoga niche? We throw this word around all the time but do you understand what it actually is?
Speak to your students and find out more about them. That’s the first step to crafting your offering! Your offering is all the experiences you create, how you put those together, the elements involved and what transformation you’re offering to your students.
Defining your offering is so much easier when you’ve already spent the time to understand your ideal student and what your niche is. It’s really important that you have a clear understanding of who you are as a teacher, what you’re passionate about and what kind of teacher you want to be.
It’s super hard to create something if you don’t have a clear identity of not just your ideal students, but also your identity as a yoga teacher.
Find Your Identity
Do you feel clear on your own identity as a yoga teacher and what you’re putting out there? Do you feel like you need to do a little bit of work on this stuff first?
Take a step back, revisit who you are as a yoga teacher before you moving forward in creating offerings. This means your offerings will resonate more with your audience. so that you can fill your classes, workshops, and retreats.
Most teachers tend to play it safe. The mistake here is thinking that we can cater to everyone.
Yes, yoga is for everyone. But your job as a yoga teacher is to tap into a specific type of student with specific needs. When you try to cater to everyone, the result is that the message is unclear and you actually end up serving no one because there’s a lot of noise going on around us.
Think about your social media feeds: there’s a lot of messages that we’re being bombarded with. If you are specific about who you’re trying to target with a really clear specific message for that person, you have more chances of cutting through that noise.
When you try to create and offer something that’s going to cater to everyone, you end up serving no one. So if you want to be well known for something, you need to narrow in and focus on that specific type of student with a specific need. Those are your ideal yoga students.
What will happen is that you create and craft an offering around that specific type of student with a specific need.
You might be asking now how do I get clear on my offering?
Here are 3 steps that you can take to uncover your offering and what you’re putting out there.
1. Reflect
Reflect on how you’re currently teaching and the classes that you teach or that you’ve taught in the past.
What did you most enjoy about those classes? Are there any specific classes or people you’ve worked with that made you really feel alive? There may have been many classes that left you buzzing! The energy was flowing and you felt aligned. You felt aligned with what and who you were teaching.
Start to think about those instances and see if you can discover any characteristics of what you did and the people who attended.
If you’re completely new to teaching you can reflect on your personal yoga practice. Reflect on what you would like to offer or what you like to do yourself. Meditate. Think about a specific part of your teaching or your personal practice that really gets you fired up. Maybe your passion is philosophy, anatomy or yoga therapy.
You can start to map out your relationship with these topics which helps you to build a picture of your identity as a yoga teacher. First of all, and ultimately you’re going inwards.
Tap into your intuition and ask yourself what kind of yoga teacher am I?
2. Brainstorm
Have you done this before? Chances are you probably haven’t. Brainstorm some ideas related to anything. It can be related to your yoga practice, to how you teach, but also your other passions in life.
You might be thinking
What my other passions in life got to do with my yoga offering?
The goal here really is to love from the bottom of your heart what you’re putting out there in the world so you do it with passion.
For the first part of the brainstorm, I want you to think about:
- your hobbies, interests and passions,
- the things that you do in your free time,
- what inspires you,
- who inspires you,
- what’s influenced your life.
What has shaped who you are?
This will help you to do the second part of the brainstorm, which is to write down all the ideas for what you can offer in your yoga business. The first part of the brainstorm is going to inspire the second part of the brainstorm.
As you are writing down all your ideas you’ll start to see which offerings are aligned with the things that you’re passionate about. These are the offerings you need to focus on creating.
3. Validate Your Ideas With Your Ideal Yoga Students
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to look at your idea and say,
Whoa, that’s it! That’s the thing that I’m going to offer. It matches my passions.
You spent all your time, energy and perhaps money on putting your idea out there and then no one wants it because you didn’t spend time to validate it.
By this point on your brainstorm sheet, you’re going to have lots of ideas and maybe two or three ideas that really stand out to you. What you need to do is to validate those stand out ideas with your students before you start spending time, energy and money on putting that offering together.
Have you spent time validating what you put out there?
Even if you’ve got pretty good ideas, you should validate them because this will help you to refine your offering. You’ll then be more confident with what you’re putting out. The best part is getting good feedback from your students and not feel so alone in the creation process!
Sometimes ideas on paper can look really great, but then when you actually put them out there or create them logistically they might not make sense or they just don’t deliver.
You can validate your ideas in a number of ways!
You can create a survey using SurveyMonkey, a free online tool you can use all the time, particularly in the concept stage for a new idea. Use lots of different questions to dig deep and find out if your ideas are valid. Explore the challenges that your students are facing right now and figure out how your idea can solve their challenges.
People buy things for a transformation!
If you can provide some kind of transformation to solve a particular problem that your students are having, the magic starts to happen. That’s when you’re going to fill up your workshops and retreats.
The goal of your survey is to establish if your idea is going to help your ideal yoga students in some way. Is it going to meet their needs and, is it what they really need right now? How’s is it going to help them to overcome that challenge?
Another way to dig deeper when validating your offering is to set up some phone calls with some of your ideal yoga students.
As you go through this process, you’ll start to craft your offering. This offering that you’ll craft is going to be unique and for your ideal students.
>> Video Training: HOW TO CREATE AND CRAFT AN OFFERING THAT YOUR IDEAL YOGA STUDENTS WILL LOVE
https://www.facebook.com/digitalyogaacademy/videos/467754447296483/