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What’s your yoga niche? How to find your yoga teaching sweet spot

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How you go about finding your yoga teaching sweet spot?

This is about finding what your yoga niche is so that you can teach with more passion. Discovering what you yoga niche is will help you to build a community of people that resonate with you and your teachings. 

The truth is successful yoga teachers always know who they teach and what they teach. They’ve carved out a valuable yoga niche and then they have built their yoga teaching around that niche.

This is becoming more and more important because the yoga industry is booming with new teachers, which is great because they’re all sharing their magic and getting more people into yoga but there are so many teachers who are trying to do the same thing.

It’s really important to have a clear understanding of who you are as a teacher, what you’re really passionate about and what kind of teacher you want to be. The lack of success in teaching yoga is often due to not having a clear understanding of your own identity as a yoga teacher. 

Many yoga teachers make the mistake of trying to cater to everyone, but you can’t cater to everyone. When you try to cater to everyone, you give out an unclear message and end up serving no one.

But if you want to be well known for something, then it’s important to start focusing on a particular niche or a specific type of student with a specific need.

You might be thinking, ‘Well, yoga is for everyone isn’t, it?’.

And it is,  we all want everyone to benefit from yoga. However, when you try to offer a yoga class that meets the needs of every single student it can be really difficult because everyone has different goals for their practice. When you try to please all those people, you ended up delivering your teachings in a way that’s inauthentic.

Your students come to class with different levels of experience and they have different ages, different genders, backgrounds. So it’s important to take an inclusive approach to your teaching and to carve out a specific offering that helps you to meet the needs of a specific type of student.

Finding your yoga niche can sometimes be really tricky. 

To help you find what your yoga niche is trying listing out all your interests and your passions to help you find inspiration for the ideal student you can really cater for.  Feeling stuck when finding your yoga niche is part of the process.

The most important way to discover your niche is to just get out there and get experience teaching and use this experience with your students to help you grasp what your yoga niche is. It’s much better to get up and running when defining your specialism and marketing to your ideal students than to wait around. You can get teaching different types of students and learn from your successes and your failures.

Take what you’ve learned from all your previous attempts and move forward with new ideas on what your yoga niche is.

You might be wondering: What’s my yoga niche?

What’s your yoga niche? When you go through your 200-hour yoga teacher training and you learn about lots of different subjects including asanas, meditation, pranayama and yoga philosophy.

You might find that you don’t resonate with all of those subjects. Some of those subjects you’re really passionate about and want to learn more about while others you don’t seem to find that passion. So you should ask yourself, ‘what do I feel most passionate about teaching?’

That will help you to narrow down on a specific subject that you’re most interested in where you can define yourself as an expert teacher in that particular subject. It also helps your ideal students discover you because they’re the ones that are also interested in the same subject. 

When you combine narrowing down on a subject your passionate about with finding students who are also really passionate about the subject magic happens. This is when you start to build a tribe of people who resonate with you as a teacher.

How To Go About Finding What Your Yoga Niche Is

Start by focusing on the areas that you’ve learned in your training but also have a look at different styles of yoga. You could be a hot yoga teacher or a Kundalini yoga teacher, yin yoga…there are many, many more!

You could look at different combinations of yoga. For example yoga for athletes, mum and baby yoga. You could also look at the specific needs of your students, like yoga for back pain, for depression, yoga for recovery from addictions.

There really is a yoga for everyone these days. The challenge for you as a teacher is working out your unique style and what you can offer to your ideal student that is both authentic and that you can deliver with passion.

Instead of offering a general yoga class, your class is a niche yoga class that targets a specific group of students with a specific interest or goal. 

Benefits of finding your yoga niche

It allows you to connect with your students on a deeper level and be the passionate teacher that you really are. When you teach with passion, your students are more engaged and they will tell their friends about you. They’ll tell their friends about what an awesome yoga teacher you are, and you’ll start to build your community.

When you become more authentic in your teachings and you show yourself to be really passionate as a yoga teacher, that’s when people will be drawn to you. That’s when you can start to build a passionate community around you that wants to come to your classes, that wants to book your workshops and that wants to come to your retreats. 

You will successfully connect with your ideal students instead of trying to connect to everybody.

When you shift your mindset from serving everyone to focusing on your ideal student, you become really clear on who you’re meant to teach. There are thousands of yoga teachers out there all over the world. But there are far fewer who are specialized in something.

When you focus on your niche you’ll start to teach with more passion. This really helps you to connect with your students on a much deeper level. 

When you define your niche finding your ideal students becomes much easier because your message is clearer and your students will start to seek you out. You’ll naturally start to attract the right people. If you are teaching yoga for depression, you are going to be speaking to the people out there who are suffering from depression and anxiety. Those people will know that you are the right teacher for them.

 When your ideal students are searching for solutions to their problems, they’ll find you. So your marketing efforts become more streamlined, more focused and your brand becomes consistent.

Stand out and become fulfilled by teaching to your niche

By focusing on your niche you will stand out. You will have a unique audience that connects with you because of what you have to offer. When you focus on something, you are actually deepening your own knowledge and grow your confidence around that particular subject, making you an expert in that field. This will give you more confidence in delivering your teachings and marketing for your offerings.

And lastly, you’ll be more fulfilled because you’ll be teaching in your authentic style. It’s true to you and you’re teaching from the heart. When you teach from the heart, you attract your true fans. These are people who follow you from studio to studio. They connect with you and what you have to offer. You will begin to teach in your personal style and you’ll see that some people will love it and some people won’t. That’s the fact of life, isn’t it? You can’t love everything. People aren’t always going to connect with you. 

Now you must be thinking

How do I go about finding my yoga niche? What should I do? How do I discover who it is that I’m supposed to be teaching? 

There are three steps for exploring and trying to discover your ideal students. You should give yourself some time for this. It’s not something that you just know, or you’ll find overnight. 

What’s your yoga niche step 1: REFLECTION

You should reflect on how you teach. Remember the classes you’ve taught in the past. What it is that you really enjoy about teaching yoga? Are there any specific previous classes or events that you’ve taught when you felt really alive? Can you pinpoint any previous occasions in the past where you really felt fired up from teaching?

Then reflect on your own personal yoga practice. How is it different to what you teach? Take some time with this, you can maybe journal, you can meditate on it. Think about the specific parts of your yoga teaching and your own personal practice that really get you fired up. What is it that you’re living for when you practice or you are teaching? Are you living for the philosophy? Is yoga therapy your passion? Then you can start to map out your relationship with these topics.

You’ll then start to get a clearer picture of who you are as a yoga teacher. Ultimately, you want to go inwards. You need to tap into your intuition and ask yourself, ‘what kind of yoga teacher am I?’

What’s your yoga niche step 2: BRAINSTORMING

Brainstorm some ideas related to the other passions in your life. Your niche is just as much about your personality as it is about your students’ needs. These two key things must work together for your niche to be a success. So you can ask yourself a few questions.

What hobbies and interests do you have outside of yoga? What do you do in your free time? Who and what inspires you? Is it nature? Certain books, authors, culture, music, teachers…What do people ask you advice on? What has influenced your life and shaped who you are today? What comes naturally to you that you don’t really have to think about? 

Ask some of your students what they most enjoy about your class.  Just take your time. You could just see other things that have come up. Are they a good fit with yoga or could they work with yoga? 

What’s your yoga niche step 3: TESTING AND EVALUATING

The only way to know if you’ve found your niche is to test it out. So before you start telling everyone you need to test it out.

A good way to do it is to host a class with your yoga niche.

You need to get clarity on your idea by taking action. It’s no good just doing all this brainstorming if you’re not going to take action to make this happen. The way you can do that is by hosting a free class and invite people from your niche to attend the class. 

For example, you love running and you’ve been going to a running club every week. You want to combine these two passions and offer some yoga classes for runners.  Ask those runners to come along to your yoga class, host it for free and get feedback from them and see how it feels before you truly commit to your new niche.

Sometimes these ideas look good on paper, but when you actually try them out logistically, they might not make sense. So it’s really important to see how it feels when you need to test this out for real.

Don’t forget to look online! Do a little bit of research and see who else is offering yoga in your niche. Don’t be put off if you find there are teachers offering yoga for runners or yoga for depression or whatever it might be because actually it’s a good sign. Don’t let that put you off if someone else if delivering this style of yoga. 

Remember that your niche might not be what you originally planned. Ultimately it’s going to be much more rewarding because it’s more aligned with your truest self. 

>> Video Training: How to Find Your Yoga Teaching Sweet Spot

 

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