Full Transcript: TUT - Episode #30 - What does teaching mean to you?

Welcome to the Transformer Unicorn Tales. I'm Katie, your ever transforming host. This is a podcast about awesome transformations, food for thought, and occasionally unicorns. I am so excited that you're here listening to this. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Transformer Unicorn Tales podcast. As you might hear in my voice, I'm still not perfectly okay, but I'm doing a lot better, so we're going to do another episode. And today I want to talk about what does teaching mean to you in the broader sense, but of course also teaching yoga to others.

And I want to start by saying, yesterday I hosted a live webinar about how to teach yoga online, but that hasn't happened yet as of this recording. I hope that makes sense. I'm recording this before it actually went, but the episode will come after the event. So I can't really say anything about how it went. But what I was trying to do is to get most of the people to join live because if you join live, I think you get more out of it. And like just in general, like there's so many free webinars, free courses, free stuff on the internet. And come on, we all sign up for them and then we never do them, right? When we start doing them, we're like excited, and then we forget about it. So I wanted people to be there live, to actually do the things so that they would get the most out of it. And I also made the replay available for a small fee to then not have it like as a free thing anymore, but like, you know, I paid for this and I will do it. And that's how I came up with the idea of this episode because I thought maybe I can share a little bit about that. Like, what does it mean to me to teach people these things? And also to get you thinking about why do you teach things? And what does it mean to you to teach others things?

And if you're wondering why I'm, if you're watching the YouTube, I'm looking slightly to the side because that's where my notes are today. And if this is the first episode you ever heard from me, I love making notes on this. So they're always somewhere around.

So when you teach something, it's stuff that you know and others don't know, right? So it's new for them. So you don't teach for yourself, you teach for the other people who you are talking to. And I think that is the goal or the purpose of teaching people is to have a way figured out how you can like transfer the knowledge into other people. So you're not doing it for yourself, but you're doing it for them. And what I want to talk about is how can we come up with ways to teach people things in a way that works for them. Because if you ever like a really bad teacher, they were always just like totally not into it. And they were just like, you know, I'm just going to tell this stuff because I already noticed. I don't care if you pick it up or not. And then there are those other teachers who are like, I'm going to make this fun. I'm going to like, you know, ask for feedback. How did you think it went? And those are the classes we enjoy, right? Because the teacher is trying to make it accessible to us. Like even if it's like the most dull or boring or complicated subject, if they make it accessible to us, we might think. It's interesting. We might actually pick up stuff. And to relate it to yoga, for example, talking about yoga sutras, it's something that most yoga teachers ar like how will I introduce that into my class without, you know, just like having a philosophy conversation or something. Or just having a conversation in general. And so that people don't zone out or whatever. Yeah, so that's what I want to talk about. How? How do we do this? And I wanted to give first two examples and then five ways how I kind of do these things like in general.

So the two examples is my yoga classes. I can combine anatomy with something really fun and that there is some relaxation element. So what I want people to pick up from my classes is that it's good to know anatomy. It's good to know your body. It's good to know how things work in your body. It's fun to explore those things so that it's fun to learn about those things. And it's really good for you to just relax, right? Like most people actually come to the class with the idea, I'm just here to relax. And then so many things can be sprinkled in there, right? You can talk about this little trans while people are chilling out. You can meditate with them. You can do breath work and combine that with anatomy of your upper body. But those are like the most important elements for me. And what I focus on is how can I make sure that people get these elements of the classes without like, you know, thinking, you know, I don't know, like, I don't like anatomy. I don't understand the bones. I don't want to learn these names or these poses or whatever, right? So that's one example.

Then another example is I do technical things for yoga teachers, right? And what most often comes up is people are like, well, I don't know how to do this or I don't have time to figure this out or there are so many options or this doesn't work. And like, I'm just like, I'm going to give up. And what I try to do with how I teach or actually like offer my services is to empower people and support people so that they get this sense that tech is like, I also like, honestly say, you know, tech can be super annoying. Like, anytime someone says, I want to set up an email address, I'm like, that's going to be annoying. Or I want to have like a custom domain that's going to be annoying. I'm not going to lie. That process is just really annoying. It doesn't matter how many times you do it. There's guaranteed something going to go wrong. But then I empower them by saying, you know, I will be there along the process for you. I will support you. We will figure this out. And it's not the end of the world if something doesn't work the first time. So what I try to teach there is that it's okay to ask for help and tech is just annoying. And it's not your fault. You're like an amazing human being. So it's really cool when we like make things actually work when you have like a website ready, you know, like, I try to focus on those moments with people so that they don't give up. So that they don't think like, okay, never mind. And again, I'm not doing it for me. I'm not teaching other people for me because if you think about it at the end of the day, if I teach people how to do the tech stuff, I don't have work because I don't have to do it anymore. But that's the whole point. I already know how to do this. So I'm not teaching it for me. What I want to do with my teaching is to empower people to show people it can be fun to support people and not to like make the most money as well. Like, that's another subject. But just to mention it, right? Like, um, that's not the main goal here. The main goal is to teach people stuff.

So I came up with five things, how I generally teach things. And this might be like helpful for you when you come up with something that you want to teach. And again, this is mostly for yoga teachers teaching yoga classes, but it can be applied to anything else, basically, when you're trying to like, like doing this movement on the camera, but like when you try to convey some message to someone, right? Like, that's kind of teaching them a little bit.

So number one is leading by example. So I show how I do things and I'm honest about my journey. For example, with the tech stuff, like I said, I'm honest about, you know, like setting up a domain, setting up your website. It's like, it's annoying. Things will go wrong, but we are there. And I'm just showing like how I go through that process and I explain the steps nice and clear. So I lead by example, or in a yoga class, to give like an example, a recent example, holding your spine straight, right? There are like so many ways that when you say, hold your spine straight, people can like go all kinds of weird ways with their backs. And then I say, you know, honestly, when someone tells me to stand up straight, they also do this, like, you know, boobs out or butt out or whatever. And that it's okay, that it's okay, that happens. And now we're going to adjust it a little bit to find a more supportive way for the spine to be. So it's like leading by example and accepting that there's a journey to get the destination. So not that like, you know, I know better. This side should stand. What is the side of this? Much more like accessible for others. Relatable also, o others.

Number two, also there are no specific order, by the way. Yeah, I'm thinking if I should have ordered them somehow, but no, I think they're like equal important. So number two is fun. There are like so many things that are just not fun. For example, core work can be really not fun because your core, you're sweating and your back can hurt or whatnot, right? But I try to make those classes fun by making people laugh because one way to engage your core actually is to laugh, right? I think all of us know that moment when you like laugh so much at your tummy hurts, it's your abs. So like to give an example how to incorporate fun into not so fun things is like making people laugh in a core class. Or when we're doing the tech stuff and something breaks, I'm like, well, it just happened and I send a meme or something. And then we continue with serious work, but incorporate a little bit of fun somewhere in there to, yeah, to like make it more enjoyable to learn to pick up stuff.

And then number three is to use different media to convey the message. So, for example, some people like to learn by me really just showing the steps. And then, you know, they just follow along. Other people prefer to watch a video. Other people prefer to have just a step by step like screenshot thing. Same goes for a yoga class, like you can talk about the breath or you can just do poses where the breath automatically has to do some kind of thing, right? Like if you move really fast or you do a lot of strength exercises, your breath will go somewhere, right? Without you having to talk about the breath, but you're kind of like secretly like teaching people, right? So, like different media to do the teaching. Or like yoga sutras, you can do circles where you talk about them, you can do meditations. There are like so many different ways to teach things, right?

Number four is sometimes with some people, I am just being a little bit like if you know me like when I'm going to say it's my time with even funny. I'm like being a little bit cold and honest. Again, because that you met me, I'm not cold. But then, you know, I would say something like I already know this stuff. I'm trying to teach it to you, you're the one who wants to learn this. So, if you're not learning, that's not my problem. Because there are sometimes like people, I wrote this down because when I was at university, I was also a teacher. And you have those students who are like, I don't care about this class, I just want to pass. And I'm like fine, but I'm not, I'm not the one here who has to learn this or I'm not the one who has to enjoy this class, I get paid. That's up to you to enjoy this thing, right? But it can also be applied to yoga when people come for the 100th time with the back pain and you go, yeah, we talked about this. I told you to try these exercises, have you been doing them? No, then it's not my back, it's your back. So sometimes do a little bit of a though love situation and then still like include the love in the background please and fun, right? And also like still acknowledge that it's hard to change things, it's hard to learn things sometimes, so it's okay, but again, you do it for yourself, not for me.

And then number five is kind of a double-sided double-edged sword. Ask people what works for them, but I would say do it retrospectively because if you ask people upfront, like what do you want? Like how would you like to absorb this knowledge? People don't know because they don't know, right? Like they literally don't know what they have to learn, so they might not know what is the best way for them to learn. So yeah, I like to do, when you have the chance to do something multiple times, to just each time afterwards ask, okay, what things did work for you, what things did it work for you? And it's like a, maybe even a multiple-edged sword, it's like an axe, okay? That's a very complicated weapon, because different people will also have different feedback, right? They will be like, I love the bread, working on the person, like I can't beat, I hate it that part. It was so boring and it was so exciting, right? And then I was like, okay, thank you for the feedback, that's completely useless like this. But the point is you learn about the individuals then, right? Or you learn what works for different people. And that's how you can improve your teaching. And I think this feedback is also helpful because sometimes you don't even think about something. Like what I have, it's sometimes in yoga, like at the end of the class, I ask people, how are you feeling? Is there something you want to share? And sometimes people are like, "What we were doing is really a cool move in the middle, but actually, I cannot move my body in that way." And I'm like, "Oh, I thought about, like, seven modifications, but I did not think about your tiny finger that could not move." And I'm like, "Thanks." Right? Like, sometimes you just also learn from that feedback. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, so let me just do a quick recap of the five things and then we will round this up. So there are five things how I try to teach things: leading by example, making it fun, trying to use different ways of teaching, different mediums of teaching. Sometimes having a little tough love to tell people, like, "You know, you need to pick it up not me." And then asking people what works for them, asking them for feedback, but be mindful that feedback is a complicated thing.

And then I had a question for you to wrap this up: How do you teach? Do you have any tips for others? How do you share your knowledge? What really works for you to share your knowledge and also to get people to pick up your knowledge, of course? And if you would like, you can share that on Instagram, you can share that with me in a DM, as a voice message. I love your voice messages, people.

And yeah, that's it for today. And then one little commercial. So the replay for the webinar is now available. You can get it on my website. I will link to it in the description. And that's it. And I really hope that my voice is getting better soon. And yeah, thank you for listening, and I think you're awesome.

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