Why Teaching is Harder Than Doing

I regularly receive feedback from students who attend my yoga classes that I provide very clear cues. Students appreciate that they don’t need to look around to know what to do.

For me, this is the highest compliment. It’s a skill I practice regularly and constantly aim to improve.

Clear verbal cues are important because the moment a student has to look around the room to see what other people are doing, they come out of alignment. And when the brain is confused about the cue, it hijacks focus and steals presence.

My students’ feedback is especially meaningful to me because my cues weren’t always so great.

I had been practicing yoga on and off for over 20 years before I did my first yoga teacher training.

Going into that first training, I expected difficulty in mastering some of the more physically-challenging poses, but I thought teaching an cueing would come easily. After all, I’d spent years hearing teachers cue yoga classes, and had a lot of practice self-guiding my own practice.

Early in the training, we were paired with a partner to practice guiding someone through a series of poses. I thought it would be easy.

I was quickly humbled.

My partner was brand-new to yoga. She was a body worker who had never even taken a yoga class before. She didn’t know the names even of basic poses. I couldn’t tell her to “step into a downward dog” or “lower halfway to chaturanga.”

I stumbled over my words to guide her, was dismayed when she responded differently to my cues than I had intended.

I realized that what sounded accurate in my head landed differently in the mind and body of someone who didn’t know where I was trying to take them.

It wasn’t enough for me to know how to do the pose; I had to learn how to communicate the technique of getting into the pose to someone who had no frame of reference for it — with as few words as possible.

I couldn’t use the pose name as a short-cut. Even for people who know what the pose is, they might not have the technique to get there

Over the course of our training, and in the years since, cueing yoga poses has become easier for me and my cueing has become more effective, thanks to hours of practice.

In some ways, I might have an advantage in my process because yoga poses never came naturally to me. Because I have to think about what I’m doing, I’m able to break it down in a way that makes it easier to communicate to others.

This principle translates to realms beyond yoga.

An oft-repeated cliché is that “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

This ignores the reality that teaching is often more complicated than doing.

Why Teaching is Harder Than Doing

Doing and teaching are completely different skill sets. Teaching requires communicating in a way that makes sense to the person learning. You must be attuned to how the student is receiving and processing information, and how they’re translating that information into action in their body.

Knowing how to do something doesn’t necessarily make you a good — or effective — teacher. In fact, it’s often the case that the better someone is at doing something the worse they are at teaching it. That’s because the more naturally you do something, the less you have think about how you’re doing it.

In fact, I’ve learned that I don’t even have to be able to do the pose I’m teaching. All I need is an understanding of it and the ability to break it down so that the students who have the capacity to do it can follow my guidance.

The biggest thing the old cliché gets wrong is purporting to compare teaching and doing. Teaching and doing aren’t comparable skills. They fall into different realms entirely.