Get confident giving yoga adjustments

Transcript - Get confident giving yoga adjustments

Hello and welcome to For Yoga Teachers. This podcast has been created to help yoga teachers teach with passion, avoid burn out and earn a fair living.

A few episodes ago, we took a look at whether yoga teachers should demo or not, and we had loads of questions like - yes I’ve wondered about demoing, how much and when, but and this then led to conversations about making sure that your in-person classes are as good as they can possibly be, which then of course lead to conversations around adjusting.

So many of you want to give adjustments however you feel like you need to build up the confidence to start adjusting regularly in your classes. So before we go any further let’s be clear that the only thing that will help you build your confidence offering physical adjustment in your classes is by getting experience offering physical adjustments in your classes. There’s no shortcuts unfortunately. However twice a year at Yoga Hero, we hold half day workshop to go through the stages of offering adjustments to yogis and then loads of time to try out these adjustments under the watchful eye of our trainers to give you the experience that you need to be able to feel confident offering adjustments

The next workshop is 23rd of June held at Yoga Hero in Leeds and you are welcome even if you’ve never offered single physical adjustment before your entire life! You can expect to learn the stages of offering a physical adjustment, how to read people to see how the adjustment is landing, on them and like I say loads of opportunity to practice practice practice to give you the experience that you need. The workshop link is in the show notes and I hope you can join us. Anyway, this episode is going through how to build adjustment confidence whether you can make the workshop or not.

So this is where we’re going:

We’re actually starting with a look at what confidence is, which might seem really obvious, but it’s actually quite interesting when you start to break it down

Then we’ll look at ways to get confident giving Yoga adjustments

We’ll look at the stages of giving physical yoga adjustments, including getting consent.

and finally will look at how to get feedback to check that the assumptions that you’ve made about the adjustment were correct

OK Let’s do this.

What is confidence?

Often when I’m talking to yoga teachers, there’s a conversation that goes something along the lines of ‘I’m not a confident person’ or ‘I’m not one of those confident yoga teachers’ or even ‘I’m not one of those naturally confident yoga teachers’ BUT confidence is something that you work on. It’s not often something that just appears; here I am! It comes and goes, it grows, but not in a linear way, and it my experience, its something that you have to work on. And so feeling confident giving yoga adjustments is something that you can work on, something that you can generate, and create yourself!

Confidence is knowing that you can do something. And reason that I keep saying it comes from experience, is because the ongoing, repeated experience of offering adjustments is something that you can’t argue with. If you’ve ben offering adjustments, then are adjusting and that’s a fact! And that fact is what gives you confidence.

Ways to get confident giving yoga adjustments

So as the risk of being a total broken record, confidence comes from experience. Ok but how do you go about getting that experience?! How about gathering together a couple of yoga teacher friends and practicing on one another? If you’re already on The Base, put a shout out for yoga teachers near you and set up a practice session, where you all  practice approaching a mat, putting hands, administering the adjustment and then getting feedback after.

How about starting with yogis that have been coming to you forever, you hopefully feel pretty comfortable around them, and could just start with simple Balasana, Child’s pose adjustments or gentle adjustments in Savasana?

How about concentrating on yogis that have been really honest with you in the past, so that you know that you’re getting honest feedback?

How about purposely creating a slower, simple flow that frees up your brain to focus on moving around the room and offering adjustments?

I really think the key is to start really slow and simple, get feedback which will hopefully boost your confidence, and then you can make your adjustments more regular or more skilled once you have that base of confidence to work from.

The stages of giving physical yoga adjustments

The first stage, and if you take only one thing away from this episode, let it be this; you must have clear, opt in consent from every person that you touch in your class. Something like a card that the person takes themselves, that says ‘I would like to be adjusted’. There’s more on this in episode 22 and in our adjustments checklist - details for both are in our show notes.

The second is your intention and your approach. The intention check in is a must - think ‘why am I intending to adjust this person’ - is it because the pose is unsafe? Or is it because you feel like there’s extra space? Or is it because it doesn’t look like he pictures in your yoga books? Needless to say, if it’s the latter, that isn’t reason enough to adjust!

The third stage is the adjustment itself. This is a tricky one because if you’re feeling nervy, the yogi will probably pick up on that and tense up, so go back to the building confidence stage and just think how can I make this easier for myself, so that you don’t feel nervy when approaching someone. You also, while you don’t want to stomp up to them, you do want to make some noise so you don’t surprise them!

The fourth stage is a short observational period once the adjustment is complete. If the yogi wobbles, or rubs something as if it’s sore or looks confused or whatever, this is gold, this is telling you more than they might say verbally about how the adjustment was for them.

The fifth and final stage is to get feedback. This is most likely to happen after class rather than straight after the adjustment, because you want the yogi to feel free speaking and you need to get on teaching the class!! This could be as simple as approaching the yogi after the class to say, not sure if you’ll remember, but I adjusted you in dadida pose, and.. how did it feel, or was it clear why I was adjusting you, or did you feel you wanted more or less pressure. Etc. Put his in your big box of learnings, and you’re done!

In the base, we have some journals questions around offering adjustments, so if you feel like you have a bit of a block here and you’re not sure why, go and find those and start free writing. You don’t have to adjust, however,  when done right, and with consent, can take a class from good to amazing for your yogis, and who doesn’t want that?!

So to summarise, think about making your first adjustments as simple and as easy to do as possible. See how they land on people, ask for feedback, put that in your big box of learnings, and then start to think about making them more regular or more complicated. Over time, there’s no need to rush. Go grab your journalling prompts and your checklist, and join us for our adjustments workshop if you can, and be kind to yourself. It’s takes time, but most wonderful things do, don’t they!

Good luck, and as always, happy teaching!