Published October 1, 2026 11:23AM
Yoga teacher Adam Husler has taught yoga classes, workshops, and teacher trainings around the world and is the co-host of theHonestly Unbalanced podcast. His approach emphasizes creating physical and mental strength in students, and he encourages other teachers to do the same.
It can be easy to get caught up in the visible markers of what supposedly makes someone a good yoga teacher. Namely, what we can do physically, whether we look “yogic,” how many hours of training we have completed, how many people follow us online, or whether our Saturday morning class has a wait list.
When I refer to becoming a better yoga teacher, I’m not talking about drawing crowds to your classes. Class numbers are the result of a collection of controllable as well as completely uncontrollable variables, including studio marketing, time of day, price, location, style, and whatever particular form of movement happens to be fashionable that month.
Many of the more meaningful signs that our teaching is actually improving can be difficult to quantify. And that means teaching quality and popularity are not quite the same thing, even if the latter makes you more money.
So let me humbly attempt to explain what I mean by “becoming a better teacher.”
5 Subtle Signs You’re Becoming a “Better” Yoga Teacher
Following are a few ways, ones I’ve come to value, that teachers can continue to evolve their teaching.
1. You Feel Less Pressure to Prove Yourself
One way teachers can improve is gradually becoming less interested in impressing their students. This usually looks like being less compelled to demonstrate just how much information we have accumulated by filling every available moment of silence with another complex anatomical cue, a reading from an obscure poet, or superfluous Sanskrit words.
It takes a surprising amount of humility, self-control, and experience to be able to ask whether what is coming out of your mouth is genuinely useful at that moment or an attempt at proving that you know something.
Great teachers remove themselves from their seemingly lofty position of teacher and the impression that they have somehow “completed” yoga and that everyone in class is lucky to share their findings. Instead, they think of themselves as another student of yoga, someone who happens to have traveled a little farther down a particular stretch of road and can help others navigate some of it.
2. You Become Way More Comfortable Saying “I Don’t Know”
This might be a little disconcerting for students who prefer their yoga teachers to be all-knowing and semi-divine. But the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes people with moderate experience thinking they know far more than they actually do, exists in the yoga space, too.
I have found that it is usually a very good sign when a teacher can say, “I don’t know” in response to a student’s question. The more knowledge and experience we accumulate, the more we can see the limits of our understanding. The same applies to the things we once thought we understood becoming more complicated and nuanced.
A good teacher can instruct competently from the knowledge they actually possess yet not hold onto what they believe so tightly that changing their mind at some point feels like a personal defeat. Personally, I hope that I change my mind about something when better evidence arrives, another teacher explains something more convincingly, or experience reveals I was just plain wrong.
3. Your Students Become Less, Not More, Dependent on You
A yoga teacher could provide students with various other roles, including facilitator, entertainer, space holder, and motivational speaker. But my own bias is toward thinking of teaching primarily as education. Rather than helping students become better at following instructions, the role of a teacher is to help them develop a better understanding of what is happening across their physical, mental, and perhaps spiritual landscape as they move through their yoga practice.
That means an experienced teacher might empower students to ask and understand more about the asana, or pose, than its visible shape. Namely, what is its intention? What are we trying to lengthen, stabilize, or strengthen? What range of movement are we exploring? What kind of breath might support the experience? What lessons might this offer—patience, perseverance, non-attachment—that can play out in everyday life?
Because if we teach an asana purely as a shape, students learn how to make that shape. If we teach intention and understanding, they begin to develop principles that can be applied across their entire practice. Then they can start making intelligent modifications based on their own body, experience, and needs rather than waiting for a teacher to issue a cue.
4. You Care Less About Creating a Persona
Have you ever met a yoga teacher in two different circumstances and felt as though you had encountered two entirely different human beings? There can be quite a substantial disconnect between the person presented in a teaching context and the human being who appears once that context disappears and the person in a restaurant, supermarket, airport, or elsewhere in everyday life.
We each behave differently in different environments, especially professional ones. But there is a difference between that and adjusting how we communicate to manufacture an entirely separate identity.
The teachers I admire most are imperfectly human, messy, and flawed. Yet they have a reasonable degree of consistency between who they appear to be when they teach and how they actually behave in the rest of their lives. Those teachers might not have the biggest class sizes, as they’re not trying to perform or please everyone. But the people who resonate with them do so deeply. And most importantly, the teachers don’t forget who they are in the process of teaching yoga.
5. You Judge Your Teaching By More Than How Many Students Show Up
Finally, experienced teachers learn to come to class prepared and also notice the actual human being standing in front of them.
Planning can look like knowing a sequence, cues, transitions, variations, teaching points, philosophical ideas, and the intention behind each moment of class. Yet when we teach, we do so to people who have taken at least an hour of their lives to be in that room. They might have arranged childcare, left work on time, commuted across town, and paid decent money to attend class. Preparation isn’t the opposite of adapting to the needs of the students in the room.
In many cases, preparation is the very thing that makes intelligent adaptation possible when, for example, everyone looks exhausted when you had intended to share a challenging class or something you imagined would take one minute of explanation actually requires 10 minutes. What matters is that we stop teaching the class we imagined and become better at teaching the actual human beings in front of them. In these situations, teachers begin to see their students’ confidence, curiosity, hesitation, apparent understanding, and fatigue.
I’m not suggesting yoga teachers should begin psychoanalyzing their students halfway through Warrior 2. But they should be walking the room and paying attention so they can subtly alter their words, cues, adjustments, and physical presence to boost the students’ experience. I would genuinely rather see a teacher arrive with a pile of notebooks and refer to them occasionally than open with, “So, what do you fancy doing today?”
Although the most meaningful development in a teacher happens in ways that are challenging to measure, I suspect students notice it nonetheless. They might not know exactly what they are noticing. But over time, students can feel the difference between somebody who is evolving in their skill of teaching yoga and someone who is not. Namely, being able to communicate what they know in a way that helps the people in front of them feel safe, seen, and increasingly educated. And they manage to do all that while remaining curious enough to accept the limits to their own knowledge.
