Get your ducks in a row, some might say. 🦆 Many of you are aware that I take hot yoga classes. 🧘♂️ I have been doing it for over a decade, and it’s something of a ritual. As I was preparing for yoga yesterday, it struck me how important preparing for my yoga class is to me. Over the past couple of years, my wife has also started coming with me, which we tend to look forward to doing together. 💑
While we were getting ready in the morning, I noticed that we had gotten our routine for preparation down to a science. Honestly, preparing to go to hot yoga is a small burden. There are a lot of small tasks that need to be performed to feel ready to bendy. Here’s a quick breakdown of everything we need to prepare. 📋
- Have a coffee ☕️. (we always go to an 8-am class)
- Go to the bathroom 🚽.
- Get cleaned up 🚿.
- Walk the dog 🐶.
- Feed the dog 🍗.
- Make and take amino acids 💪.
- Pack a water bottle 💧. Roll and pack mats 🧘♀️.
- Pack towels 🛀.
- One for the mat.
- One for the shower.
- Two face towels.
- Pack an extra pair of bottoms. (shorts or pants) 👖
- Pack a sweatband for the head 💦.
- Put the gym bags in the car 🚗.
- Leave the house 30 minutes before class starts ⏰.
It’s not a small list of things to do to go to an 80-minute yoga class, but at this point, we do it without thinking about it. We don’t need to speak; we just do it. We both know if one of those things doesn’t happen, it will make for a much less productive yoga class. It may even ruin the experience for us. If we forget the mats, for instance, while we can rent them from the studio, it’s a hassle, and it costs us money that we don’t want to spend. If we forget to take our amino acids, we will lack the energy to focus on our practice. If we forget extra bottoms, we must drive home in sweaty clothes. I think you get the idea. 💡
None of these are the end of the world, but they do make the experience less enjoyable when they are missed.
Missing them impacts the experience that day and can negatively impact how we think about going to yoga in the future. It may even make us less likely to want to go in the future. 😔
My point is this. Classroom training is the same. If you don’t identify your preparation routine for delivering training and get it down to a science, you’re setting yourself up for avoidable failure. Because you are the leader in the room, it doesn’t just impact you but the entire class. So the same adverse outcomes that would impact only you if you were a participant will bleed over to your class. Then you risk them getting less out of the course than you intended, and even worse, in some cases, making them less interested in coming to your class in the future. 🎓
Put some thought into what you need to do before the start of class and write the tasks down. Make a checklist ✔️. Give yourself enough time to perform all the jobs on the list before the start of your course. It seems simple because it is. Many trainers are not as thoughtful as they could be in this respect, but you can be. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to brainstorm and compile a thoughtful checklist.
- What must I do before class to get into the right headspace? 🧠
- What materials do I need to have ready before class starts? 📚
- What technology needs to be ready and functional for me to have a successful class? 💻
- How long will it take me to work through my checklist? ⏱️
A little thoughtful preparation can go a long way, especially if you are co-facilitating. Before my wife started regularly going to yoga with me, I had my preparation routine. When she began joining, it changed a little bit. It took us a few weeks to find our stride together, but after we communicated our routine, it fell into place pretty quickly. So if you are co-facilitating, share your preparation steps, have them share theirs, combine them, assign ownership for each task, and work through the plan. I hope this helps you prepare for either solo or co-facilitating classes! 🤝
