Countless hours of preparation – attending training classes after work, memorizing cues, practice teaching, studying postures and learning and practicing giving hands-on adjustments during postures – all came to a head for me on Monday night. I auditioned to teach Hot Power Fusion at CorePower Yoga. I feel like so much was built up into this one hour, which was referred to as a “skill-a-bration,” defined as a celebration of our skills, by the two managers who observed us. To me, it was one of the most intense hours of my life.
Back in February of this year, I enrolled myself into the 200-hour yoga teacher training, Hot Power Fusion program. This consisted of three classes a week – 3 hours after work on Wednesday and Thursday nights until 10:30PM and three hours on Sunday for a whole nine weeks. This was of course, in addition to working full-time at my day job. I was BUSY! By the end of the nine weeks, we were told if we wanted to teach at CorePower, we’d have to enroll in the Extensions Program, which meant five weeks of practice teaching. Of course I enrolled and dived right into practice teaching. Why wouldn’t I? I wanted to teach yoga.
By the time I finished the Extensions Program, I was invited to audition and try out for a Hot Power Fusion teaching internship with CorePower Yoga. The day our Extensions Program ended, I was in the car driving down to California for a two-week vacation. During my vacation, I would be volunteering my time to lead a yoga warm-up two days in a row for the annual Girls Ride The Wake event in Lodi. Not only would I not be in town for the audition, I mentally didn’t feel like I was ready to audition. I was scared. I didn’t feel very confident. I kept in touch with CorePower and told them I’d reach back out to them when I was ready to move forward.
Fast forward five months, I was coming up on my graduation of my fourth and final yoga teacher training of the year, a 200-hour Bikram Yoga teacher training at my beloved Sealevel Hot Yoga studio in Seattle. I had been giving teaching at CorePower Yoga some thought. I was still working my full-time day gig, but now more than ever, especially after finishing all of my training for the year, I was ready to teach some yoga. I reached out to CorePower and they invited me to come audition in mid-December.
For a month and a half, I focused on getting reacquainted with my Hot Power Fusion cues. I set aside a couple hours each night after work to re-memorize the dialogue. I sat in on a couple of hands-on adjustment workshops with the current round of Hot Power Fusion teacher trainees. I even showed up for their Bring A Beginner To Class day to show my love and support and to also help get my mind back into the Hot Power Fusion realm. On weekends, I would lock myself in my room for hours going over each posture, line by line, making sure I had every cue memorized.
Then finally before I knew it, Monday night was here and it was my turn to get up in front of the whole room to teach yoga. Since I had graduated earlier in the year, no one from my training class was at the audition. In fact, all seven of the people auditioning with me were already teaching yoga at CorePower. Talk about intimidating! As soon as my name was called, I took a deep breath, smiled, reminded myself that it was only yoga and was suppose to be fun and then hit the ground running with delivering my cues. On point, I might add. I was super proud of myself on how well I did. The hard work paid off. I felt really confident.
I think the thing I’m most proud of wasn’t how well I thought I did in the audition. It was that I faced a really big fear of mine, square in the face. I put in the time, did the work and completed the task. I don’t know how many times I tried talking myself out of memorizing the cues again or doing the actual audition. Whenever I’m scared to do something, I always try talking myself out of doing it. For once, I set those feelings of fear aside and powered through. I’m most proud of myself for following through on such a daunting task and I did it with a room full of yoga teachers. So there’s that.
Now comes the waiting game. I’m waiting to hear back on what my next steps will be with CorePower, which may include details of a teaching internship, a schedule discussion of days and times of the classes I’d be teaching each week or it could be a “Thank you, but no thank you” conversation. Whatever that highly anticipated discussion might be, I know that I gave it my all, did my best and I’m really proud about it.