How To Hire (or not) The People
(narrative follows the list, audio is narrative only)
1. Have a methodology - whether you’re hiring, dating, or considering where to vacation, know what you’re looking for and create a list of YES as well as a list of NO and share it openly and often.
2. Make the process transparent - see above. They mystery is what makes a selection process confounding. The lack of principles is what makes dating weird. Also the people. The people make dating profoundly weird.
3. Consider yourself an essential backup dancer to the process of the other party - sounds woo, I know. But in very practical terms - instead of hiring as though your only job is yay or nay, consider how your interview process supports the other party. Each one benefits by walking away knowing precisely who the other one is looking for.
(more on this below the paywall)
My very first yoga audition came 28 years after I started teaching yoga, and 26 years after my final acting audition.
(I once acted. And did stand up. It’s a whole chapter.)
I’m pretentious enough to let you know that I’ve never had to audition or apply to teach yoga. My second 200 hour YTT was in a corporate chain into which I was not hired, although that was because I had not taken their bonus predatory program ‘required’ of new teachers (because I had already been teaching for 12 years).
Everywhere else has fallen into my lap, even as I tell people that I’m antiquated and stuck in my ways. Opinionated and HUGELY SELF RIGHTEOUS! I have been in circumstances very near the flight attendant broadcasting a question ‘is there a yoga teacher on the plane?’ Not quite, but so close. Emergency yoga, can you imagine? Even after years of stating LOUDLY THAT I DID NOT WANT TO OWN A YOGA STUDIO I ended up owning a yoga studio. I ended up in India in nearly the same way, in a stick up with the Universe saying BOARD THE PLANE OR ELSE….
I have learned to go with the flow - which has taken me so many places in life. Resisting causes heartache and break (which ironically is not totally avoided by going with the flow, I’m sad to report). So when a friend nudged me to apply to teach at the giant conglomerate health club/spa/fitness place opening down the road, I conceded.
“I really want to take your classes there,” they said.
So kind.
Ok, hint hint. I’ll do my best.
My classes are a jumble. Denver is a tough market. People are very fucking serious about their yoga here. They want to go fast and hard. They want you to beat them with the yoga or help them spiritually bypass the horrific global shit show in which we are all complicit. Either way, you - as a practitioner - should be younger, thinner, and sweatier than you are in this moment.
I’ve heard it’s like this in New York and LA as well?
When I relocated to a suburb of Denver, I taught at the branch of the local mom-and-pop chain, which had a location two blocks from my home. Walking two blocks is my absolute favorite way to teach, unless it is possible to walk one block, which I have also done. A manager at another branch asked me if I could pick up some classes there, which I also did, and so would sometimes step in and sub way down on Broadway in the giant mega mega studio space.
One Wednesday I snapped up a sub opportunity (a double!) for a Very Popular Person. It was a LEVEL THREE class, and what excited me most was how desperately I missed (and still do!) teaching my 7:15pm Wednesday night vinyasa in Colorado Springs. That was an anchor in my life for eight years. From the time that literally no one came to my class until the time when I was admonished for cramming 33 students into a studio built for 28, through the time that we had people spilling into the carpeted lobby. Through the terror of teaching while exiled from my home for the Waldo Canyon Fire. Through the divorce and the worse-than-divorce. It was my favorite community of fellows, with Wes [who gave up cheese for Emma!] and Cheryl, and Stacy who always brought a book to yoga, and DeeAnn who always had three beverages and would answer my banana-pants trivia inquiries about zoo animals DURING CLASS. The unnamed folks who have carved themselves into the walls of my heart, coming to that class after choosing adoption for their pregnancies. Who escaped horrors. And addiction. To that one lady who brought her service animal into a heated vinyasa class with me (Welcome, Rufus!), and Morgen who brought a literal van load of blind athletes week after week, and accidentally took my keys home once, and housed my ex-husband when I went completely insane.
Remember that one time I punted to another teacher mid class and sprinted to a birth?
I do.
My hopes for this one-off Wednesday Denver class were so high. I was giddy. Wednesday night is magic in yoga, I’ll have you know. The room filled, and people milled in and chatted and I started the way I always used to.
“Howdy! It’s Wednesday night! Anyone have anything exciting going on that they want to share?”
Record scratch sound.
They. Did. Not.
I was not their hot shot, tight and toned and shaved in all the right ways tattooed with Sanskrit perfectly poised and fake as fuck spiritually bypassing self righteous regular teacher. I was my OWN version of self-righteous and I swear to you three people got up and left.
Six of the folks who remained had a great time. The other forty mourned visibly, and I punished them with jokes and unanswered animal trivia, extra pushups and frog squats and beat them liberally with a theme about making the fucking best out of it.
Fuck. All. Of. Them.
That experience reverberated in my mind last week as I drove north (after styling my hair, I’ll have you know) to audition at the branch of the fancy place that will maybe soon open down the street.
The invitation was simple: you have five minutes to teach your best yoga. Bring a playlist.
What the hell is my best yoga?
My best yoga is a room of 42 individuals who are in the shadow of a mountain of fire - half evacuated and the other half hosting evacuees.
My best yoga is a mama running up the stairs and jackhammering the door 47 minutes into mom and me yoga and the OVATION she received for MAKING IT.
My best yoga is being the person you can text when the absolute worst possible thing happens.
THAT is my best yoga.
It isn’t a flow or a playlist or a theme or a cue. It isn’t my hands on or hands off. It’s not my pronunciation or my enunciation or my demonstration. It’s making eye contact in the moment before you take the stage and saying I believe in you. Or forcing you to acknowledge the existence of the other humans in the room. It’s the willingness to be wrong and have THE ENTIRE ROOM yell LEFT SIDE!
It’s reminding you that you’re essential and that your job in this life is to lift and connect and be lifted. To ask for the help that you need. To be specific about what you want. To say yes, emphatically, when the flight attendant (or their proxy) buzzes and asks for you to step up to do your thing.
And - in the case of yoga auditions - it’s to remind you that you deserve so much more than five minutes. You (YES YOU) deserve a conversation. A give and take. And that life is your real audition, and that gold stars are everywhere (and unfortunately not redeemable for anything). That when you’re the owner, or manager, or hiring director, that you will offer more and do better because you will embrace the humanity of the humans you have the privilege of crossing paths with.
My best yoga is this. It’s making meaning of the unfairness and sitting in solidarity that you feel judged against an invisible measuring stick when your true value is in your substance which cannot be measured by a stick of any kind.
You deserve more than five minutes.
Whether or not your yoga is teaching, you deserve acknowledgement and respect. Grace and solidarity.
Onward,
K
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