You're Worth It

In October I left my NHS job. It was a big decision yet not a difficult one. I’ve battled for years knowing it was not a healthy environment for me but stayed because I had a mortgage to pay. Despite still having that financial commitment to honour, I decided it was definitely time to go. Life is short. In the words of Kirsty Gallagher in Your Cosmic Purpose “…one of the biggest, bravest, boldest and most purposeful and inspiring things you can do is to dare to live a life that is true to you.” My intention was to continue to build my yoga business all the while knowing that it is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to make it your sole income source so I needed to find another job.

Six months later and I have not been shortlisted for interview once. I’ve found this hard especially as the jobs I am applying for I know I could do standing on my head. Almost on a daily basis I have to pick myself up as my confidence has taken a nosedive.

This got me thinking about self-worth, the value we place on ourselves, and where we get this from. Often it is from our work and not getting shortlisted has certainly made me feel like I have nothing of value to offer or that it is an age thing. Washed up.

Increasingly in the modern world we derive our self-worth from other external factors. Social media followers, likes and comments. The higher the number the better! This is equally the case in the yoga world. Yoga teachers are measuring their worth through numbers at class, on retreat, likes on posts, followers, comments, shares. I know I am guilty of that. Living with this pressure can be exhausting!

It’s not only your numbers. Scrolling down your feed you then have the comparison factor as you see other teachers’ content. Sold out workshops, wait lists for classes. They are clearly a better teacher! If my students see this they will think that too! Before social media you weren’t exposed to other teachers in this way and neither were your students. You did you.

A recent post from someone who I think of as a “successful” yoga teacher struck a chord with me. He used the headline that he was “failing as a yoga teacher” as he had 7 participants at his retreat in 2004 and 7 at his retreat in 2025. In people’s eyes (and some were openly vocal with him about it) he had “not grown” as a yoga professional in 20 years purely based on those numbers. Yet he didn’t see it as “failing”. For him what mattered was the impact he had on those 7 people at each retreat as well as his own personal job satisfaction. Focussing on numbers, as he said, disconnects us from the deeper purpose of yoga.

This links to something else I have openly discussed. People like stats. They like numbers. They want evidence. They want improvement. Although there is an increasing evidence base of the benefits of yoga, it is hard to quantify the impact yet it has survived for over 5,000 years.

So next time you come to class I hope you don’t judge my worth as a teacher on the number of people in the room. I hope you judge it solely on your personal experience. Equally I hope you know that I will give as much of myself to that class whether it is full or a little quiet. I also hope that, like me, you might give some thought as to where you derive your sense of self-worth and know that it comes from within.