Before you pay anyone
Most people choose a training on price and schedule, and then discover in the third month what they might have asked in the first week, when it is too late to do anything about it.
What you get
None of these are trick questions, and none of them are about us. The question itself is the easy part. What takes a little practice is hearing what an answer is telling you. Here are the first two in full, written exactly as they arrive.
A program is often described by the name of one teacher and then taught by several. Ask who will be there every weekend, and ask what happens on the weekend that person is unwell. Guest teachers are a gift and they bring something the lead teacher cannot, so their presence is not the concern. What matters is whether there is someone who knows you by the end of the first month.
Ask how many people actually attended the last few times the training ran, rather than the number the room is able to hold. Small is a word that means something different at every school, so the number itself will tell you more than the word does. If a school would rather not say, that is worth noticing too.
The other five
The remaining five ask how soon you stand at the front of a room, what you will read, whose lineage you are joining, how a school responds when life interrupts a training, and one more that most people never think to ask out loud. Each is written the same way as the two above.
Send it to me
All seven open on the next page, and a copy arrives by email so you have it later. You also join Rachel’s newsletter, which you leave in one click.
We answer all seven on our own pages, and we would rather you asked them of us directly. A training is a great deal of your life to hand to a school, and every one of these questions is worth the small discomfort of asking it out loud. The people who skip them do not find out they chose wrong at the open house. They find out in month three, standing in a room they have already paid for, next to a teacher who does not know their name. There is more in yoga than you have been able to reach.
Who is asking
Rachel has been training teachers for more than eighteen years and has graduated over three hundred of them. She is a C-IAYT certified yoga therapist and a World Yoga Federation Grandmaster, and her lineage runs directly to Krishnamacharya. None of that is why you should trust the list. You should trust it because these are the questions her own students tell her, afterwards, that they wish they had known to ask.
I almost did not apply because I did not feel advanced enough. That was the wrong question. This training meets you exactly where you are and takes you somewhere you did not know you could go.
Jess T. · 200-Hour GraduateWhat happens next
The list arrives straight away. No call, no sequence of hoops, and you can leave the list in one click whenever you want.
Take it to us and to everyone else you are considering. The answers will differ more than the brochures do.
Whoever you pick, you will have picked them for reasons you can name, which is the whole point of the list.
Who you become
You walk into every one of these conversations knowing what you are listening for, and whichever school you choose in the end, you will be able to say exactly why you chose it. That is a different thing from hoping you guessed right, and you can feel the difference the whole way through the training.
Both trainings answer all seven on the page itself.