News flash! Your instructor is human
I’m going to tell you a secret.
It’s an indiscretion that could spoil my reputation as a decades-long yoga and fitness instructor. It might even get me thrown out of the club.
Here’s the secret: Your yoga teacher, your barre teacher, your Pilates idol – and yep, even that buff, bulletproof boxing beefcake you take classes from – they all have something in common if their teaching career spans more than about 5 minutes: They have at least one injury, illness, or instability that they are pretending isn’t there, just to impress you.
There, I’ve said it. The emperor has no leggings!
You might be in the midst of a yoga session, blissing out on your instructor’s dulcet-toned chants of “Ommmm….” What you don’t know is that in his head, the dialogue may be more along the lines of, “Ommmm my god, my stomach hurts right now!” or “Ommmm my sciatica is off the charts today!”
It’s almost as if instructors had all taken the Solemn Oath of the Over-Achiever – to conceal any traces of human frailty at all costs. Through nasty cold viruses, stomach bugs, bulging disks and brutal bunions, we keep showing up and sucking it up. If we can’t find a sub (and often we can’t, because our colleagues are just as battered and broken as we are), we put on a Julia Roberts smile – look in the mirror and declare, “It’s show time, folks!”
Of course, nobody wants to take class from a pathetic wretch who’s alternately barking commands and hacking up a lung, or one who’s limping blandly through a half-assed rendition of some formerly spicy choreography. So we do stay home if we can’t fake our way through our A game. What I’m talking about is the Zumba instructor who would sooner commit to wearing slate grey triple-polyester track suits for life than admit that she tweaked her knee in her own class, or the spinning superhero who won’t dial down the intensity for himself when he’s sick because he’s operating under the perverse notion that all of his students will drift away to a worthier teacher (perhaps a cyborg) if he doesn’t demonstrate 120% effort at every moment.
So, here’s a radical idea for instructors everywhere: If you come down with a virus, twist an ankle, or otherwise become a victim of humanness, own up to it. Trying to maintain the illusion that teachers are invincible only accomplishes two things, neither of which reflects very well on us or our students: It sets up students for injury-shaming (if my teacher never gets sick or hurt, it must be because she, unlike me, knows what she’s doing); and it keeps us trapped in a pretentious Robo-instructor mask of invulnerability, unable to be our beautifully flawed selves, and reluctant to admit that illness and injury are normal parts of life.
Emperors and would-be cyborgs, your secret is out! Don’t despair – embrace your imperfections!
It’s show time!
(But only if you’re really feeling up to it.)
What's Your Reaction?
