9 Ways to Sharpen Your Verbal Cues in Yoga Class

Yogaland Podcast

Andrea Ferretti

Health & Fitness, Yoga, Yogaland

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Jason dives deep into one of the most overlooked — and often overwhelming — skills in yoga teaching: verbal communication. Whether you're a new teacher still getting comfortable saying anything aloud, or a seasoned instructor trying to say less with more impact, this conversation is full of practical insights.

You’ll learn how to refine your voice, distill your message, and create space for your students to absorb and respond.

Highlights from the episode include:

Why saying less often helps students learn more
The #1 mistake yoga teachers make with verbal cues (and how to fix it)
What Jason learned from Andrea’s editorial red pen ✏️
How to pair your cues with your sequence (and why this skill takes time to develop)
What “over-teaching” looks like and how to avoid it
Minimizing jargon (and when it's okay to use it)
Managing up-speak and down-speak for clarity and confidence
Using story, metaphor, and analogy to keep teaching engaging
The hardest skill of all: being yourself, even while giving commands

👉 Learn more about Jason’s 200-hour YTT and 300-hour YTT. Module Two of the 300-hour starts in early August!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. I'm Andrea Ferretti and this is Yoga Land.
0:11.6	Hi, Jason. Hi, Andrea. Welcome back. Thanks for having me back to our garage.
0:17.4	Yeah. And welcome back, Ginger. Yeah, those of you that are watching on YouTube, you're getting, as usual, a little ginger rose crandal presentation.
0:27.8	She is just staring at me with such love in her eyes because we always joke that she has this pillow that she has to be on when we're recording.
0:36.3	And we call it her director's share.
0:37.4	It's one of these yellow pillows.
0:39.1	You probably, if you've taken Jason's courses, you've seen it in the background.
0:41.9	We have to take a yellow pillow off.
0:43.5	We have to put it right down on the ground.
0:44.9	It's her little director's chair.
0:46.3	But today, she wasn't really settling into her director's chair.
0:49.4	She was really communicating with her eyeballs, which is how she communicates with us.
0:55.2	That things were not right.
0:56.4	So we just before we went on air, we scooped her out, Jason, put her in his lap,
1:00.8	and now she is so happy.
1:03.2	I know that right before we started recording, I said, let's get to it right away.
1:07.2	But I'm just going to share one more thing now that I'm thinking about animals.
1:10.7	Blossom, who is in my 300-hour teacher training program, has a cat named Kaidang.
1:17.4	A kitten. A kitten. And I was kind of joking yesterday because I wanted to see the cat again.
1:23.8	And I said, can we have a kitten cam? It was part of our live session. I said, can we have a kitten
1:28.5	camp? So she set her phone up and she logged him in and it was great. So Blossom was doing her
1:34.9	practice on her regular camera and then Kynang had his own. Own little Zoom cam. Did you find out what
	...

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