Yoga Teacher’s Guide to Saving Time with ChatGPT
It can often feel like technology is moving at a scarily fast rate. And for many of us in the yoga or wellbeing world, there’s a constant push / pull between us knowing we need to use technology to reach our clients and run businesses, but juxtaposed by a hesitation, nervousness and general apathy towards technology.
It’s important to set the scene, before I start talking about all the ways you can use Artificial Intelligence to recognise the tension behind the scenes in wanting to teach yoga, but knowing you need to run a business.
With that in mind I want to make some suggestions for ways that you can use Artificial Intelligence (in this case I’ll be referring specifically to ChatGPT as that’s the one I use - but others do exist), in a way to help you manage your workload, but that still protects your brand, your voice, and the “youness” that your customers know and love.
What is ChatGPT
Let’s start at the beginning. Simply put if I had 5 seconds to explain it to you, I’d say it’s Google on steroids.
Slightly more detailed I’d say:
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot designed to understand and generate “human-like” responses. It’s based on a large language model trained on diverse text data.
You can use it to assist with tasks like answering questions, drafting content, providing educational support, and engaging in creative brainstorming.
It can “somewhat” adapt its tone to suit different contexts (more on this later) and works across multiple languages. ChatGPT is a versatile tool, however it has limitations, such as occasional inaccuracies, it can sound a bit un-natural and relies on its training data for responses.
How can Yoga / Pilates Teachers Use ChatGPT
I now want to show you some ways you can use it, and give you advice about the “prompts” you write. (The prompts are essentially the instructions).
ChatGPT for Manual Tasks
Write up from an Image
I’ll start with one of the best use cases. Freeing up time by helping with manual tasks.
One the key ways I personally do this is by taking a screenshot on my phone of my yoga timetable, and asking ChatGPT to write up the classes in a particular format.
My Prompt:
I run a yoga studio,I want to do a post about upcoming classes for social media. Take the classes from this image and put them in this format: Day, time, class name. Please use emojis to make it clear. If there is a red circle image, this means the class is full so please add [waiting list].
The Result:
This would have taken me about 5 minutes to write out, it’s a boring admin job that saves me a lot of time.
Tip: Give ChatGPT as much context as possible, who are you, what is this for, do you have specific formatting requests?
Proof Checking
Another use case is to check my written work. In this example I’m going to do a couple of typos and errors so we can explore whether ChatGPT picks them up.
My Prompt:
I do marketing for yoga teachers, this text is for a website page, can you proof check it for me keeping the same tone of voice?
Have you wandered about what Chat GPT is all about. Maybe youd like to be more efficient with your business? In this eBook I’ll explore some the key ways to use ChatGPT to save time so you can spend more energy on you’re clients. Free to download.
(It pained me writing this!!!)
The Result
Helpfully, it shows you what has been changed, so you can always make a decision to change it back if ChatGPT has it wrong!
Tip: I always ask ChatGPT to keep my tone of voice, and again, I’m specific with my prompt. Though of course you could ask more generally what could be done to improve, and you will get a lot of advice!
Policy Writing
Many, many teachers I know could benefit from protecting themselves more when it comes to cancellation, transfer and refund policies. ChatGPT is perfect to help you write these more “formal” bits that you need to make sure is clear and transparent. Let’s look at an example.
My Prompt
I run local yoga classes and I would like to have a clear cancellation policy to put on my booking system, could you help me write it to say I need 12 hours notice to cancel a class, and up to 6 hours is transfer only. I don’t offer refunds except in extenuating circumstances. I’d like it to still sound friendly but professional, and anything else you think I should add to protect myself.
The Result
For a situation like this, ChatGPT is perfect. It’s not something that needs to be fully of personality and the AI is able to be friendly enough that it feels like something I’d say whilst being professional.
ChatGPT for Creative Tasks
Let’s move away from the admin side and think about creative applications.
Class Themes and Ideas
It can be exhausting always thinking of new class themes, you don’t have to take something word for word, but perhaps it could help you brainstorm ideas or be a spark for a new idea. Let’s imagine I’m doing a half day retreat around Valentine’s, I know it will be heart focused in some way but I want to see if there are other ideas so I’m bringing a new element.
My Prompt
I’m running a half day retreat focused on women who want to spend time looking after themselves, they have busy and demanding lives and this is all about self care. It’s around Valentine’s Day and though I will be talking about being heart-centred and compassionate, I’d also like to have some new ideas. Can you help me think of philosophical yoga themes, pranayama and asanas that might be nice to include. The retreat is 3 hours long.
The Result
ChatGPT is GREAT for helping to think of a structure, and providing an overview that ensures everything fits together nicely. You can deep-dive into any of these areas, if you then asked for a guided meditation for example. You’ll still ALWAYS need to add your personality, your colour and touches but I’d see this as a good foundation to work from. I’ll let you be the judge of how “good” this retreat overview. My purpose here isn’t to say ChatGPT is the most amazing thing ever, it’s to help you think of application for your business to save you time.
Blog / Social Media Ideas
This is likely one you will have done already, if you have a blog on your website or the inspiration has dried up on social media, again let’s look at how you can write the prompt.
My Prompt
I am a yoga teacher in Muswell Hill, I teach gentle flow, restorative yoga and breathwork, I have a blog where I share advice for people navigating burn out, my advice is accessible, practical and relatable. Can you help me think of 5 blog titles that would also be good for website SEO?
The Result
So here is probably where I would clarify more with ChatGPT, the ones I liked I might ask for them to expand on it or even sketch out the outline of it for me. I’ve had mixed results with the actual quality of written blogs, even when I’ve asked them to match my tone of voice, it hasn’t sounded like me. So I would always encourage you to write as much as you can but take the help on the structure.
Following on for this, you could then ask for advice about putting together a social post, make sure you ask when you want emojis, if you want hashtags (be clear who you are talking to). Again, I recommend you don’t take the content verbatim, you style it to be you.
ChatGPT for Technical Tasks
SEO Suggestions
If you have a website, or you’ve had to do more technical things like authenticate your email in Mailchimp etc - ChatGPT can be useful for helping on this side of running a business. Let me take an example that’s in the SEO camp. Putting together a page title, heading and meta description. If you don’t know what any of that means, I have loads of blogs on SEO so do take a look.
My Prompt
I am a yoga teacher in Muswell Hill, I am building my website and want to attract local people and help me appear in Google search. Can you help me with the page title for the yoga classes page, give a suggestion of the heading 1 and the meta description so I am doing SEO best practice?
The Result
Hmmmm… it’s not quite how I’d say it but it’s not incorrect. Even if you swap out a few words here, you’ll have a decent page title that will help you appear on search results. And over time you’ll get more confident with putting these together yourself.
Tip: Anything SEO wise make sure you tell ChatGPT where you are and who you are targeting otherwise the results will be too vague to show up locally.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, I would encourage you to experiment with firstly how you could save time, but also experiment with how you write your prompts. Make sure you distill the important information and be as specific as you can. Remember you can have a “conversation” and you can ask for different formats / more information / more ideas. It’s limitless.
I’ll end by sharing what ChatGPT suggests Yoga Teachers could use ChatGPT for (!) . I didn’t want to only post this as I wanted to show you real examples but by all means take some of these ideas and experiment!
Content Creation
Social Media Posts: Crafting Instagram captions, Facebook posts, or tweets with themes like mindfulness, self-care, or class promotions.
Blog Writing: Writing blog posts about yoga philosophy, class themes, or wellness topics for their website.
Class Plans: Generating ideas for yoga class sequences based on themes (e.g., gratitude, grounding, or chakras).
Email Newsletters: Drafting email updates for students with class schedules, workshop announcements, or tips for a yoga lifestyle.
Business Management
Website Copy: Writing or editing website content, such as “About Me” pages, class descriptions, or FAQs.
Marketing Support: Creating promotional materials, such as event flyers or workshop advertisements.
SEO Optimisation: Suggesting keywords and meta descriptions to improve their website's visibility.
Client Communications: Drafting templates for emails, such as welcome messages or reminders for bookings.
Education and Inspiration
Philosophy Summaries: Simplifying yoga sutras or philosophical concepts to share with students.
Quotes and Affirmations: Generating quotes, mantras, or affirmations for classes or social media.
Themed Class Ideas: Offering ideas for creative class themes like seasonal changes, awareness days, or specific student goals.
Administrative Tasks
Scheduling Posts: Generating a calendar or schedule for content posting.
Feedback Requests: Drafting surveys or feedback forms for students.
Policy Writing: Helping to create cancellation policies or studio rules in a professional tone.
Personal Development
Professional Bios: Writing or refining their yoga teacher biography.
Learning: Asking questions about yoga philosophy, anatomy, or teaching techniques.
Time Management: Creating checklists or planning templates for classes, events, or retreats.
I hope this has been helpful for you!
