The Wild West of anonymous reviews
Beware anonymous feedback on your yoga classes online. By Paula Hines
Reading time: 3 minutes
It can be breathtaking what some people will say when they don’t have to say it to your face. Even more so when they can say it anonymously.
Recently, I saw a post on social media where a studio explained why they were no longer going to be working with a certain platform and shared some (unnecessarily cruel, I feel) anonymous reviews they had received, mostly about their teachers. Reading those reviews left me feeling sad, but unfortunately unsurprised.
Now, feedback when it’s constructive and considered is and should be welcomed, as it can be helpful. However, one-word anonymous reviews labelling a teacher’s class as “pathetic” are most certainly not.
One of the ‘best’ I received was a student complaining to a studio manager after a restorative yoga class I taught because they’d expected there to be more moving, more stretching and more talking. This was despite the class description on the studio’s website making it very clear what a restorative yoga practice entails (i.e. not lots of moving, stretching and talking).
I’ve also over the past years of teaching had my fair share of open expressions of disappointment when I’ve shown up to cover a class, once even overhearing one student tell another that if they’d known the regular teacher wasn’t going to be there they wouldn’t have bothered coming or wasting their money.
(In this particular instance, I was a last-minute cover because the regular teacher had a medical emergency and I was dismayed to learn that even with that knowledge certain people present expressed irritation rather than concern.)
I feel there are a few things at play here, just a couple of which are: An inability (from some) to conceive that yoga teachers are human too. That yes, we can break or have a bad day sometimes or are facing our own challenges, yet we still show up and do our best.
Another is the culture we live in where in many areas we expect things to be exactly as we want them and have often become accustomed to taking and consuming without reciprocation.
This is missing the point of yoga. Is this to be expected, as the business of yoga has grown so big? I hope not.
Fellow teachers, I see you. When you teach a group class, you’re juggling a lot. It’s okay to know that it’s impossible to please everyone all of the time.
Paula Hines is a London-based yoga teacher and writer and the author of the book Rest + Calm (Green Tree, Bloomsbury Publishing). Discover more at: ucanyoga.co.uk
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