Functional Gifts for YTT Grads

Every season a pile of new yoga teachers is unleashed into the wild. Whenever I graduated everyone wanted to send me some sort of graduation gift. At the time all I really knew to ask for was yoga clothes because I didn't know what would be truly useful. Now it's been a few years and I know my way around a little better.

Here's My Top 10 Gifts to make a new teacher's life easier:

• Business Cards/Holders - Creative high quality business cards are more memorable.
• Parking Money - A parking meter cashkey would've saved me a lot of trouble when I first started teaching downtown.
• Hot tea - Sipping hot tea while teaching or just after class is great for overworked throats.
• Yoga Anatomy book - never stop studying.
• Yoga classes - to prevent burnout and stay inspired. Self-care is important.

• Square - to accept credit/debit for private sessions
• Blessed to Serve - I declared this book required reading for aspiring teachers.
• Yoga Teacher Bag - a good sized dedicated bag for classes keeps everything in one spot and makes it easy to carry all over town.
• Yoga clothes - Layers for cold classrooms, and nice new clothes for interviews/auditions.
• Binder - for organizing class plans/articles/notes/waivers/contracts...

It's a Moo Point

I recently ordered some new business cards for my yoga teaching endeavors and they arrived yesterday. I am super excited about them. I never thought I'd ever be that psyched to buy business cards - I've bought quite a few before and always been like - meh. Now that I've finally spent some real time and thought on building myself some Moo MiniCards - I'm totally psyched. I don't know about anyone else, but I will be proud to hand these things out.

They're MiniCards, so they're tiny at only half the size of a standard business card. (70mm x 28mm or 2.75" x 1.10"). I think they're fabulous and I love that the entire rainforest didn't have to die for me to hand my name out to people. The little box they came in is made of recycled pulp and is 100% recyclable so I appreciate that too.

I wanted to have a more creative, upbeat, colorful card this time. I was sick of feeling like my business cards were stupid. So I sat down and looked around at other cards and I was seriously considering letterpress, but do you know what letterpress cards cost??? A lot more than $40 for 200 cards. So I decided that Moo.com was the way to go because I could put my happy dappy asana pics on one side, and in a very simple format put my details on the other side. I also listed my job title as "Full Time Yogini - Certified" because it seems like the truth, plus it's more fun than "Certified Yoga Teacher".

I really just wanted to show off my snazzy new cards, but I guess if you want some cards too you could head over to the site. I won't mind. 

Moo.com

I promise I wasn't paid or asked to do this post - I really am just that over-excited about my cards.