Creator Stories:
Online Yoga Classes: Shelly Coffman teaches us how to create engaging, personalized online fitness courses.
Shelly Coffman is a Certified Yoga Therapist, Fitness & Nutrition Expert, and Holistic Health Coach.
Through Heights Platform, she created two different online courses: Humble Seed Yoga members site, where she teaches the basics of Yoga and Ayurveda to students all over the world, and Teach Yoga Nidra, a program where she trains other Yoga teachers and helps them achieve their CEU (continuing education units) requirements.
From Manager to Yoga Teacher
After a 20 year long corporate career, Shelly decided to quit her job to pursue her dream of becoming a yoga teacher.
Today, her courses help students all over the world master their yoga skills, overcome physical injuries and gain better health overall.
Yoga has always been a passion for Shelly, but she considered it no more than a hobby for most of her life.
Shelly lives in St. Charles, a town about 20 miles from St. Louis, Missouri. For over 20 years she climbed the corporate ladder and worked in management positions in employee development.
In August 2019, she decided to leave the corporate world and turn what was mainly a hobby into a full-time business.
This is when she started training to become a certified Yoga teacher and got inspired into Yoga therapy, the personalized therapeutic application of Yoga for each individual.
Let’s see now how Shelly manages to create a living by sharing her passion and knowledge with online courses:
Online fitness classes: how Shelly delivers a personalized experience
The general concern with teaching fitness or a sport online is the lack of an individualized experience for the students.
Let’s see why this can be false and how Shelly manages to deliver a unique and personalized experience for all of her students.
Before getting into details, it is important to understand the structure of her course. Humble Seed Yoga is not just about learning new Yoga positions, it’s also about healing through Ayurveda, learning the philosophy behind it, in order to recover from physical trauma and regain movement.
"The problem that online courses solve for me is that I have a ton of information to teach, and students need to understand the philosophy behind Yoga or Ayurveda."
So in order for the course to be beneficial to the students, they need to go through a learning process that teaches them all about these philosophies.
Once the students have learned the theory and gained the right mindset, they are ready to start the physical work one-on-one with Shelly.
So the way she has structured the course is to have pre-recorded online lessons plus live online training with each of her students.
"To be quite honest with you, if I teach everything in person, I am not able to give my students an individualized value: there is so much information they need to learn, and if I teach all of it in person, it doesn’t give them an impactful session with me"
Pre-recording the theoretical lessons and letting her students access them through the online course, allows them to learn at their own pace, on their own time. This way, once they’ve completed all the lessons on the online course, they’ll be ready to have a live session with Shelly, where she can focus 100% on the student and provide valuable, highly personalized feedback.
"The online courses contain all the basic information students can watch on their own time, and progress at a state that's easy for them. Then we have a one-on-one session, just about them, since at this point they already have some basic understanding of the theory."
