Teachers ask us what their bio should say. For me that’s the wrong question, because it assumes somebody is reading.
They aren’t reading. They’re checking. And what they’re checking is narrower and duller than any bio ever written.
When to use this
- Before approaching a studio, venue or workplace
- When you’ve sent something and heard nothing back
- If your public presence is a personal social account and nothing else
- When someone new is deciding whether to come
What actually happens
A venue manager gets your message. Before replying, she looks you up. Twenty seconds, on a phone, between two other things.
What she finds either resolves a doubt or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, she doesn’t investigate further — she just doesn’t reply, and you will never know that was the reason.
Same for a student. Somebody mentioned you. She has a look before turning up. Same twenty seconds.
The three doubts, in order
In my experience nobody’s asking about your philosophy. They’re clearing three things, and they clear them in this sequence.
Is this legitimate? Are you qualified, insured, accredited, is there a body standing behind you. This is the fastest to answer and the one most teachers skip entirely, because to them it’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying.
Is there real experience here? Not whether you’re good — whether you’ve been doing this long enough for the answer to matter. Years and hours settle this in a way a biography never does.
Would I want to be taught by this person? The only one that’s actually about your teaching, and the last one they reach.
Get one and two answered and the third gets a fair hearing. Leave them implicit and the third never gets read at all.
Most teachers write their entire public presence as though it’s the first.
What belongs where
There’s a distinction worth holding, and it solves a problem most teachers feel but can’t name.
The professional record and the personal presence do not have to be the same surface. One answers is this person real and qualified — flat, checkable, unglamorous. The other is where your voice lives.
Separating them is what lets you be professional in one place without feeling like you’ve turned yourself into a brochure in the other. If you’ve ever winced at making your own account sound official, that’s the tension, and this is the way out of it.
The words other people use about you
One thing worth adding, and almost nobody asks for it.
A sentence from a student who’s been coming for nine years does more than three paragraphs you wrote about yourself. It answers the third doubt from somebody with no reason to flatter you.
Asking feels excruciating. So make it easy on both of you: ask two people you know well, tell them one or two lines is plenty, and give them a question to answer rather than a blank page. What would you say to someone thinking about coming?
Action steps
- Look yourself up on a phone as a stranger. Time how long it takes to answer doubts one and two.
- Fix whichever takes longest. It’s usually qualifications and insurance, not teaching.
- Ask two long-standing students for a couple of lines, with a question to answer.
- Decide what belongs on the professional record and what belongs where your voice lives.
Related resources
- The words people actually search for
- Approaching a studio
You might look and find it’s all perfectly clear already, in which case you’ve spent ten minutes and can stop thinking about it. Worth knowing either way, because at the moment you’re finding out by not hearing back.