Your rival is the sofa

There are perhaps a dozen independent yoga teachers in Muscat. Each rents a room somewhere, runs a handful of classes a week, and keeps a careful eye on the others. Who has the better studio, the earlier slot, the student who used to come to me.

It feels natural to think of each other as the enemy. It is mostly wrong.

The students one teacher wins from another are a rounding error. The real opponents are elsewhere. One is the large operators, the gym chains and big fitness clubs with the money to set the terms, the landlords and the booking systems that every small teacher has to deal with alone. The other, far larger, is everyone in the city who has never thought of taking a class at all. The sofa. The late night. The quiet belief that it is not for them.

Neither of those is beaten by guarding a timetable.

Imagine the dozen sitting down together once in a while. Not to fix prices, which would be wrong, but to compare what they have learned. Which landlords are fair. What a reasonable room rent looks like. Which kind of beginner's class actually brings in people who have never done this before. A teacher who is alone negotiates from weakness. Twelve who talk to each other negotiate as people who know what is normal.

And when they speak to the city together, a free morning in a park, a shared introduction for beginners, they start to move the people nobody was reaching. That does not divide the pie. It makes it larger, for every one of them.

The temptation for any small seller is to look sideways and see a rival. Usually that person is in exactly the same position, facing the same giants and the same indifference.

They are worth a phone call.