General remarks

Talk in your normal voice

Starting guides are often hard to hear or downright unintelligible. This mistake is very common and is the result of trying to talk in a slow and soothing voice. Don't! Just use your normal voice and try to articulate clearly.

Sit still

When you guide, sit still. Some people keep their eyes open during their meditation, and your restlessness will become their restlessness. Often people don’t notice themselves moving when they are guiding. A good backup will remark on this.

Arrive ten minutes early

This allows you to make a nice circle and in a calm way. You can do some small talk. Grab yourself a cup of tea. Allowing everyone some time to settle before the meditation session starts. If you can't be that early, see if someone else be that early for you, so they can facilitate this.

Finish on time

Always make sure you finish the meditation a couple of minutes before it’s time. You don’t want people having to rush out the moment after meditation. They have booked half an hour of their time, make sure you put the whole experience into that space.

Accessible to everyone

The perfect guided meditation should be accessible for an absolute beginner, but also comfortable for more advanced meditators. To do this, you have to make sure that you don’t use any meditation lingo (labeling, stabilizing, mindfulness). Expect people to know nothing.

Instead of saying "return kindly to the breath", try variants like "you don't have to be frustrated, just smile a little, it is all part of the practice and then gently return to the breath". Where "kindness" is replaced by something more explicit. Some people don't know how to return kindly—I didn't and sometimes still have trouble :)

When you know that everybody has their own meditation practice, then you can reduce to amount of guiding. If some people attend many guided meditation sessions, don't assume they have their own practice. They might not be able to handle very little guidance.

Share your own practice

A good guided meditation is nothing more than taking a group of people through your own practice—in essence, you're meditating out loud. Sadly enough, most people don’t say to themselves: “let's set the intention” or “let's stabilize the attention on the breath”, this is a big miss. Your own practice will get better if you literally talk through a good meditation routine, inwardly verbalizing the steps as you go, but it will also make it much easier to share. So, if you aren’t doing this yet, it is time that you do!