You're Self-Employed. So Why Does It Feel Like You Have No Choice?

If you work for yourself, you're supposed to be in charge of your own time. So why does it feel like your teaching week is something that happens to you, rather than something you've actually chosen?

In this episode, I'm talking about the gap between being self-employed and actually feeling like you have any say in when and how you teach. I share the story of how I restructured my teaching week so I could collect my son from school on Thursdays, and what happened when I told my students their slots were changing. 

I also talk about why so many teachers end up teaching far more days than they want to, why the reschedule habit is quietly using up your evenings, and how attracting a different type of student can give you far more flexibility than you might expect.

This one is a mix of mindset and practical. You don't have to teach six days a week. You don't have to be available on WhatsApp at all hours. You don't have to fill every gap in your diary. But making the shift starts with realising you actually have a choice.

In this episode:

• Why teaching music doesn't have to mean evenings and weekends, every week, forever
• The story behind clearing my Thursday afternoons, and what actually happened when I did it
• Why rescheduling is costing you more than you realise, and how to start pulling back
• How to attract daytime students and why your website is the place to start
• How to build your teaching week deliberately, rather than reactively
• The lesson notes trap: how new teachers accidentally use up their evenings trying to prove their value
• Switching off when your brain wants to keep going

Resources mentioned:

• Free Studio Policy Template
• Focus Sessions (60 min, £67)
• Monthly Billing Transition Toolkit (£12):

Connect with me:

Instagram: @victoriaclarkpiano
Facebook: @victoriaclarkpiano
Website: Victoria Clark Piano

Access the show notes here: Episode 4 Show Notes

Transcript

0:00

I'd like you to think about your teaching week for a minute. How many days a week are you teaching? Five, maybe six? How many lessons do you teach in any one go? Are they blocked or are they spread out during the day? Are you able to eat dinner with your family? Or are you still in lessons at seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night? Do you dread certain days because they are so packed that you just have to summon up the willpower to see that day through? These are really important things to think about because we are self-employed as music teachers, but often we don't feel like we have any control over our time, and more often than not, our teaching week schedule is something that just happens to us rather than something that we intentionally build. But here's the thing: you are self-employed, which means you decide your own hours, or should be able to decide your own hours. So why does it feel like you have no control over your working week? This episode is about the gap between being self-employed and actually feeling like you have control over your time, with some practical tips on how to close that gap so that you can look forward to every week, knowing that it is built intentionally to work for you and not something to endure and be grateful that you got to the end of the week intact. I'm Victoria. I started teaching piano part-time 18 years ago, alongside a career in pharmaceutical market research, and I made pretty much every mistake you can make when it comes to running a teaching business. But today I run a thriving studio from my home on the south coast of England with students I love and a waiting list I'm proud of. I started this podcast because I want that for you too. If you've ever said yes to a reschedule you really didn't want to do, felt your heart sink when your phone buzzed with another last minute cancellation, or found yourself putting off increasing your fees for another year because the timing never feels quite right, this is the podcast for you. I've been there and come out the other side with a teaching business that lights me up every single day, and I'm here to help you do the same. Okay, so let's look a little bit closer at why it feels like we have no choice how our time is organised. Well, for starters, there's quite a strong assumption that in order to teach children we need to be available for after school and evening lessons. And for the most part that is true. We also have the assumption that if we want to teach adults we need to be available in the evenings because they are working during the day. When you're first growing your studio, there is a really strong urge to accept every single student who comes your way, whether or not they're your ideal student, because you want to fill lesson slots, you want to start making income, you want to know that what you've chosen to do as music teaching is a valuable and validated career. There's a fear of being a music teacher with not enough students and feeling like you can't quite make it. So this invisible pressure to say yes to every slot a student requests is there. It's undeniable. And it takes a lot to not just accept everyone who comes your way, even if you know in the pit of your stomach that you are not the right teacher for them and they're not the right student for you. One of the biggest things that makes it feel like we don't have a lot of choice over when we teach comes down to student availability. Now, I don't think any music teacher has gone into this profession thinking they're only going to teach during standard working hours like nine to five and be free every evening because it's not the reality of it. Our students are school-age children who are only available after school and in the evenings. Our students are also adults who probably work during the day and they they have the normal working hours, and so in order to teach them, we either need to make ourselves available for teaching at the weekends or in the evenings. Now, that being said, it doesn't mean that all of our students fit into those categories, but the general assumption is that you need to be available for teaching in the afternoon and the evening in order to acquire enough students to pay your bills. When you're taking on new students as a new teacher and growing your studio, your week can fill up very quickly if you accept every student who comes your way and you just place them wherever they want to have their lessons, wherever works best for them, because you're gonna end up with a studio schedule that is all over the place. Now, if we're accepting the sacrifice of our afternoons and evenings, I'm not gonna say weekends because we don't really have to teach on the weekends unless you really choose to, unless you unless you really, really want to, unless maybe you're a part-time music teacher and you have a full-time job during the week and the weekends are the only times that you can teach. That's something that I did in the very beginning when I was when I started teaching part-time. I did have a full-time job in London. I taught children at the weekend and adult students in the evenings a couple of days after work. So, what I'm really talking about here is when you are going into teaching full-time or without so much of a restriction on your teaching availability, this is where you have the opportunity to design your teaching week in a way that suits the lifestyle that you want to live. So you don't have to give up every single evening, you don't have to give up your weekends, you can structure your time in a way that gets you to take on enough students to make the income you want to make, but without missing out on life, because this is one of the biggest problems is it's not just one lesson here or there, these are long-term students, a lot of them, and we know how long the journey is to master an instrument. So this is not a short-term situation where you'll get your evenings back just by chance. You actually have to make it happen by being intentional about when you teach. So the cost of not questioning where you spend your teaching time is actually missing out on your life, missing out on family life. If you have children, missing out on being able to collect them from school, being able to collect them at odd times from after school clubs, being able to attend parents' evenings, being able to take them to birthday parties after school, or you know, it could be anything. There's a lot of life that you can miss out on if you don't question whether or not you actually want to teach every single day after school. Because you don't have to. And that's an assumption that a lot of us make, but I'm here to tell you you don't have to. You don't have to teach every day of the week. And in fact, and I'm talking like seven days a week, and I would caution you if you already are teaching seven days a week because everybody needs downtime. Even if you feel like you're superhuman, it can't last forever, and it's just a bit of a dangerous pathway to go down. Or we can talk more about that later. So, as always, I am talking from experience and wanting to share my experiences with you in order to help you structure your teaching week in a way that serves you best. So, when I first switched to full-time teaching back in 2019, I've said this before, I had a lot of imposter syndrome, as we all do, and so I was taking on every student who came my way. I did a trial lesson, but the whole time I was hoping and wishing that they would want to sign up for lessons. So that leads you to accepting any times that they're available. The problem with that is once you've had a few, and they say, you know, someone will say, Oh, I'd really love to start lessons. Can I come on Wednesdays at 5 pm? When it's the first one, it's fine, it doesn't matter. That's yep, sure, I'd love to start teaching you. You can start next Wednesday at 5 pm. I'll send over my judgment contract for signing. Then the next few come along, and if everyone suggests their own ideal time slot, you end up with a teaching week that is so disorganised and sporadic. What I ended up with is teaching on most days of the week. At that point I had to be strict with myself and I chose not to teach on Fridays because I didn't have the childcare on Fridays because my husband was working in London and I didn't have support from grandparents. That meant I needed to be available for school pickup and drop-off at unusual times. So, right from the start, I've chosen not to teach on Fridays, and a couple of times along the way I have wavered and thought, mmm, should I take someone on? I could make it worthwhile and take a few on on the Fridays, but I'm glad I've stuck with it because between having a full studio now, having two children, also suffering with chronic migraines, actually, by the time I get to Friday, I'm so grateful for having an off day, for having a day where I don't need to be literally switched on and ready to teach, because you know we've got to be on it, haven't we? When we're when we're teaching, we can't just be half-hearted about it. It's it's sort of all or nothing. And I get to the Friday and I've done my week, and I'm really grateful for this day when I can just concentrate on taking the kids to school, collecting them when they need to be picked up, doing my admin tasks, but not being on. And for any of you who are maybe introverts like me, you'll understand what I mean. You can use up your social battery pretty quickly if you're an introvert. And of course, you know, one-to-one teaching is wonderful and I love it. And I don't find it overwhelming in the way one-to-many, like groups would be, but still, it takes a significant amount of energy and thought to do good lessons, good in-person lessons, and I love them and they energize me. But then once I've done 30 or so in a week, I'm ready for a I'm not speaking today rest kind of day. So my sporadic week, as it was, when I was taking on new students, once I'd switched to full-time, it had so many dead zones. I call them dead zones, just pockets of time that were not enough to do anything significant. Like it wasn't long enough for me to go out and get any chores done or errands done. It wasn't long enough for me to do a workout, not that I did any exercise back then anyway. They were kind of really awkward small slots of time that also felt like a waste of time because I couldn't do anything useful during them. And that was a little bit frustrating because then you know you your whole day is used up and you've only taught, I don't know, four or five lessons, but because they've kind of been spread out just enough throughout the day because you accepted whatever time slot the student preferred, it ends up being quite a frustrating day. It feels like a lot a big waste of time for all of that time in between. So there is something that you can do about it, I promise. There's there's practical tips coming, but I'm just trying to paint the picture for for what it's like. And some of you may be experiencing this, where you've taken on students and you've just popped them in wherever they're available to be the most available and amenable music teacher you can be, to be helpful and to make the process of starting the music lessons as easy as possible, and your new students you've accepted whatever time slot they wanted. Okay, so earlier this year I made the decision to be available to collect my son from his afterschool cricket club on Thursdays, and in order to do that, I had to shift around my lesson schedule so that I no longer taught in the afternoon and evening on Thursdays. At this point, my teaching week looked a bit like this. I taught Monday to Thursday, I taught every evening on those four days, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I also taught during the day. So Wednesday during the day, I kept that day free to uh get appointments done on those days because you know, more and more these days, I don't know if you find this, more and more these days, dentists and doctors and and hairdressers and whoever else don't tend to be working on Fridays. So I keep Wednesday as my appointment day. But I needed to make myself available so that my son could attend this cricket club that he'd been really wanting to attend, and up until this point, the only way my children could attend after school clubs is either if my husband was available to pick them up, which when he was working full-time he couldn't, or I'd enlist grandparent help. But the way our family is structured now, I have family in different countries, lots of different countries, which isn't great for childcare help. But that's the way it is. So rather than accept that, oh, just because I'm a piano teacher, it means that I can never pick my kids up from school or I can never pick them up from after-school clubs because I need to get back in time with them to start my afternoon lessons. To not live by that means I've made an active choice to allow my son to attend a club that he really wants to attend. And that's a really important thing. You don't need to apologize for having a family. You don't need to pretend like you don't have a family if you do have children, or if you have other commitments, personal commitments, family commitments, you don't have to apologize for them if you're a music teacher. You protect your time and you give the time that you have available, but you don't have to give all of your time at the expense of your own family or your own personal choices. So the way I did this in reality was I contacted all of my Thursday afternoon and evening students and explained that I was no longer going to be available to teach on Thursday afternoons and evenings, but that I had made available some new slots on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. So what I did was I opened up an extra slot in the evenings after my last lessons and an extra slot in the afternoons before my first lesson in the afternoon, which was a change that I could actively make that would not disrupt any other part of this well-oiled machine. Because we have to remember that there's a limit to the number of lessons that anyone can teach in one go. We all have our own different limits. My particular limit is four lessons in a row, which are either a half an hour or three half-hour lessons in a 45-minute lesson. After that, it's a bit too much, and I need just 15 minutes to reset and recalibrate. So I wanted to make sure that I still kept those conditions for my teaching schedule, but I opened up these extra slots and conveniently. Now, how many lessons? I was switching five or six students from the Thursday afternoon and evening slots to these other slots during the week. So I made enough slots available that everyone could have one, and I I think I made available more slots than there were students because obviously you can't expect everyone to just neatly fit into the slots that you make available. And as it happens, everyone except one student was able to select a slot that worked. So they all replied to me. So this is a point I want to make. When I put the proposal forward to them, for one thing, I didn't apologize for not being available on Thursdays, I just stated that I would no longer be available on Thursdays because you don't have to be sorry for it, it's just your time requirements have changed. That's fine. So that's the first point. And the second point is I told them the lesson slots that I had made available and I asked them to tell me all the possible slots from those that I made available that they could feasibly manage. Not their favourite slot, they're all the feasible slots, because when you're scheduling, as you know this, when you're scheduling, it's a balancing act between everyone getting their most favourite slot or the most convenient slot for them versus being able to get everyone into a slot that that pretty much works for them. It might not be totally ideal for everyone, but then everyone gets a slot, if that makes sense. So I heard back from everyone, and a couple of people could only request one of the slots because of other requirements through the week. And there was only one student that none of the slots worked for. And this is what we all fear, isn't it? When we make a change to our teaching schedule, we fear that we are going to exclude one of our existing students, and that feels horrible. It's a relationship, student, teacher, and family relationship that we've built up for. However long we've been teaching them, we're established, we've made progress, we've we've got the teaching journey mapped out or roughly loosely mapped out, and then something like this happens, and you don't want to lose them, of course you don't. The thing is, when you get to this point, and if you have a student who cannot be available for any of the slots that you have available, in order to not lose them, the overwhelming temptation is to open up a slot that was not previously a slot to I say in inverted commas, squeeze them in. And this is never a good idea. Never, never, never. Because when you open up a slot that you hadn't really intended to teach during, there's a reason for it. There's a reason that you designed your teaching week the way you did, which I'll talk more about in a minute. You've mapped out the days and the times that you want to teach, and you've limited yourself so that you don't get overstretched so that you're not completely overwhelmed after teaching six lessons in a row and then reflecting on those last couple of lessons later that evening, wondering, did I cover the right things with them? I can't remember. I was so frazzled by that point. You don't want to be in that situation. It's going to lower the quality of your teaching. That's the last thing you want to do. So when you get to this situation and you've opened up a teaching slot, maybe it was allocated as downtime, even if you know you don't fill your calendar with this is my downtime. Or some people do, which I think is very uh remarkable. But downtime is important. We all need to switch off, even if we can't properly switch off. We need non-teaching time to collect our thoughts, to plan the next lesson, to prepare for the next lesson, to do some admin, to consider the next books that we're moving students onto. You know, all the things that are buzzing around our heads all the time as music teachers, all of our time is valuable, whether it's teaching time or not. So the overwhelming urge is to make some make some time available. But the problem with it, aside from the bits I've already mentioned, is that you didn't intend to teach then. And so when you open up that slot, it will forevermore be one of those slightly resentful slots. And I say resentful in the sense that you never planned to teach, for example, maybe you opened up an even later slot. You never planned to teach that late, but you did it so you weren't going to lose a student. So because these lessons they happen every week, it's not just a one-off, it's a commitment. Every Wednesday, let's say, for example, every Wednesday, when you get to eight o'clock and you still have another lesson to go and you would have finished teaching by then, you're completely exhausted, but you know that you opened this slot and it was it was your doing so that you could keep that student. There is going to be some resentment building up because you wanted to stop teaching before eight o'clock. You wanted to make that part of your schedule. And you feel like because you decided you wanted to be able to collect your son from an after-school club on a Thursday that it was your doing, so this is this is the sacrifice you have to make. Well, I'm telling you right now, you don't have to make that sacrifice, okay? Even though it's a really difficult thing to think about. So what happened for me was this one student could not be available for any of the lesson slots I had made available on the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. So I sent a message back just saying that's unfortunate that she can't attend any of those lesson slots. What we can do is we'll put her back on the waiting list, and when a spot comes up that works for you, then she can go, she'll be at the top of the waiting list and she can come back to lessons. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it's you know, it's professional, it's warm, it's kind, it's just sticking with your lesson slots that you agreed to teach. And when I did this, I received a message back the next day or the day after saying they'd made it work and they could attend the the last slot that was available, and it was all fine, and they've been coming ever since. Now, what happened in this situation is something that not many of us get to experience because we're also afraid of losing students, and I didn't want to lose her as a student. I didn't want her to go back on the waiting list, but I had to be very pragmatic with my time. And what happened was whatever arrangements they made, they prioritized piano lessons above something else so that she could continue to come to lessons. And when a student family does that, they are your ideal students. They are prioritizing piano lessons. I'm using piano lessons as the as the example because I'm a piano teacher, but any music lessons, any instrumental or vocal lessons, when they prioritize that above something else, they automatically are. One of your ideal students because they are valuing what you're offering. They value what you do more than something else. Because we all have a limited amount of time in our week. We'd love to all do a hundred different activities. Well, actually, I wouldn't. I'd be exhausted. But there's oftentimes we want to do more than we have time available for. And that's just part of life. You have to prioritize, you have to choose what you want to spend your time doing more than something else. So that's what happened in this instance. It meant I then had my Thursday afternoon and evenings free so that I could collect my son from his club and feel like a present parent, which I think this is an issue for us. If you have children and you're a music teacher, there is a level of sacrifice involved because of needing to teach after school and in the evenings, albeit not every day of the week. So I felt really positive that I made this change, and it's been wonderful because I get to collect him from his club, I get to hear about how his day went. I still get to teach all of my students. I've just packed a few more in on a couple of those days earlier in the week. So the way my schedule looks now is Monday is my busiest day. I have 14 lessons on a Monday, which you might think, wow, that's a lot, and it is a lot, but they are structured in such a way that I'm not starting early enough that it's a rush. I have groups of lessons of no more than four, and they're all half-hour lessons on Monday. So I have no more than two hours of teaching without a break, even a small break like 15 minutes in the evening. But after the morning lessons, I have an hour's break. That's the time to get lunch, and then I have another group of two hours of teaching, and then I have an hour's break before the afternoon and evening lessons, which works really well for me. I just have to go into Mondays knowing that my day is completely full, there's nothing else I can fit in, and that's okay. So then I don't feel like I'm pulled in lots of different directions. But it also means that I've taken control of my time during the week, and I'm telling you this as an example because you can do it too. If you are feeling like your weekly teaching schedule has you running all over the place with lots of annoying spots of dead time, and you feel like you're rushing from one thing to the next, it doesn't feel very nice, and it's going to be that way every week that you teach because everyone gets the same slot every week if you operate in that way. So there is something you can do about it, which I will be talking about in this episode. So reflecting on how I felt when I had just started teaching full-time, so seven, nearly seven years ago now. If I had put myself in this position and said I need to free up my Thursday evenings, Thursday afternoons and evenings, I don't think I would have had the confidence to send that email and stand by my available lesson slots because my fear, the fear of turning away students, was bigger than my confidence in my ability to attract new students. I had all that imposter syndrome, and I would have considered it the kiss of death, as they say, if I had just said, I'm sorry, these are the only slots available, they can go back on the waiting list, or I'll let you know when something's available. I would have just thought that student's gone, I've you know, upset them, or I've I've made them feel unwanted, you know, all of these personal, emotional things that really have nothing to do with it, it's just a scheduling issue. We can't all be available at all times for everybody, and that's just a fact of life. But uh back then I would have found it very difficult. So one of the things that made it much more feasible these days, the biggest thing I suppose is the mindset shift I have had over the last three or four years of being in control of my time and understanding that I'm running a business is not a hobby, I'm not doing favours for anyone. The way it works is to be professional and then things run smoothly and everybody's happy. Uh, the fact that I have an active waiting list, obviously, is a very big support. And when I say an active waiting list, I mean I'm contacting the people on the list every so often. I should probably do it more often, to be honest, but keeping up to date with their availability, whether they still are waiting for a teacher, if they have any questions about getting an instrument, all those sorts of things. So I know I have this big group of potential students waiting for slots to become available. That is a big reassuring point. Obviously, it made it a lot easier for me to make this decision. But even if you don't have a waiting list, having faith that you attracted these students to start with, you will attract more students. And this is another topic going into attracting your ideal students that will definitely be another podcast episode. Because once you have this system going, you don't need to fear that you'll run out of students or that you can't find enough students. They will find you because you are visible, but enough on that for now. So, something I do have to mention here is about rescheduling because it's relevant to having a good teaching schedule. And when I say a good teaching schedule, something that works for you week in, week out, that you don't dread, that you don't have to endure, something that works for you and your energy levels and your lifestyle and your family commitments. Now, the reschedule trap. I have talked about this in previous episodes, and I no doubt will talk about it in many more episodes to come. So, as you know, I don't reschedule lessons. It's one of my policies, and I stick to it. And one of the reasons is because if you cannot guarantee that you can offer the same flexibility to every one of your students in terms of rescheduling when they miss a lesson, then it's not a policy and it's not fair on all of your students. It results in only the ones that ask get to have this special treatment that's more convenient for them, which isn't right and it's not good for you as a teacher dealing with your cohort of students. I understand it though. I've lived it, I've I've come through the other side, but it's something I really want to touch on. You get the guilt cycle, you get a parent whose message to say the child is ill, and you offer to reschedule the lesson even when you haven't been asked. It's one of those automatic things that happens in the beginning before you've trained yourself not to. Oh no, I'm so sorry they're unwell, it's not their fault they're ill, they're gonna miss their lesson, but that's okay, don't worry. We can fit them in another time during this week, and then you go and look at your schedule and you can't see any spaces, so you make something available that was gonna be your time to switch off and catch up with your spouse after a day of teaching, or it was your time to go and relax and have a bath or read or do something to switch off, but you get this guilt cycle because you feel it's the right thing to do. The reason that we don't do this is because you cannot accommodate every single illness that every single student might get that might interfere with their lesson slot. And I say cannot, I say you cannot do this without consequences that fall directly on your shoulders in terms of loss of time and loss of income. So, one of my favourite analogies for this is the gym analogy. So if you had booked a session at the gym, you wouldn't expect a refund or a free free session rescheduled if you missed it because you were ill. And it's the same with the lesson. The fee isn't just for the 30 minutes that they're in the room with you, it covers your expertise, it's your preparation, it's all of the planning you've done, the slot that has been held open for just them. And that's why they don't need the refund. The refund doesn't exist because the money has already been spent. The slot has been kept open for them by their payments. So when you tighten up your teaching schedule and you hopefully start to shift to a no-reschedules policy, the big fear about losing students is there, it's it's inevitable. We all have that fear. But when you look a bit more closely at the situation, it's not quite as drastic as you might think. Because with music lessons, it's a personal thing. Often it's one-to-one lessons. You have built up a relationship with a student and their family. That's not something that most families just walk away from without a second thought just because they couldn't get a reschedule. So they're not having their fees increased, they're not, you know, missing out in any other way. It's literally they've missed the lesson and they they aren't getting a reschedule. That is for the vast majority of students and families, that's not a reason to terminate lessons and go find another teacher. They will stick with you. The very small minority that end up doing that, that end up quitting lessons, they were definitely not your ideal students to start with. They were more than likely the ones pushing the boundaries or other boundaries, anyway, maybe turning up late and expecting you to make up the time for their lateness, or sending a student when they were unwell, despite it being part of your policy not to attend lessons sick, or sending a sibling in place of their child for whom you'd planned the lesson, you know, all of these little niggally kind of boundary-pushing habits. Generally, it's these people who they're not your ideal students, and if they choose to leave, great. It's made space in your schedule for your ideal students. And the result of holding this boundary by not rescheduling lessons actually has a very positive effect on the relationships between you and your student families, and also the your self-perception. So you end up acknowledging yourself, whether consciously or not, that you are a business owner, that you're a professional, that you are running a business, you are providing a service of music education to your students, and you're sticking with your policies to protect your income and your time, but also to protect your students from having a frazzled teacher that doesn't teach as well because they're so burnt out from rescheduling 30 lessons in a week. I exaggerate, but you get my point. So the ones who stay are your ideal students. The other thing that happens when you hold this boundary of not rescheduling is it communicates to families that the lesson slot is fixed. It's not a movable thing, it's not something to negotiate, which is very helpful in all the other instances when requests come in for missed lessons, late lessons, other things impacting on ability to attend lessons, it really narrows things down because it sends the message that is the truth, that this is your lesson slot, that's it, it's not movable, it's not flexible. I did have a parent on several occasions requesting reschedules for their child's lesson, and every time I received one, it did give me that kind of blah feeling in my stomach where you know everyone's aware of the policy, they know that I don't reschedule lessons, but they're still asking. So all I had to do was stick to my guns and respond in the way that I've responded all the time to all the other requests, and explaining that no, I don't reschedule lessons, my studio is full, and if they can't make the lesson, that will be a missed lesson and still charged for. So when I've experienced this before and I send that message, all I get is an accepting response. It's okay, thanks for letting me know, and everything's fine, and we move on. It is a big terrifying thing until you get used to responding in this way and realizing that it's not as terrible as you think it is. Okay, so now we're on to the practical part of the episode. If we are not condemned to only taking after school and evening students, such as school-aged children and working-aged adults, who else can we teach? We need to attract daytime students, and there is actually quite a big population of daytime students available wherever you are, even if you live in a less heavily populated area, they are always there, and we have the option of online lessons, which kind of removes the geographical restrictions anyway. So, which kind of students take daytime lessons? First of all, you've got retired adults, maybe returning to the instrument that they learnt as a child and gave up on, and they've always wanted to come back and play. Uh, you've got adults who maybe work from home and they have flexible working hours. And then you've also got home educated children, and the community of the home education community has grown enormously since COVID. So it's actually quite a big student pool that you can access. And I uh I currently teach two home educated students and have taught a handful of others in in the past. So they are out there, and because they don't conform to sort of school hours a lot of the time, they are your ideal students if you would like to fill your daytime slots. So COVID really did have a huge impact, as we all know, on lots of things, but the working week, I in my experience, I have found the biggest impact. People working from home more has really shifted the landscape. You've got so many more adults who now have the flexibility for like a mid-morning lesson or a lunchtime lesson, and also the other effect of COVID was people realizing that there was something outside of their working life, realizing that they could make more use of their time doing some things that they enjoy, do picking up a hobby, learning something new, learning to play the piano. All of these things emerged as a result of COVID. So your student audiences out there, it's just a case of letting them find you. So this is where we come to thinking about websites. Now, I know that not every music teacher has a website because it's something you have to pay for, and certainly I was I was of the mind that I didn't want to pay for anything that I didn't have to in the beginning when I was trying to attract students. But quite early on I learned that in order to attract students you need to be visible online, even though you're attracting students who live locally enough to you to attend in person. The vast majority of people look for new service providers of any kind by searching online. The biggest one is of course Google, and the way to show up in Google searches for location, you know, piano teachers near me, is to register for a Google Business Profile account, which is absolutely free, and it means that you show up on a Google search on a map when someone searches for, you know, piano teachers near me or flute teachers near me. So that's the first thing. But beyond that, having a website is your own tiny little piece of real estate on the internet. It's a place where you can control exactly what's on those pages, and when people search for whatever instrument you teach, you will then show up in the listings higher up if you have more information on your website to do with that particular thing. So I won't go into all the details of things like SEO search engine optimization and all the rest of that because it's not my forte, but I know enough about it to understand the value of having a website that communicates enough about you and who you are to attract your ideal students. So until you tell people who you are, what you care about, what your teaching approach is, your ethos, what you love about your instrument, what you love about music, what you love about teaching, until you tell people that you are just in a line of potential teachers, and there's nothing to help you stand out from the crowd to be picked as a potential uh teacher. Aside from, I mean, the thing that gives you an advantage is being able to be spotted on a Google map, which is where the Google Business profile gives you a big leg up. Now, the cost of a website varies wildly depending on the route you take. I chose to have a Squarespace website because even though I understand the tiniest amount about coding, I did some work for my sister and she builds websites. I decided to go with Squarespace because I needed something that was just a drag and drop kind of thing, someone who's not good with all the tech stuff, but that it will look pretty and I can write the text in boxes and add imagery. So that's what I went for, and it costs me only 200 and something pounds for the whole year. Now, as a first cost, that probably feels quite a lot. It did feel like quite a lot for me, but once I'd realised the value of having a website, it more than pays for itself very quickly. Because when people see you have a website, you become a more legitimate music teacher in their eyes. That's not to say that anyone who doesn't have a website is not a legitimate teacher, but it increases the trust factor. So you're appealing to people who have no idea who you are, they don't know how wonderful you are yet, they haven't got to know you. But if you have a website that's a big flag that says, I'm trustworthy, I'm a real person, none of this is a scam, I'm not going to disappear, it goes a long way to encouraging that potential student to contact you. The role of your website is not just as a contact page, it's where your ideal student decides whether you're the right teacher for them. So if your website is only talking about beginner children and exam preparation, those are the only inquiries you'll receive. If you've got an adult who is looking at your website and you only talk about those things, they'll think, oh, they probably don't teach adults, so I won't bother contacting them. Something I want to say at this point is something that I did, there's a mistake I made early on, and one that I see lots of other lots of other teachers make, is trying to appeal to everybody. Because when you appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody. It's one of those rules. The more specific you are about the types of students you teach or the type of teacher you are, the more likely you are to make that connection with whoever's browsing on your website, and it pushes them over to the point where they want to contact you, they want to book the trial lesson with you, they want to find out more about you and whether you're the right teacher for them. Because if you're bland, if you don't give enough detail about yourself, it's not going to give them any idea on how to decide whether you're the right fit or not. So in the beginning, I said, you know, I teach adults and children of all ages. You've probably heard that phrase lots of times, you see it on lots of websites. Teach adults and children of all ages, whether you're playing for fun or you want to prepare for exams, or you want to go into festivals, or you want to learn to read music, or you want to improvise, or you want to compose. You know, it was literally I was covering everything thinking, oh, this is good. Anyone who wants to have lessons, they'll know that I can offer all of these things, but it just has the opposite of the intended effect, it just makes you unconnectable, that's not the right word. You it stops you being able to make that connection with your potential students. So here's some practical advice. If you are trying to attract daytime students, such as your retired adults or home educated children, or adults who have the flexibility to work from home and could come from a lunch for a lunchtime lesson, you need to have some things on your website that speak directly to them. So mentioning specifically that you do teach adults and that it's okay if you're an adult who's never touched, for example, the piano before, or if you learnt as a child and you want to come back to it but you're not sure what you can remember. I have quite a few retired adult students who fit into that bucket absolutely. And there's a lot of vulnerability around adults coming back to lessons or coming to lessons for the first time. So addressing that vulnerability and showing some reassurance and kindness around this is goes a long way to them being likely to click the button that contacts you. So when I realized that I needed to be a bit more specific on my website with not only the copy, which is you know the text that you put on the website, the descriptions and so on, not only the copy but the imagery to attract my ideal students. I had to rework things to actually show who I am and who I teach. So I decided to make a bigger point about exams because I feel quite strongly about not taking on students to process through an exam treadmill. I'm sure we've all heard the stories. I've actually taken on a student recently who has been on the exam treadmill, and it's teachers out there who have never known any better, so that's that's what they experience, so that's so that's what they do is literally. Literally go from exam piece to exam piece with brand new students and sort of push them through exams, and they have a terrible time because there's no repertoire development outside of the exam pieces, there's no time to develop technique, and it's it's just it's a terrible situation. I wanted to make it clear on my website that I do not teach like that. So I specified the purpose of exams for the way I teach, in that exams are there to validate a level that has already been achieved, but not at the expense of developing repertoire and technique and musicianship. So, right away, any uh well-meaning parent that wants to put their child through piano lessons and get them right through the grades before a certain time period, they'll know straight away that I'm not the teacher for them, so they won't bother to contact me. If they happen to miss that bit of copy on my website and they do contact me, this is one of the things that I ascertain fairly quickly from their first message. If they say, I really want my child to do their grade two next year, they are seven years old and they've been learning for six months. That's my red flag to say, right, that's where their head is. I'm not the right teacher for them because that's not the way I teach. And it's one of those things where you sometimes you could think, well, maybe I could re-educate the parent, maybe I could help them understand that this is not a good way to progress through music lessons. This will suck all the joy out of the music lessons. But to be honest, it's that's a harder shift to make, and I want to focus my time on attracting my ideal students and helping them on their journey. Sure, if I can explain my approach uh to these parents who have this other approach in mind, I will do, but I don't hold my breath that things are going to change because it's a big mindset shift and often it's it's a bit of a waste of time. However, the point I'm trying to make is when you talk to your ideal student, you talk about the things that they are going to want to do in terms of lessons, uh, reassure them if they're feeling vulnerable, like adult students often are, they will connect with that on your website and they will reach out to contact you. So some of the things that I did when I reworked my website was that first example I gave, we're talking about exams and not a treadmill situation that I run in my sister in my studio. One of the other things was I actually shared a bit about my why, why I teach. And as some of you know, if you followed me for a while, one of the biggest reasons, well, the reason that I switched to full-time teaching in 2019 was shortly after my mum passed away. Fairly suddenly from pancreatic cancer, it all happened within the space of a month, and it really brought into sharp focus just how short life is and made me realize I need to do the thing that makes me happy full-time, not just part-time. So I made that switch and I decided to put that in my story on my website. I did have a few second thoughts about it and thought, well, am I oversharing? I'm a music teacher, I don't need to share my full life story. But do you know what happened? One of my adult students that I still teach today, she saw that on my website and she had recently lost her mum and it connected with her for obvious reasons. And she reached out to me and I met her, and she's wonderful. She's actually become a great friend, and I love teaching her, and she is one of my ideal students. So you never know what sharing something about yourself will do in connecting with a potential future student, an ideal student. Obviously, you don't have to put your life story on there, but opening up a little bit and telling telling people who you are and why you do what you do goes a long way to attracting your ideal students. Okay, so how do you build your week deliberately? The first thing is you need to decide on the days that you don't want to teach, not the days that you do want to teach. Decide what you're protecting. For example, I have protected Fridays and weekends. So I don't teach on Fridays because that was the day my husband was working in London, so I needed to be available for school drop-off and pickup and clubs and all the rest of it, and I didn't want to have to worry about getting back home in time for lessons, so I made that an absolute definite that I would not be teaching on Fridays. When student inquiries start coming in, and you have, you know, if you have a consultation lesson with them or a trial lesson and you ask about their availability, rather than asking when they're available, aside from do you need a daytime lesson, do you need an after school or evening lesson, or do you could you do a daytime lesson with the premise that if they're available for daytime, there'll be a bigger choice of lesson slots, something like that. That's generally the way it works, is that you can look at your timetable and offer the next lesson slot that makes the most sense because a lot of the time students will have a whole bunch of days and times available, but if you leave it to them to suggest the time, you're gonna end up with this scattergraph kind of working schedule with all that dead time in between. So try and fill your lesson slots sequentially and deliberately. Now it's okay if you offer a slot and that's the next available one on that day that you're filling currently, and they say they're not available, that's fine. You can either go for the next available slot or look at another day where you could have two lessons back to back. Anything that makes it group together in the way that you want it to be grouped. Just a note on that beware of grouping too many lessons in a row. Now you may not know your limit until you try it. I worked out through trial and error that about two hours was my limit, as I said earlier. So some people can go longer and they're fine, and certainly it depends on the lesson lengths that you teach. I tend to teach half-hour lessons and some 45-minute lessons. And it's also, I think, because I have lots of intermediates and beginner students, I don't yet have lots of advanced students. The amount of brain power can vary depending on the type of student you're teaching. So that is something to keep in mind. But I would maybe, if you're not sure how long you can teach without a break, I'd limit it to maybe three or four students to begin with. You can always add to it later, but it's harder to take away those students to move them elsewhere once you've given them a slot. That's much, much harder to do. Another consideration that I also discovered through trial and error is the age of the child. If you're placing a child in the afternoon or early evening, the younger the child, it sounds obvious, but the younger the child, the earlier in the afternoon you should be scheduling them. Purely because a six-year-old is going to have such poor concentration later in the afternoon because it's already their dinner time, or they've had dinner before they came out to the lesson and they should be winding down for bedtime, they're not going to be able to concentrate very well in the lesson versus if they were able to come straight after school for like a 4 pm lesson. So that is something to consider the specific age of those children. If you can schedule them in a way that puts the younger ones earlier and the older ones slightly later, they will have a better experience, you will have a better experience, and there'll be better progress all around. And the other important point to not forget is that you don't have to offer a lesson slot just because the gap exists in your timetable. Every last moment doesn't need to be filled with teaching and in fact shouldn't be filled with teaching. It's okay to limit to certain days, certain times if you only want to teach in the mornings, for example, on certain days of the week. Just do that, stick to it. You will continue to attract more ideal students who can suit your timetable. Something that has occurred a number of times is I've had potential students come to me, contact me through my website, and they were adults who had shift work, so couldn't guarantee coming for a lesson on the same day and same time each week. And I had more than a few contact me in this situation and ask if they could have a once a fortnight lesson. And the old me would have gone, yeah, okay, anything you want, I'll do anything. But luckily by this point, I knew what I wanted to do with my week, how I wanted to control it, and the once a fortnight lesson style did not fit with the way I wanted to teach. In theory, you'd think, okay, if you had a student who could come on Tuesday mornings at 10 o'clock every other week, and then you found another student who could come on alternate weeks at the same time, then that would work out fine. But the chances of that actually happening are infinitesimally small. So you're always going to end up with an inconsistent schedule. And if you want the same schedule every week, which is what I value, then taking on a student who can be available every two weeks isn't ideal. It also means you're going to be making half the amount of income for that student because they're having lessons half the time that you would be teaching them. But it doesn't really change that much about the amount of input you give in terms of planning and active teaching, obviously, is halved, but the planning effort is all still there, and then it's compounded by the fact that having a lesson once every two weeks is a huge gap when you're learning something like a musical instrument. As we know, it needs to be regular follow-up for feedback and to maintain motivation. So it's just a model that I've never engaged with. So I have turned away a number of adults in the past. Now, I didn't turn them away unfeelingly because I would love to be able to be the type of teacher to accommodate those types of students because these are people like shift workers like nurses and doing these really valuable jobs and they want to learn an instrument. But for me and the way my schedule had to work, I had to accept that these were not students I could take on. And I know there's other teachers out there who can take on students like that, and that's wonderful. They are not my ideal student, so trying to shoehorn that into my schedule was never going to be a good idea because again, it would always end up with that little bit of resentment that I've agreed to take this student on and it doesn't fit with what I wanted to do, but it was my choice, and I decided it, no well, there we go. It doesn't make for a good working relationship. So there's a point I really want to make, which is if you are a music teacher who feels that you can't be deliberate about your scheduling yet, because you're still building your studio, you're still finding new students, and you feel the need to just accept everyone who comes along. I want to tell you that it is much harder to move students once they've started lessons than to place them in a logical lesson slot from the start. Have faith in your ability to attract more ideal students. They will always come and find you as long as you are making yourself visible online. Being active online, social media has a huge role in all of this. Whether you love social media or hate it, it's a big place where people can find you and it's quite a useful tool for local recommendations. So having your Google Business profile, having a website, doesn't need to be all singing and all dancing, it just needs to be basic. But to tell real things about you and being active on social media, even just having a business page. But again, I'm gonna do another episode about that because we need to talk about all these things, don't we? Alright, so now we're gonna talk about an area of teaching that is a big time sink. So this is really thinking about admin and lesson notes. Now, when COVID happened and one of my students encouraged me to try online teaching for the first time, I was terrified and it all worked out for the best, and it was a great medium. And I still to this day teach two of those students online who don't live anywhere near me, and it works out brilliantly. For those online students, I can't physically write in their planner. They both have planners, my piano planners, but I email them after the lesson, sometimes a couple of days after, because things get away from me. But I send them an email with lesson notes so that they know what to cover during the week. And this is an area that in the beginning, when I was doing all this online teaching during COVID, I would kind of get carried away with the lesson notes. So afterwards I would spend at least 15 minutes per student for a half-hour lesson, at least 15 minutes, if not longer, explaining all these concepts that we covered in the lessons, going and finding further reading links that they could they could read up on more of this, selecting YouTube videos that would demonstrate certain concepts and just going into far too much detail for lesson notes that ended up sucking up loads of time and wasn't actually that beneficial to the student. So even when you have the most dedicated piano family and student and they provide all the support and they read all your notes, they are in the small minority, and actually, for a weekly lesson, you don't need to give them a ton of stuff to read. And in fact, it's actually counterproductive. The notes just need to be specific practice tasks related to what you did in the lesson online or even in person. So when you're thinking about writing lesson notes, this applies to in person as well. So for the vast majority, the problem comes from these extensive lesson notes that you've created that have taken quite a lot of time relative to the length of the lesson, is you just have as more often than not a situation where the planner doesn't get opened, the notebook doesn't get opened, those links are never clicked, nothing is read, and it's not a failure of the teacher or the family, it's just the reality of weekly life. The limited amount of time that a family has should, in my opinion, be on active practice, encouraging the child to and sit down with the child to do their do their practice rather than reading up on all this stuff that we find fascinating as music teachers that we think is going to be really helpful, but actually they don't need that level of detail, not at this stage. And in fact, the in-person learning is much better and more feasible. So I've spoken to a number of music teachers who write their lesson notes after in-person lessons. They'll write them up after the lessons and email them to the student and or the parents later that evening. And this is where you can fall into that trap of sending these really detailed notes as a way of demonstrating your value as a teacher. And it might all be brilliant stuff, but the practicality of it is not so sure because there's not enough time in the week to cover all that material, to do that extra reading, to watch that video. Really, what the student needs is just specific practice tasks so that the parent can support the child with their practice. So it can very easily, in the early days, this extensive detailed lesson note writing and sending can become a significant time drain for you as a teacher for not really much added benefit. You can feel like you're giving lots of value in the parent's eyes, but really it's highly likely there's an element of the parent might feel guilty at not being able to get through all the notes and let their child watch this video or read that bit of text because you've put the effort into putting the notes together. So it could have a negative impact on both sides, which is definitely not what you want as a teacher. What I found over the years is that the better alternatives is to actually make the lesson notes during the lesson itself, not after the lesson. So it's during the lesson. I, as you know, use my own piano planners with the students, but I used to use a notebook. But what I would do is I would with the student, they'd play their piece for me, we'd discuss things, we'd work on the different elements, and then I take out their notebook and I, you know, write the heading, whatever the name of the piece is or the scale or arpeggio they're working on, whatever we're doing, and I will ask them what they think is the best part to practice on, what they need to focus on with this element this week. And sometimes they'll pause and they'll be like, Well, I just I need to practice it, don't I? And you say, Okay, well, what have we talked about this lesson? Because you would have focused on that bar, you know, or section B or separate hands practice or starting to put hands together or dynamic changes or whatever. So if they if they don't realise it, reiterate that point as you write it in the notebook and show them and say, right, this is what you're going to practice. When you practice this piece, you're going to be trying to join bars six to seven because it's specific enough that it will be memorable. It means their notes are written down for them. They've been involved in the conversation, they're more likely to remember it, so it just is a winning combination all around. And what I do aside alongside this is I'll just make in not official shorthand my own kind of abbreviations. In my own teacher piano planner, is I'll make notes on what they're working on with any particular piece. So that they have a log of it, I have a log of it, and then we go week to week and we can all see who was supposed to practice for what, whether the practice was done or not, and uh move on to the next subject without using up valuable evening time that you really need for winding down after a full day of teaching. As I mentioned earlier, my current approach for online students is I have a simple email template divided up into the different elements like scales, arpeggios, pieces, theory, and it's all bullet pointed with sub-bullets to stop me from writing actual prose, and I'll just be very specific about whichever particular scale or arpeggio they need to practice and within each piece which element it's literally what I would have written down in their notebook had they been with me in person. And it works really well because they can see at a glance, oh, I need to do this, this, and this. Occasionally I will send them a link if I want them to watch a performance of a particular piece or listen to a theory video explanation or something like that, but I'll limit it to maybe just one external link to demonstrate a concept. This way I don't get carried away. So, this is what I would recommend to any teacher who is currently doing this lengthy notewriting after every lesson or as a group thing in the evenings, which is even more difficult because depending on the number of lessons you've had in the day, that can be quite a lot of information and detail to keep in your head. I know I certainly would struggle with it. So I would recommend that you try to start scaling back the extent of the lesson notes that you're sending. If you are one of these teachers who just wants to prove your value and your worth to your families, your piano families, is to start scaling it back. So you could communicate it to them and just say, I'm restructuring the way I write lesson notes to make them more specific to practice tasks and more manageable for the student. No doubt the piano parents will be happy with this. I can't imagine any piano parent would say, no, we want all that extreme detail. It's very unlikely. Because you're putting it forward as this is something that's going to be more efficient for the student to use. Of course, it will be more efficient for you to write as a teacher because you're getting straight to the point, you're not describing any concepts or reiterating things that you said in the lesson. So you could just say they will look different, but the quality of the output is the same. And the aim is to sort of streamline the practice sessions so that progress is even more efficient. You know, something like that. You can word it the way you want, but what I recommend is switching it to bullet points so that you don't write big long sentences about things. It limits the amount of stuff you you you can reasonably type, and also limiting it if you are used to sending a bunch of links to different videos or concepts or websites, just to limit it to one. Just think about the one most important link that you want to share with them so that it's not overwhelming for the parent to receive and it's much more manageable and digestible. And the whole point is that it saves you that much more time. So I have brought my time down to maybe five minutes typing up notes for my online students because that's all it needs. And they get the direction they need. I've communicated what we've covered in lessons, and if they choose, they can transfer that into their planners, or if they keep I think one of them keeps an email folder of the emails so they can just access them regularly, and it works. I've mentioned this a couple of times during this episode, and it's the concept of actually switching off, having downtime as a music teacher. Now, I'll acknowledge it right now, I am not one of the best at switching off. I find it very hard to switch off, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Our brains are constantly problem solving, and when you teach music, there's so many potential problems that you can try and solve and do solve. So, you know, the most unexpected times I'll have thoughts popping into my head for I could try this book with this student, or that piece would work really well for that student who needs to work on this concept. It's just part of being a music teacher, so I have accepted it. However, it is an essential part of your week to have downtime to be able to switch off. I used to think, oh, you know, the switching off will be me going and playing my favorite piano pieces. No, no, no, that doesn't work because you're in the room where you teach. If you teach from home, you're in your workspace, you can see your student books all around you and student materials. It is inevitable that you might start playing one of your favourite pieces, but then you'll just grab another book that you are planning on using with a student and you'll start playing those pieces just to make sure you're up together with them. And suddenly you're working again, you're not switching off, it's not downtime. So it's a very easy line to blur, and I have found for me to really switch off some of the things that really help. One is uh getting outside, because unless you're a traveling musician who plays in a walking band, a margin band, the outside is not associated with your teaching life, with your working life. So just going for a 10-minute walk for the sake of going for a walk, not to go and do an errand or pick something up or go somewhere particular, just 10 minutes walking around the block outside in the fresh air is really really good. And if that's all the time you have in your break between lessons, it's a really valuable way to spend your time to refresh your mind, to reset your senses, it's brilliant. Now, the the really good wind-down activity that I love is knitting. I'm a knitter. I learned to knit about the same time that I started to learn to play the piano. I was maybe six or seven, and I had a birthday present one year, which was, and I remember them very vividly, Golt Toys, G-A-L-T. I don't know if I'm saying that right. It was a little pair of red plastic knitting needles and paper instructions for how to do garter stitch and pearl stitch. And I had some yarn and I taught myself to knit and it was brilliant. I love it, I love it to this day, and it's one of those activities that is it's nothing to do with music, it's nothing to do with teaching, and it so it allows me to switch my mind off a little bit, to be mindful. Sorry, I'm not switching off, I'm being I'm being mindful when I'm knitting, because you're thinking about counting stitches or pattern repeats or whatever, and it keeps my hands busy, and it's just a such for me, it's such a satisfying hobby to have. I love the repetitions, I love seeing the project grow, the satisfaction that I have turned this yarn with two sticks into something beautiful like a cardigan will never cease to amaze me. But it's one of those things that I really value. So having a hobby that has nothing to do with your teaching life is very valuable. And if you don't have one yet, I would encourage you to try something new. You won't realise whether you like it or not until you try it. And just a side note, because I got a message from a fellow piano teacher last week, and it was how you can have I mean it's not a new concept, the idea of comparison and looking at things on social media and feeling bad about yourself. But hearing from this particular piano teacher that she'd been feeling quite down about herself and her teaching, because of seeing everything that music teachers are posting on social media, I just want to touch on it because it's a fallacy to believe that everybody else has it together and you don't. It's just one of those things about social media. Very few people post about their failures or their insecurities. More are now, but the vast majority will share wins because they want to share and celebrate the things that they're proud of, and that's fine. But when it comes to reflecting on yourself by comparison and thinking, I'm not doing anything, I'm not doing any of those things, I must be a rubbish teacher, it's very easy to fall into that trap. But it's something I want to raise because I have felt that on many occasions, and I look up to a lot of music teachers and piano teachers and think, oh, it's wonderful, they're so organized, they do this, and they do, I wish I could do that, I wish I was like that. But there'll be a whole bunch of things that I'm doing that they're not doing, but you don't realise because you're not talking to them. So I just want to reassure you that you are doing enough because you are you, and the fact that you're conscientious enough to worry about that means you care about your quality as a teacher, what the the value that you're providing as a music teacher. What you see on social media is not the full picture, just remember that. When it comes to thinking about your progress with your students, know that the journey is always longer than we realise. We went through the journey ourselves, but that was many, many years ago for a lot of us. And it can be hard to remember just how long it takes for students to progress, and they all have different speeds of progression. And something that I worried about a lot in the beginning was that I felt like I needed to have every student's journey mapped out to the most extreme degree, to the finest detail. But it's not possible because you don't know your students inside out, you don't know how they progress, especially when they're new to you. Uh different times in their lives, they'll have different speeds of progress because of whatever else is going on for them in their personal lives, and also their own brain development and any other uh stresses or or pressures that they might be having. You can't plan for every eventuality and you shouldn't because that would be a massive waste of time. It's okay to have an overall view of the direction you're going with a specific student. As long as you keep them on that track, that's fine. And actually, what's more valuable is recognizing that you're probably a very responsive teacher. You're not just plowing ahead through your materials regardless of how the student is responding to them. Every lesson, you're watching their response, you're seeing how they've taken the information in, whether something has clicked or hasn't clicked, whether you need to go over some concept or some piece of technique, or whether they've got that and they've moved up moved on to something else. You are a responsive teacher by nature. So I just wanted to add that in there because it's an area where I felt very lost in the beginning, thinking I'm not lesson planning everything. I mean, I'm planning what we're doing, but I don't know the full picture and I don't know that I'm doing the right things at the right times. It can be quite a vulnerable time for us as early music teachers. So just remember you are a good teacher. You don't have to compare yourself to everybody else online, and you shouldn't compare yourself to everybody online. So, to finish this episode, I would like to end with something actionable. Just one thing. I would like you to write down the days and times that you actually want to teach. Not the days you currently teach, not what you think is feasible, just the days that you want to teach and the times you want to teach. And then try and identify and write down one thing in your current week that is using up some of your time and energy that you could start to pull back on. Only one thing. You don't have to write a whole list. If a list comes to you, that's great, that's fine. But just as a starting point, see if you can identify an area where you could pull back some of that time and energy for you to make your working week that much more manageable. Now we've touched upon a lot of things in this episode. If you haven't already made use of my free studio policy template, it is available at victoriaclarkpiano.com forward slash freebie. This will help you instill those boundaries such as not offering reschedules, and this will do wonders for your for your weekly schedule. If you feel like you need more support, I do offer online focus sessions, so a one-hour video call where we can talk through your specific situation and I can help you on to the next stage of whatever you're trying to change, whether it's fixing your your weekly teaching schedule or your policies or anything about your teaching life. I am here to help you with that, so you can book that via the website, and I will put the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today. That is the end of the episode. I really hope this has given you some inspiration and motivation to take control of your time and your weekly schedule and to have a place to start to begin turning it into the kind of teaching schedule that works for you, not just this fragmented teaching schedule that happens to have landed in your lap. You can do something about it. You can structure your week to suit you and to suit your life and your family commitments. You just need a place to start. So thanks so much for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you again in the next episode.