Behind the Scenes of Positively Beaming HQ with Jenny Cole

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Hello and welcome back to Positively Leading the Podcast. I'm your host, enny Cole, and I'm really thrilled to be with you again this week. We have another solo episode for you today. When I started Positively Leading the Podcast, I really did think that I would do almost entirely interviews, and it is still my intention to do lots and lots of interviews. I batch these recordings, which means I try, where humanly possible, to record as many as I can in a week and then I send them off to my fabulous editor, vicky, who does the editing. She makes sure that the sound is okay, she makes sure that there aren't too many ums or ahs and that we can understand what people are talking about, and then we generate the show notes and so forth and get it ready to be uploaded onto the various platforms and publicized so that you know that it's around. So that's my aim. However, because the people that I have as guests on my podcasts are people who are working in schools in middle and senior leadership roles, it means that at the end of term three, we have had lots of people need to reschedule their podcast interviews, often multiple times, and I don't need to tell you, people who work in schools, that this is because we can't get relief staff. It's because of COVID or illness, and this year we've had a particularly bad bunch of coughs and sore throats, which have been less than perfect for recording a podcast episode, so I find myself without an episode to share with you this week. Delightfully, though, I also find myself with the school holidays with almost back-to-back interviews with fabulous people, so rest assured, next term is going to be sensational. However, I don't want to not provide anything, because I've been getting lovely feedback that you've really been enjoying all of the episodes, and some of you have particularly got something out of the solo episodes, and while I could definitely record something about some aspect of your work that you could improve on or anything that I normally teach, I thought that this was a really good opportunity to change direction somewhat and give you a bit of a sneak peek behind the scenes into my business, and if you're not at all curious about this, feel free to stop now and come back next week when I have got some new material for you.

Jenny Cole: 4:02

Last week, I was at a conference, the WA Ed Support Principals Association Conference, and they were co-hosting their conference with the Australian Association of Special Education, and this is a field that I had been in as a teacher and then a leader. So these were my people. I've known some of the people at this conference for 30 years we had taught together and others that I had met at conferences, and I was really lucky that I I wasn't lucky because I decided to sponsor the conference and have a booth, so I set up all our materials. If you look on social media, you'll see my flashy neon sign that says Positively Beaming. The thing that I was lucky about was that I got to connect and reconnect with a whole range of people that I don't normally see. And you know, for some people they're old friends and we can just slip straight into the conversation. But for those people who hadn't seen me for a while except on my social media channels or through my Love Note, would say things like you're so busy. You're obviously really busy at the moment. It's good to see that you're busy and as a business owner, it is good to be busy. As somebody who has experienced burnout once before, I'm very careful about how busy I am these days and I guess if you follow my social media my LinkedIn, my Instagram, my Facebook pages have a look at what I do on the Positively Beaming website. It's really easy to think that I'm super busy, which is lovely.

Jenny Cole: 5:43

I'm going to give you a little sneak peek behind the scenes into what busy might look like in the day of the life of somebody who is a coach and a consultant. As I said, I've experienced burnout once before and I am very protective of my mental health and I know a whole lot of things about me now that I didn't know before. First of all, I work best in the mornings, and so I try really hard to do my deep work in the morning, and I will often leave the afternoon for coaching calls. And that doesn't mean I don't have to concentrate. It actually means that I do have to concentrate because I have someone in front of me. So, instead of motivating myself, if you're coaching with me in the afternoon, you're motivating me and we have this wonderful relationship.

Jenny Cole: 6:32

So I structure my week quite carefully and there's sort of in front of the curtain work that I do and behind the scenes. So the front of curtain work is workshops. So these can be a full day, in fact, a couple of days that can be a half day, or I could just be presenting at a staff meeting for two hours. This work is often scheduled way in advance, so I'm already scheduling into sort of middle of next year. So this is when schools or associations or groups have the need for a workshop and what I will do is have a conversation with people about what it is that they want. I will go away and write something called a proposal, which is a quote, depending on the project. Often this is quite in-depth, a five or six or seven-page proposal with all the prices and the fees and so forth. This is my least favourite work in the whole entire world and if you catch me procrastinating, I will be procrastinating about a proposal. So that forward-facing work is my workshops. They're organised often well in advance and they're in my diary and the effort that goes into that is writing the proposals and getting the workshop ready and so forth. So that's the preparation there.

Jenny Cole: 7:56

The other front-facing work that you see me doing is coaching and again, my pattern is that I have six coaching sessions with somebody. This is set up and they take place sort of every three to four weeks over the span of about six months. People click on a link to get into my diary to establish a coaching session, so I can look at my diary and they've got access to when I'm available, and so I can look at my diary and they've got access to when I'm available, and so I can look at my diary and know when I've got my coaching clients coming up. They fit in around the workshops and the available spaces in my diary my coaching takes, once it's set up with a particular client, it takes very little preparation and a little bit of follow-up. I keep quite detailed notes. I keep them in one note, and so I will take time before a coaching session to review my notes, review the goal, remind myself of the conversation and then, after the conversation, ideally I will follow up with anything that I've promised or just to make my notes make more sense for when I come back to them.

Jenny Cole: 9:08

The other part of the front-facing work are workshops that we organise for ourselves, and so workshops are events. So these could be the retreats that I hold, this could be the public workshops that I hold on a variety of topics, and again, we decide well in advance what those dates are, put them up on our great big term planners that I've got behind me on the wall in my office and we plot out where we think the best place to hold those workshops and for things like Launching into Leadership, which is a spaced out program, the best place to put them in the diary so that they don't bump into things like reporting cycles and so that we're not too stuck in the Easter holidays and those sorts of things. So in that respect it's not unlike planning a school term, trying to work out where you're going to put your staff meetings and so forth. So those public workshops take a little bit of behind the scenes organisation and by and large, Jess does that. So I have a fabulous assistant called Jess. She works 10 hours a week with me, five hours on a Tuesday, which is face-to-face, and the other five hours get spread out over the week. Tuesdays Tuesday morning specifically, is sacrosanct. No one gets in my diary on a Tuesday morning. That's when we do all of the other work that needs to happen, of the other work that needs to happen.

Jenny Cole: 10:47

So let me tell you about some of the other work that happens in my business and this is often the stuff that makes us look really busy. So obviously every weekend I put out a Love Note. I try really hard to write this quickly. I used to always write it on a Sunday, but now Charlie has other ideas about the best way to spend a Sunday morning, so I will do it very quickly, as fast as I can. The idea is to get it out there, not for it to take a great deal of time. The other thing we do is that if we are publicising my workshops, we need to let people know that they're available. So this is the work that Jess does.

Jenny Cole: 11:25

We plan out a social media strategy and we post things to social media, to Instagram, to the various Facebook pages and groups and also to LinkedIn. Also behind the scenes, obviously, is the podcast. So I record the episodes, I batch them, as I said earlier, we send them off to the wonderful Vicky who does the editing and processing of those, and then Jess makes sure that they get uploaded to the various sites. And it's quite a complex process and, to be honest, if I'd realized how complex it was, I probably wouldn't have started this journey of podcasting, but I do love it. And again, we publicize the fact that every Thursday morning a new episode comes out and we make sure that you know that through the various social media channels.

Jenny Cole: 12:26

As a business person, it's very important that you know how to find me. You know what I offer and what products I have, so that if you need something you can find me quickly and have a conversation and perhaps purchase it. If you don't know that I exist, then you can't get value from what it is that I offer. So would I be on social media as much if I was just a principal in school? Absolutely not so. When my friends and clients come up to me and say, oh gosh, you've been so busy, let me give you a behind the scenes tip, a bit of juicy gossip. A lot of that stuff is scheduled in advance and planned and put out to hit your feed at the right time. Hit your feed at the right time, even these days, I hate to say it.

Jenny Cole: 13:27

I have a fabulous Facebook group that I have been running for about seven years, called Positively Beaming for Wildly Wonderful Women, and this is where I post something inspiring or uplifting or funny every single morning, and I've been doing it as part of my gratitude practice for, as I said, nearly seven years. Sometimes they are scheduled, sometimes on a Sunday night, I'm sitting on my couch and I think, oh gosh, what can I schedule for Wildly Wonderful Women this week? And I don't feel bad about this anymore because, as James Clear says, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. And one of the systems that Jess and I have been trying really hard to do in our business is to automate things so that things that happen over and over and over again we don't have to think about that, they just go out automatically. And that includes a lot of the social media, a lot of the information that we send out. We've got systems that sit behind things like the Love Note and the emails that mean that we can track some data about who's opening and who's looking at things, and that way we can offer more value to you, to make sure that we're giving you more of what you need.

Jenny Cole: 14:38

So have I been busy? Yes, I have been busy. August of this year, August September is always conference season, and so we know to book out in my diary going into next year that August September we kind of keep free for the various association conferences. We know, obviously, about school development days, pupil free days, and people who know that I'm available have already started to book into those. The ones at the beginning of term one have gone, and I think term two may have gone too, and then we put in holidays and those sorts of things, so we are trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Jenny Cole: 15:19

The other thing that I'm always trying to do when working on my business is to be listening very carefully to my coaching clients. What is it that are their pain points? What is it that is top of mind for school leaders at the moment? What are people struggling with? What are their middle leaders struggling with? And then I'm trying really hard to design workshops that fit with that and also design some learnings that might be able to address their need in the moment. So I am currently working on a set of small videos, on a set of small videos snapshots 20 to 40 minutes about particular aspects of leadership bite-sized pieces of professional learning where you can pick up a document or a resource and I'm going to walk you through it and show you how you could use that in leadership. It's one of the reasons I love coaching is that I can collect some pretty good data about what's actually going on in schools, what people are struggling with, and make sure that I adapt anything that I am doing in my workshops, either in schools or publicly to suit the needs of schools, their leaders, their teachers and, obviously, their kids. So that was a bit of a sneak peek behind the scenes.

Jenny Cole: 16:46

What does any week look like? In Positively Beaming, it looks different every single time, and no week is exactly the same. This particular week I've had almost back-to-back coaching and no workshops at all, and then next week I've got three days of workshops and a bit of coaching in between. I hope you found that interesting in a little way. Am I busy? Yes, I am busy, but have I structured my life so that I am not crazy busy all the time? Sometimes I get that right and sometimes I don't.

Jenny Cole: 17:21

This afternoon I am heading off to a hairdressing appointment in the middle of the week, which always and still feels like absolute luxury. But that's okay, because that's how I've managed my diary and that's how I've decided that I'm going to work. Is that I get the work done in the time that I have available, and the time that I have available fits around everything else that I do. So if you're listening to this at the end of term, three congratulations, you've made it Well done. Take a nice big, long rest over the school holidays, but I shall be in your podcast ears next Thursday. See you then.

Click on the link above to collapse this text.