Pilates Teachers' Manual
Pilates Teachers' Manual
Staying On Top Of Your Schedule
In this episode, we're diving into the administrative side of the job and sharing top tips for managing your schedule, staying organized, and creating a sustainable workflow. From choosing the right scheduling system to the importance of consistent habits, we'll help you become a reliable and trusted teacher by building a system that ensures you're always on time and ready to teach.
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Workout Dance Day EDM by Diamond_Tunes, in compliance with Pixabay's Content License (https://pixabay.com/service/license-summary/)
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Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Teachers' Manual, your guide to Becoming a Great Pilates teacher. I'm Olivia. You get the latest updates when you join my community at buymeacoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts, or follow along on Instagram at @PilatesTeachersManual.
Pilates Teachers' Manual:The Book is available for purchase now. You can find it at shop.OliviaBioni.com. You can also purchase the book on Amazon in Kindle format, but it's way more expensive.
So workaround:you can buy it from me and then convert it either as an EPUB or A PDF file to a Kindle friendly file by visiting amazon.com/sendtokindle. Just a reminder that that EPUB format is the most like an e-reader and the PDF is just a PDF. It works, but it's also a PDF. There you go. Today's episode is all of my favorite and best top tips for staying on top of your schedule and creating a sustainable workflow for teaching. Again, this is not directly related to teaching Pilates, but having these strong administrative skills in addition to your teaching skills will set you apart as a reliable and consistent instructor. You do have to be a solid Pilates teacher, but being a solid Pilates teacher who's on time, is on top of their obligations and has a strong workflow to their week is like a gold star status pilates teacher. Teaching Pilates can be very repetitive or very irregular. Sometimes your schedule is repetitive. You teach the same classes at the same time each week, same class levels, same studio, likely a lot of the same clients. But even then, it's still very likely that your Monday schedule is different from your Tuesday schedule, which may be different from your Wednesday and Thursday schedule. Maybe that's you, or maybe you fall more into a camp where you have quite unusual schedules week to week. Maybe you have a lot of private clients who have irregular schedules or travel a lot. Your schedule as a result of being their instructor will also be irregular. If you make it a habit to sub lots of classes outside of your weekly set schedule, that could also be a curve ball. If you like to teach workshops or popups, or if you do things outside of Pilates that also make your schedule a little bit wacky from week to week. The easiest thing for establishing a routine in your brain is to have a schedule that doesn't change every week. If you have to do the same thing every day at the same time, it's really easy to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time and all of those things that we know that our brain loves. And whether this has happened to you or someone you know, if an instructor is ever late to a class or misses a class, very often it's because this class is outside of their routine. It's a class that they are subbing or someone they're covering for another teacher. They just spaced. It's not even malicious. It just wasn't even on the radar. I'll share an anecdote that very early in my Pilates teaching career, I agreed to cover a client for another instructor when they were out of town. For whatever reason, I completely forgot that I had this session with this client and I was sitting at home when I got an email from that client like, Hey, are you on your way in? My stomach absolutely dropped. My ears started ringing. I was having a full blown panic because there's nothing quite as terrible as not being where you're supposed to be when someone is counting on you to be there. I knew right then that I needed a better system to ensure that I never missed an appointment like this again. What I'm sharing today are some strategies that worked for me. I'm sharing them so that you don't have to experience missing a class, missing a client, in order to get your schedule on track and really build a system that you can replicate. So much of the work we do teaching Pilates is built on trust. Our clients are expecting us to be where we said we were gonna be when we said we would be there. Our clients take time out of their busy days to work with us, and the very least that we can do is be there. The studio that we work for is counting on us. The instructor who taught the classes before us is expecting to be able to leave after their class. And you're kind of like the relief pitcher going in, you know? We have obligations and we need to make sure that we're meeting them. As Pilates instructors, our schedules are really too complex and way too irregular to just keep in our head and try to juggle all of it mentally. Even if you're only teaching a few classes a week, those classes need to be somewhere visible that you know that they're happening. Outside of Pilates also, we have family and work and personal obligations to juggle, so some sort of scheduling tool is a must. In a lot of ways, whether we're paid as employees or independent contractors, when we're teaching Pilates, staying on top of all of our scheduling commitments is something that falls to us kind of like an independent contractor. Like we are responsible for all of that scheduling. If you're a pen and paper type of person, writing out your obligations in a planner is fine. You can color code it and use stickers and organize it however you like. I've recently made the switch to Google Calendar, and now I live and die by it. If I can make an argument for a digital calendar over pen and paper, whether it's Google Calendar or iCal, or whatever you like, my argument is threefold. One, we are already on our phones. I don't think I've gone somewhere without my phone since 2013. I always have it, so if I need to add something to my schedule, I have it with me. If I need to adjust my schedule, I always have it with me versus forgetting planners and random things out of my backpack. Secondly, we get automatic reminders. If you write something down, you still have to refer back to what you wrote to remember what's coming up. Google Calendar sends me notifications about upcoming events whenever I ask it to, 30 minutes before the event, two hours before the event, one week before the event, it will send me a notification or an email which drastically decreases the likelihood that something important will slip my mind. Thirdly, there's app integrations. Zoom meetings can be linked to your calendar. Appointments can be booked on apps like MINDBODY or Acuity that automatically populate on your calendar. Some apps, like Calendly, for example, can read your calendar and then not schedule an appointment if you're already booked for something on your calendar. That is incredible. I feel like there's so much stuff going on in our lives trying to remember offhand all of this stuff that we've committed to, it's just not the best use of our time. Using a digital calendar frees up my brain, definitely, for other things. Whatever system you choose to use, whether it's pen and paper or whether it's something online, you have to use that system. You have to put everything on there, and I mean, I even schedule the time that I spend programming my classes, the time that I spend commuting to studios, the time that I want to decompress and not have other things booked, my available windows for calls or coffee chats, et cetera. There's multiple ways to create events or create a calendar for multiple things. You might use multiple email accounts, which is useful if you have like a work email and you don't want your personal calendar items visible to those you work with in such great detail. You can share your calendars or your accounts with each other so that you can toggle on or off events of a certain calendar, or you can color code events on a single calendar. That's what I end up doing most often, and I will color code different studios, different colors, and you know, different things, different colors. So like my classes at the University of Chicago are blocked off in red. My private clients I block out in purple. If I'm taking a yoga class, I use green and I do also write down my downtime, and I do gray for that. So the different colors help me see at a glance what's gonna be happening on a given day. How much free time do I have? How many appointments do I have, how much traveling am I doing between places? You'll find a system that works for you. It doesn't have to be my system, but for me, being able to see everything I'm doing, whether it's work or personal, in one place has been very helpful. You can also set up recurring events in your calendar for classes or clients that repeat week to week or even multiple times a week. You can invite your clients to those appointments on Google Calendar, or if you pay for something like Acuity, those sorts of software will send your clients reminder emails in addition to showing up on your calendar those software programs, also process payment and track packages for you. So depending on how many classes, appointments, clients you have, it may be worth investing in a program like that for class scheduling, appointment scheduling and payment processing. Recurring events are actually why I moved away from a written planner because it was taking me so much more time to write out everything I was doing every week, even when it was the same. When, on Google Calendar, I can just say repeat forever, and it does repeat forever and it takes like a millisecond. And while writing something down is a better way to commit it to memory, I don't actually need to commit my schedule to memory. I just need to be where I said I was going to be when I said I would be there. Not having to remember what those things are frees up my brain for lots of other cool things. In addition to getting everything out on your calendar, whether it's personal, whether it's work, any time that you wanna be doing a thing, you put it in your calendar, I also recommend scheduling some time to look at your schedule at the start of your work week so you know what's coming. It doesn't have to be first thing Monday morning. If you start teaching on like Tuesdays, like that's fine. You can do your review on Tuesdays. It could be a short, less than 30 minute review. It might take you more time, but just having some time to look at the week ahead, see what's scheduled in your calendar will really set you up for success in your week. For me, because I process my own payment for client packages, it's good for me to know at the start of the week if there's any packages that are being finished that I'll need to remind people to buy a new package. Also, if there's anything out of the ordinary meetings, doctor's appointments, sub requests I'm covering, any clients out of town, any clients meeting at a different time than usual. I just want all of that stuff on my radar and scheduling some time to look at it is helpful to me. On the flip side, I also do this at the end of the week where I review my schedule and make sure that all payments were processed. All clients that I said I would follow up with about things I followed up with them. Any leftover tasks from the week that I need to take care of have been taken care of. Just setting aside again, could be 30 minutes at the end of my week to tie up those loose ends lets me go into my time off of teaching with a sense of completion and without any worries that I forgot something important. Taking time to review and conclude your week is also time well spent. Now you're hearing this in what I'm sharing, but I am also very much a type A personality and having everything written down so that I can stay on top of it is absolutely paramount to my existence. I know that some people are more spontaneous or things come up and then they do them as they come up. While, personally, that sounds like a nightmare, if that is your workflow and it works for you, amazing. Fantastic. I'm so happy for you. I just wanna make sure that you stay on top of everything, because I've said it before that teaching Pilates has a big customer service component because Pilates itself already works. We're not trying to convince people that Pilates works. It does. So how can we as teachers set ourselves apart from a YouTube video that our client could just as easily do? One of the big things is keeping our clients accountable. They schedule a class or an appointment with us because they know we're gonna be there. They know other people are gonna be there, and they're accountable to us, and we are just as accountable to them to be there on time, ready to go, and having a strong scheduling system is a big help. Bottom line here is that we all have to stay on top of our commitments one way or another. I found that outsourcing some of the administrative scheduling work frees me up to do the actual work that I have on my schedule because you don't make more money by spending more time thinking about your schedule, but you will make less money if you have repeated scheduling snafus where clients start to distrust you or choose not to work with you. These administrative skills, even though they're not the sexy, fun, teaching Pilates skills, they are just as important as programming a great class. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee, especially to new supporters, Kelly, Irene, and healingyouholistics. I'm looking forward to meeting you in this month's Coffee Chats. I hope you have a great couple weeks and I'll talk to you again soon.