Singing Teachers Talk BAST Training

Today Alexa is joined by a singer-songwriter, speech pathologist and voice rehabilitation specialist. She's also the author of Everyday Voice Care, the Lifestyle Guide for Singers and Talkers, with other publication credits including the Journal of Voice and Voice and Speech Review. Joanna Cazden is on Singing Teachers Talk to tell you how you can help your singers maintain a vocally healthy lifestyle.

Joining Alexa on this week's episode is a musician, university professor and founder of Creative SEO. She manages her own music studio and helps musicians to create their own paid opportunities to live the life that they deserve. Dr. Tanya Lawson is on Singing Teachers Talk to tell you how you can improve your SEO and earn passive income.

Our guest today is best known as The Holistic Artist Coach and the founder of the Parr Method, and she's on a mission to empower artists to create a career that they love. With over 20 years experience in the industry, Wendy Parr has created a development pathway to assist artists in defining and elevating their skills as well as embracing their authenticity for true connection through music.

Today Alexa is joined by Erin Ross, Strategic Communications Specialist with the popular business management software platform My Music Staff. Erin is on Singing Teachers Talk to tell you how you can organise your studio business. You’ll also find a special offer for a 60-day free trial just for podcast listeners in the links below.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


My Music Staff started in 2013 as a love story between its founder, who’s a software developer, and his wife, who’s a private music teacher. She needed something to help her manage the administrative side of her business so she could focus on teaching. She asked him if he could build something for her, and it grew from there.
My Music Staff has four core features: students, calendar, attendance and billing.
In the student area, you can manage your entire student list, including family contacts and birthdays, track your notes and information about instruments. You also add default billing information here.
The calendar is where you set up all of your lessons. You can create custom categories and locations. If you do online music lessons, you can set up meetings on Zoom, Skype and FaceTime. All of that can be started directly from the calendar.
Once you build out your lesson schedule, the platform uses what is called calendar-based billing, so you don’t have to manually add up how much money every family owes you every month. All you need to do is keep an accurate calendar, and My Music Staff automatically calculates their bill.
Feature number three of the platform is attendance. You’re letting the system know if a student turned up for their lesson. If they didn’t attend, do you still want to charge them? Do you want to offer them a makeup credit so they can take up the time later?
All of these things are then fed into the billing feature, saving you time by automatically gathering the information needed for the invoice and sending it to you.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘It gives you time to actually focus on what you enjoy doing’

‘How can we improve the experience so that as a teacher or as a studio owner, you're not spending all of your time outside of lessons handling more administrative tasks’

‘Now the world is so fast paced, everyone's on the go. We find there's been such an increase in people working on their phones,

 

EPISODE RESOURCES

Guest Website:


com
mymusicstaff.com

Social Media:


Instagram: @mymusicstaffapp
Private Facebook Group: @MyMusicStaffCommunity

Relevant Links & Mentions:


My Music Staff Trial Deal: Sign up for a special 60-day free trial today at mymusicstaff.com/singing-teachers-talk
Singing Teachers Talk Podcast - Ep.92 How to be Resilient in 2023 with Line Hilton: https://linktr.ee/basttraining?utm_source
Duet Partner: https://duetpartner.com/
Website builders mentioned: Wix; Squarespace; Wordpress
My Music Staff Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Mymusicstaff

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Erin Ross is the Strategic Communications Specialist at My Music Staff, the #1 business management software for private music teachers and music studios. She oversees social media, partnerships, trade shows, and, well... anything with words! She loves to find new, creative ways to help music teachers learn more about how My Music Staff can help manage their students, organise their calendar, automate online payments, and much, much more!

 

ABOUT THE PODCAST

BAST Training is here to help singers gain the knowledge, skills and understanding required to be a great singing teacher. We can help you whether you are getting started or just have some knowledge gaps to fill through our courses and educational events.

Website: basttraining.com

Get updates to your inbox: Click here for updates from BAST Training

Link to presenter’s bios: basttraining.com/singing-teachers-talk-podcast-bios

 
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy New Year! January is usually the time when we set resolutions for the year, but let’s face it, most of us aren’t going to see them through a couple of weeks, let alone a whole year. So this week on Singing Teachers Talk, Alexa and BAST founder Line Hilton discuss how to be more resilient in 2023, how you can improve resilience in your students, and what you can put in place to make sure you achieve your goals.

KEY TAKEAWAYS


One of the problems with resolutions is that people set them and then don't do them. So it's much better to set goals throughout the year and then follow up with whatever strategies or tools that you can to maintain them.
When working on self-improvement, if you haven’t dealt with the beliefs that are feeding into the thing that you’re trying to stop or change, then your mind will just go back to what it’s comfortable with.
It can take around four weeks to form a habit. This means repeating the thing you want to do daily for it to become imprinted in your brain as part of your routine.
Low resilience can be mental or physical and could relate to work or our home life. Often, when you physically learn resilience, it will affect everything. Sometimes with mental resilience, that only happens in particular settings.
As a singing teacher, you need to be aware of the things that can affect your students from a psychosocial point of view. It’s not all about asking what’s wrong with the voice; it’s about asking what other factors may be at play. Perhaps someone has really low energy, or something has happened at school and they’ve brought it with them into the lesson.
Usually, when somebody has severe anxiety in response to a negative experience as a performance, it’s because they’ve attached a meaning to it. The performer may think it means they’re not good enough or a failure or that they’re being judged. Help the student to reframe their thoughts and understand that it’s just a thought; it’s not a fact.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘We have the resolution, but we don't put a plan in place or have support.’

‘Physical things are just a little bit more obvious than with mental low resilience’

‘The singing teacher quite often is privy to a lot of stuff that other people are not in that person's life’

 

EPISODE RESOURCES

Guest Website:


basttraining.com

Social Media:


@basttraining

Relevant Links & Mentions:


Singing Teachers Talk Podcast - Ep. 32 The Bio-Psycho-Social Model with Stephen King: https://linktr.ee/basttraining?utm_source
Duncan Rock: https://duncanrocknutrition.com/
Rock On Ruby (slogan clothing): https://rockonruby.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA7bucBhCeARIsAIOwr-8qNWJZranfBEK3TqAmO02l_ujYUkszuAWssDHgxhcZd2Z7HFgkjVgaAiQzEALw_wcB
Marisa Peer: com
Mel Robbins: com
Instagram: @linehilton
British Association for Performing Arts Medicine (BAPAM): https://www.bapam.org.uk/
Dr Mark Hyman: https://drhyman.com/
Dr Rangan Chatterjee: https://drchatterjee.com/
Mind Charity: org.uk
Help Musicians: https://www.helpmusicians.org.uk/
Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Insight Timer App
The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters
Singing Teachers Talk Podcast - Ep. 33 The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters Book Review: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05XH8aZkXCrSq4rKsLIwCs?si=366951a969514cb4
The High Five Habit by Mel Robbins
Norman Doidge: https://www.normandoidge.com/
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Lifetime by Russell Foster

 

ABOUT THE PODCAST

BAST Training is here to help singers gain the knowledge, skills and understanding required to be a great singing teacher. We can help you whether you are getting started or just have some knowledge gaps to fill through our courses and educational events.

Website: basttraining.com

Get updates to your inbox: Click here for updates from BAST Training

Link to presenter’s bios: basttraining.com/singing-teachers-talk-podcast-bios

 
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy

Joining Alexa today on Singing Teachers Talk is the Head Tutor of Singing at Italia Conti who additionally works in private practice as a singing teacher with both aspiring and professional performers. His work also encompasses singing voice rehabilitation. Michael Vickers is here to talk about preparing singers for drama school auditions.