Business by Janice

There’s been a lot written here about goal setting, success and the Law of Attraction. I don’t know about you, but I believe it’s important to keep submerging ourselves in this type of material to make sure the mindset really takes hold.

I read an article the other day which was extremely powerful;  an article which summed up in just 3 points the essence of everything I’ve been writing about in many posts.

The writer talked about “Spiritual Millionaires”, how he has studied their habits and has discovered that they achieve what they desire by using 3 powerful principles.

Firstly, they KNOW that they can create whatever they want through the  use of the Law of Attraction. They don’t just believe, they KNOW that by focusing 100% on their desire and imagining that they already have it (as it already exists at a different level of consciousness anyway), it is only a matter of time before it will manifest into physical reality.

Secondly, they take action, “inspired” action. They follow their intuition and take advantage of opportunities which leads them step by step to the manifestation of their goal. They don’t force action but at the same time they are not put off by being taken out of their comfort zone if that is what a next step demands.

Thirdly, they maintain an “attitude of gratitude”. This is essential in the whole process, as gratitude is an emotion which vibrates at an incredibly high frequency and thus draws more to you of which to be grateful for. Whenever you feel such gratitude that tears come to your eyes, immediately switch your thoughts to what you wish to manifest and this transformed energy will immediately start working and manifest what you want much more quickly.

So remember:

• Have total faith in the Law of Attraction
• Take inspired action
• Maintain an attitude of gratitude

This post was prompted by the article The Three Most Powerful Principles I Have Learned from Millionaires by Dr. Robert Anthony featured this week on the site Mind Power News.

By the way,  I have to recommend a book that I have recently purchased, well, I’ve purchased it in CD format so I can listen to it in the car, it’s amazing - so detailed yet so easy to understand (even the heavy quantum physics section). It’s called “A Happy Pocketful of Money” by David Cameron Gikandi

http://www.revolutionscape.com/

My blog resembles Twitter this week - it’s short and sweet.

As I’m really tight for time, I thought I’d leave you with a quote from my favourite Law of Attraction authors, Esther and Jerry Hicks/The Teachings of Abraham.

“There’s not enough action in the world that can compensate for misaligned energy”

And something for reflection - Who are you spending your life with? Are you happy in your job? If you are taking action to make up for something that doesn’t feel right, could it be that you’re tackling things the wrong way round?

It’s quite a struggle to keep up with everything that comes at us in this technological age, we have to develop prioritising skils  more than ever before and it’s tempting to focus on our own world of immediate concerns and pressing problems.

Email, and more to the point, managing email has become a skill in itself. Those people who manage it successfully combine prioritising their time to “get things done”  with maintaining an effective email relationship with their network.

Have you ever felt perplexed (and probably slightly miffed ) that people who you have a professional relationship with just don’t answer your mails?  What happened to good old fashioned manners?  Ok, perhaps the term “manners” is no longer appealing, let’s replace it in this context with the term “netiquette”. Because at the end of the day we are dealing with PEOPLE. We might have a computer screen seperating us but we  have one person sending the mail and another person receiving it.

How people behave around email says a lot to me. Those people  I have a relationship with and who respond to my mail, even if it’s just an acknowledgement and especially if it’s to say thank you, go up a few points on my integrity scale. As with anything in life, it’s how we behave that paves the way for a positive personal and/or business relationship between two people. Those who don’t observe simple codes of conduct when it comes to responding to email could just be losing out on opportunities.

And what about those people who are too lazy to change the “subject” of the mail. They want to talk about a completely different topic to the previous one so they find the last mail that was exchanged with you and just start writing. You get confused before opening the mail to then find that the mail is endless with all the exchanges that went before. How lazy can you get?

Continuing on a practical note however (enough of the moans and groans), how can we effectively manage our email whilst at the same time reserving time to do the  important, “moving forward” aspects of our jobs?

Here are some tips to manage email:

1. Allocate specific times of the day to check email and different times to DEAL WITH email
2. Work on the concept of zero inbox. How do we achieve that?
3. When you check your emails you need to scan them quickly and immediately put into one of 5 files, do, delete, delegate, archive and defer.
4. At the time you’ve allocated for actioning mails, go through the files to do, defer and delegate to take the appropriate action.

We waste so much time opening emails, reading them, thinking we’ll see to it later only to come back to it amongst a yet fuller inbox, read it again before deciding what to do with it.

Even the sight of a huge inbox before you even start to tackle anything just drains your energy, so there’s a lot to be said for the zero inbox concept.

If you are looking for more details on how to manage email and in fact, time management itself, I highly recommend the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I’m a bit of time management freak myself and in my opinion Allen’s book is the most practical work I’ve read on the subject.

Check out his web site: http://www.davidco.com

I think a lot of academy directors would agree with me when I say that it’s very hard to find teachers who do a great job teaching children.

There’s so much more to the story than being native and holding a TEFL and I wanted to highlight this subject this week to alert naïve teachers of the sort of situation  they might be getting into. I use the words “native” and “TEFL” as first off, most parents are obessed that the teacher be native and secondly, TEFL is the most common training medium available to teachers looking for work abroad.

One thing is to like children, the other is to be able to teach them. And as the majority of TEFL courses provide minimal training if any at all in this very important area, the suitability of a teacher is something that both the academy and potential teacher should consider carefully before making a mutual committment.

I have to say at this point that this area isn’t my speciality, I deal more with corporate language training but as we’ve had some teachers bail out on us this year in our school saying that teaching kids isn’t for them, I wanted to raise some awareness around the issue.

The pedagogic considerations are perhaps the least important when it comes to teaching successful childrens’ classes as we’re all trained in the basic techniques on our TEFL courses. The issues which beg to be looked at though are:

• Discipline problems
• Gaining respect from the childrem
• Dealing with different learning styles
• Motivation of individuals

to name but a few.

To what extent are new teachers really prepared to deal with such issues?

It’s amazing how many teachers casually accept childrens’ classes saying they “like children”, want to widen their teaching experience etc. etc. but are then powerless in front of a group of 6 year olds!

What can we do to prevent this situation from happening?

In the first place it’s imperative that the selection and interviewing process is rigourous. Teachers need to be sourced who have proven experience in the field and who ideally possess a qualification such as the British PGCE or similar. Recruiters need to be tuned in to energy, a teacher with an insipid personality is going to be eaten alive (possibly by the same group of 6 year olds who made an appearence above). Assertiveness and clarity here is the key.

Initial orientation training by the school is essential and particular attention should be paid to classroom management, daily routines, reward systems and disciplinary measures available to the teacher. And of course ongoing support is a must. Teachers need to know that there is someone on the management team who will back them up and be there for them.

Which leads me on to another point - we’ve seen over the years that many teaches feel embarrassed to ask for help, many think they have to solve any classroom management problems on their own, and often wait until a situation gets out of hand before speaking about it. This is completely the wrong approach.

From an academy’s point of view it’s relatively easy to find your team of full time Young Learner teachers at the beginning of the academic year and follow the comprehensive selection procedure mentioned above. But if you need to replace a teacher mid academic year, that is really when the pressure is on as the groups in the academy simply have to go on the road. A well thought out substitution system is what is called for here but for economic reasons this is not always implemented in smaller schools.

I’m sure there are quite a few of you out there who can add some depth to this post, both from an academy and a teacher’s point of view. The main point I wanted to make here is that inexperienced teachers shouldn’t jump headlong into teaching a block of Young Learner classes in a school, even though the block hours are attractive, without really finding out what extra demands the profile of these classes entails. And conversely, schools should really examine exactly how well suited a particular teacher is before assigning the classes. In this way, parents and children will have more chance of getting the service they deserve and headaches will be reduced all round, well, except for the headacher the mere noise of a group of 6 years old naturally make anyway!

What have your experiences been regarding the teaching and/or coordination of kids classes? How could negative situations have been avoided?

I’d be very interested to hear your comments.

Had a great meeting the other day with about 15 other language school owners/directors.  This was the third time we’ve met, originally called a “networking” event so as not to scare anyone off but now definately converted into “meeting”  We were talking  about the issues that concern us and it was great to see respresentation from some of the “big boys” like International House and Astex as well as small agencies who work with just a handful of teachers.

Two issues received the most attention - American teachers without papers and the inflexibiity and ignorance of many clients re. achieving language learning objectives (does this sound familiar?)

I won’t go into the all the details of the discussion on these topics as basically the points are covered in other posts in my blog. An interesting point was raised however regarding the Americans - how is it that certain schools do get Americans their papers when we’re all being told that there is no quota for American teachers?  Before you all cry out “don’t be naive Janice, we’re in Spain after all, the “enchufe” culture is still rife”, yes I know this is bound to a factor in there somewhere but even so….

I don’t have the data but it seems that there’s been no quota for Amercian teachers for years. Of course the Administration always contend that there are enough Spanish English teachers to meet demand. But what demand? The demand for Spanish teachers of English is virtually non existent. We reckon the Spanish Government DOES NOT UNDERSTAND OUR MARKET. Spanish companies DO NOT want to be taught by Spanish nationals with an intermediate level of English at best.  If our group grows, and indeed nearly everyone present is keen to move forward on the forming of an association to promote quality, best practices and to resolve key issues, it was thought that  we could easily get support from our top clients eg. Telefonica, Repsol, Ibedrola etc to prove that Spanish teachers are NOT the teachers who are equipping their top directors with the language skills they need to perform in the global market.

Another thing which I’m reflecting on since our meeting is that there IS energy here in Madrid, there IS a desire to try  to improve things in the sector.  What everyone wants is to be able to find well qualified, conscientious teachers to provide an excellent service to clients who take language learning seriously. (And it was agreed that the majority of American teachers are the conscientious and reliable ones).  I’m surprised that this interest and energy hasn’t been sought out and channelled before. There IS an association here in Madrid called ACEDIM yet hardly anyone at our meeting had heard of it. If there’s anyone from ACEDIM reading this blog it’d be great to hear from you.

So,  I think the word is spreading. Making a difference takes a lot of time and energy, but in the meantime if we can at least come together, take steps in the right direction and have fun doing it (VERY important), well that’s fine by me.  And who knows….