Welcome to Mindful Monday, where we bridge the gap between Second Language Acquisition research and the practical realities of both your classroom and your business. Each week, Leo and I share research-backed insights to help you sharpen your classroom teaching while building the freedom to work on your own terms.
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In partnership with: E-Solutions for ELT
You tailor your teaching to your students.
Your tech should be tailored to you.
E-solutions by Renata Kucharska for ELT helps teachers build an online system that works for them by building practical websites, course platforms, landing pages and automations designed around the real needs of their ELT businesses.
Tech should make your business simpler, not more complicated.
Hope everyone is taking the summer slowly as we are (if it’s summer where you are). We’ll be on an every other week newsletter schedule for July-August and taking some down time.
In this week’s Mindful Monday, you’ll see:
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New podcast on moving from freelancer to founder with Zoe Smith
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Will AI replace teachers?
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Summer Book Club is back
Hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
🎙️ The Secret to Duplicating Yourself and Moving from Freelancer to Founder – Zoe Smith
“When you are constantly thinking in scarcity because you’re broke… you don’t put enough value on yourself, on your time. You will undercharge, you will always look for ways to stretch yourself too thin. And you can also say yes to the wrong customers, too.”
We sit down with entrepreneur and BE School founder Zoe Smith.
No sales, a newborn, and an earthquake all at the same time? Zoe embodies the entrepreneurial spirit and her story is not only one of resilience but brilliant business planning.
We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we did producing it.
Catch the full interview here:
In this episode, we discuss:
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How helping build a 50-location Canadian childcare ecosystem proved that corporate clients will gladly pay premium fees for high-value operations.
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Why failing to separate your personal pockets from business capital keeps you acting like an employee.
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How having a newborn and a new business fuelled a “failure is not an option” mentality.
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How eliminating regular month-to-month invoicing in favour of non-refundable upfront class packages entirely deletes the administrative stress of chasing money.
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What managing C-suite executives reveals about regulating your own internal nervous system against minor operational fires.
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The necessity of duplicating yourself for your business to really take off.
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The braveness required to shut down classes with CEOs when invoices weren’t getting paid.
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Launching a sister company – BE Hub – without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into technical development overhead.
Zoe Smith is the founder of BE School, a specialized Business English institution that scales corporate communication via an international team of over 50 educators.
A veteran language coach who designs high-touch corporate environments and personally guides Fortune 500 executives, she recently launched The BE Hub: an interactive sister platform providing editable, real-world target curricula directly to language teachers worldwide
FOR MORE FROM ZOE SMITH:
Listen on Spotify here:
🎙️ Will AI replace teachers?
Matt Coss doesn’t think so. But he’s concerned if people ask that question.
If you missed our last research-based podcast episode, you’ll want to go back and check it out.
Matt Coss is professor of applied linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages & Classics at the University of Alabama with a focus on task-based instruction.
We chat about a wide-range of things, but what really got our interest was student retention (or lack thereof) and how we as language programs really fail to communicate why people should learn additional languages.
We continue to fail at our value proposition.
This is a great episode and we thank Matt for sharing his expertise with the world.
📚 Summer Book Club
Summer is for down time and we’re always happy to share what we’re reading. I’ve actually joined a real-life book club and it’s going well so far. More on that later.
Currently, I’m finishing a book called The Game by Ken Dryden. It’s a philosopher’s sports book.
Ken Dryden – a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens in the ‘70s – retired at the age of 31 after winning 4 consecutive Stanley Cup championships and 6 in 9 years. He was at the top of his game, best in the world, and in his prime.
He walked away anyway.
Dryden wasn’t a typical athlete (whatever that means). He was a thinker, very philosophical, and thought big.
While he as very good at it, hockey didn’t challenge him anymore. It didn’t provide the same spark it once did.
So he quit. And moved on to other ambitions (which he did just as well). It’s a very inspiring read and one that it quite though-provoking.
What are you reading this summer? I’ll need another one after I finish this.
That’s all for this edition. Talk next Monday,
Leo and Andrew
Want to grab a coffee and strategize the next step of your business?
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