Betsy Hays, a public relations and advertising professor at Fresno State, is known for getting things handled, and helping others do the same. Hence her new podcast, “Handled(ish).” Photo contributed

Betsy Hays, a public relations and advertising professor at Fresno State, hosts her podcast “Handled(ish),” which teaches productivity for the imperfect.

Hays fell in love with podcasts in 2015 and thought the idea of just the audio piece was fabulous. In fall 2020, she came up with the idea for her podcast and the name “Handled(ish).”

“It was a tumultuous time, and I’m a professor at Fresno State. So teaching online – everything’s upside down,” said Hays.

 

In her podcast, she discusses philosophical as well as practical topics. One episode talks about email and the inbox. Another focuses on mindset and introducing someone’s fantasy self to their actual self.

“So sometimes it’ll be just super hands-on, very philosophical. The whole idea is to give folks useful information that they can use, hopefully in a light, fun way,” said Hays. “And just encourage people that there are things that we can just crush and things that we will never be able to crush, and there’s some in between, and all of it is okay.”

The word “handled” is a favorite she uses frequently with students. Received an email? Handle it by replying, she preaches. That tells the person that they’ve done the thing.

In 2015, her students purchased a brick from the Kremen School of Education for the educator brick wall at Fresno State. The brick says, “Betsy Hays ‘Handled,'” becoming a trademark for Hays.

“We do the things, and a lot of times we do great, and sometimes we completely fail — sometimes we’re just sort of in the middle,” Hays said.

She was ready to launch after coming up with this idea for the podcast and working on a logo, but she got cold feet.

Fast forward to this past fall, when Hays was about to launch a professional podcast related to her work at Fresno State. She worked on recording the podcast at RPM Public Relations in Fresno run by Rae Pardini Matson.

Her professional podcast is “Central Valley Stories: Advertising & Public Relations.” It will be a limited podcast series with 13 episodes. Each one will be an in-depth interview with industry leaders in advertising and public relations in the Central Valley. The series will start on Feb. 9 and run once a week until May 10.

“That is also something I’m incredibly excited about, especially for my students, but also for the Valley,” said Hays.

With all the history, Hays chose veteran professionals and industry leaders to show how everything has evolved and changed over their careers — and what has stayed the same.

For “Handled(ish),” Hays has a long list of potential guests. She plans to continue another six episodes to lay the foundation for the podcast. She was excited because so many people had much to share related to the topic.

“The main mission is to provide value to the world and really help people because that’s sort of my mission professionally and now, personally, to help people succeed,” Hays said. “That’s the way I view my role as an educator and sort of expanding on that. I think it would be enjoyable if this led to some speaking opportunities to talk to larger groups about these ideas.”

Hays releases her podcasts through Buzzsprout, which then feeds to apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, IHeartRadio, and 14 others.

She also records her podcasts on YouTube. The video recording format for podcasts is popular amongst the younger generations, so she decided to launch it along with her audio recordings.

Her first ten episodes are available to the public to stream for free and are available to share ideas and feedback on at betsyahays.com.