YOU, INC. (What it ACTUALLY Takes to Create a Sustainable Life in the Arts. (It’s not what I learned in school.)
It used to be that if you just practiced hard enough you would win a job and the rest would work out happily ever after. Or that’s the myth I lived by as a young cellist growing up anyway. If I *just* played well enough…
But that bubble burst quite quickly as a young professional musician.
During my artistic training at school and festivals the focus was on the IDEAL of music making: talent fulfillment, being in a state of peak performance, artistic expression, human connection, excellence, style, interpretation, etc. Our days/hours/minutes were focused on every detail of musical excellence. However, once out in the *real* world, even when opportunities looked great on paper (because of who I was performing with or where I was asked to perform) the events themselves almost never lived up to the idealism I experienced as a student. The best artistic opportunities didn’t pay at all because they were “great exposure” and the gigs that paid the best nearly killed my soul.
After graduating, being a professional musician meant earning money as a musician and waking up to the reality that these peak performance opportunities don’t just fall into your lap. You don’t automatically get to play with the best performers in the best places, and rent doesn’t get paid by itself. It was a mindset of reacting to the world around me, copying what everyone else did, grasping after every opportunity possible.
Never in my professional life did I have musical experiences that were anywhere near as inspiring as the magnificence I experienced as a young fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center or Yellow Barn Music School and Festival or even in my school years at Oberlin and the San Francisco Conservatory.
I did not know how to bridge earning a living with having a rewarding and meaningful life in music. I didn’t know how to be a great musician AND make money. I didn’t know how to find the jobs that paid well AND were musically inspiring and rewarding. I didn’t know how to find musicians I loved playing with AND have a great audience. I didn’t know that my musical life was a BUSINESS. They didn’t teach how to do that in school.
How is it that the PROMISE of a professional life in music is so devastatingly different than the actual professional life itself?
My disillusionment as a professional cellist led me down an uncomfortable and unforeseen path to become a somatic psychotherapist and ultimately what I do now: executive coaching, consulting, public speaking, and leadership training.
After spending decades in the arts and seeing so much brilliance and talent go undirected and unfulfilled, I wanted to understand what exactly helped a person self-actualize and fulfill their potential. WHY exactly do so many talented artists doubt themselves, have no clear direction and suffer from things like stage fright, self-care, money challenges and poor mental health?
This blog came out of a conversation with a friend who posed the following question:
“Do you think higher education institutions in the arts are required to guarantee winning a job after graduation?”
My answer came swift and strong: No. I don’t think schools are required to promise that graduates win a job. But I DO think it is our responsibility to teach people how to THINK FOR THEMSELVES. Then they can have the tools to find their own answers and design their own fulfilling professional path.
What EXACTLY is required to teach a student how to think for themselves?
As my friend and I dug deeper into the conversation, we honed in on the necessity for a person to be able to be self-aware and to self-reflect.
How do you teach that exactly?
How do you teach a person to observe themselves and assess mood, energy, decisions, actions, mindset?
How do you teach someone to connect their perceptions, decisions and actions?
As artists our psychological development is so intertwined with our craft and our performance. We are trained to have external validation govern our decisions and actions. Instead of knowing within what success is, it’s determined by prizes, jobs, associations and opportunities.
But now in a COVID-19 world, our external validation has come crashing to a halt. Performances and competitions do not exist apart from what people have converted to an online platform. Suddenly the rules have changed. Sustaining a career suddenly requires mastering zoom, YouTube, Facebook live, social media and how to offer experiences that can create human connection in a digital world.
This ability to be able to pivot and adapt to a new reality requires resilience. And to have resilience people must know their own authentic calling, what gives them meaning and purpose, and what they want their lives to truly be about. This brings us back to why self-awareness, self-assessment and self-reflection are so essential. These are the skills required to know oneself well enough to adapt and evolve regardless of what happens in the external world.
“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
-Abraham Maslow
How do you teach intrinsic motivation? How do you go against decades of training that tell you what is good or bad, right or wrong? How do you teach a person to be masterful at her craft while still having her own voice, thoughts and ideas?
It starts with teaching a person how to think. And not just think but ask really important and high quality questions. It’s the ability to ask high quality questions that changes perception. And that’s where true empowerment is possible.
If we look at many of the skills that are taught in an arts education we can see that it is not in a bubble, though psychologically it can certainly feel that way.
Here are just a few of the many skills we gain as learn to be professional artists:
Focus
Multiple tracks of awareness
Discipline
Reliability
Stage presence
Public speaking
Problem solving
Time management
Goal setting
Project management
Timing
Attention to detail while also holding the big picture
Team work
Interdisciplinary collaboration
Performing under pressure
Non-verbal communication
People skills
Soft skills: expressing the human experience
This list is by no means exhaustive. However, I purposefully did not flush out the description of these skill sets to make the following point: this list is very similar to the same skill sets used for job descriptions in many other disciplines.
Here’s where those high quality questions come in.
HOW do we take those important skill sets listed above and translate them off stage? These skills are not just for great performances-they can be used for any area of life.
So if we determine that a sustainable life in the arts requires artistic excellence AND resilience, intrinsic motivation, creativity, innovation as well as business and financial know-how, then first steps would be to teach people to think for themselves.
Self-awareness, self-assessment, and self-acknowledgement.
All the skills listed above and more are directly translatable to tackle the challenges at hand during the COVID-19 pandemic and financial recession. But it requires intrinsically motivated people who can hold paradox, be solution focused and think outside the box. It requires fluid, not calcified strategies and teamwork.
How do you do this AND teach people to be great artists? How do we achieve artistic excellence AND evolve the art forms to adapt to our new and unprecedented reality?
In a time of crisis and massive uncertainty, how will the arts and artists claim their space in the future?
I suggest we all rise to the occasion. We start by changing the narrative from crisis to opportunity. Then we assess what was and was not working. We let go of what didn’t work, we refine and evolve what does work. Then we tackle the challenges at hand by serving the continued needs for human connection with great art in whatever way is possible and effective in a digital world. We stop trying to reproduce what we’ve temporarily lost, but create new and innovative solutions and guide us forward.
One of the greatest things I learned that has helped me grow a thriving and profitable business is this simple and profound question: “what problems does the world have that you are inspired to solve?”
It’s time to design an inspiring, healthy and sustainable new professional landscape.