Happy New Year! As the year stretches out in front of us like a blank page, it’s a time when we start to decide where we would like to be by this time next year. In your musical life, you may have many differing interests. You might be one of those nauseating people who can sing, play, produce, perform, record and transcribe music with a clear idea of the genre(s) you want to work with and a solid network to help you do it. You could also be a mere mortal who knows you have strengths and weaknesses and is sitting thinking ‘what do I do next?’
I recently lost my sense of direction and made a big mistake that I want to share with you: I thought I had to fill in my weaknesses and work out why certain things weren’t working when instead I should have played to my strengths.
Years ago a business advisor shared an old Native American proverb with me: FOLLOW THE RIVER. What this means is look at work is working for you and what doors are opening, rather than bashing your head against the ones that aren’t. So, instead of trying to look at my less successful projects and what went wrong, I asked myself these question:
- What is working best for me?
- Why is it working?
- How do I follow on from there?
Now it may be if we want to capitalise on our successes we need to acquire new skills and push ourselves a little further, but deciding to learn on the basis of our achievements is a lot more productive than saying, ‘I need to learn to be a better producer because my demos suck’ or ‘I need to learn to run better Facebook ad campaigns because only 3 people clicked on the last one’, for example. Maybe someone needs to up their skills in production because their melodies are strong and they want to pitch them as best as they can. Maybe someone else needs to learn to run Facebook ad campaigns because there is a group of people who love their music and their ads are missing those people (Tip: lookalike audiences are great. But I digress…).
If you want a guided exercises to help you work out a strategy to accomplish your goals based on your strengths and opportunities, you can download my Achieving Your Goals pdf for free.
Wishing you every success!
Eve Williams MMus 