Now is NOT the Time to Relax!
Hey folks, this is Sweet Deat, and welcome back!
Now is not the time to relax. What do I mean by that? It's very simple. Let's take a trip back in time. To the end of February, early March, what were you doing then? running around, being crazy. In your routine. What was that like? If you're a musician like me, I'm gonna assume the following one, you were practicing for gigs that you had coming up to, you were going and teaching some students or something of that sort, three... You were probably just thinking about how to get from day to day what you were gonna do, maybe this weekend, etcetera. The point is everyone had a routine, and guess what, that is over now I don't need to talk to you about viruses and pandemics and all that kind of stuff, I kind of feel like everybody's had enough of that, I'm gonna skip over all that because I'm not an epidemiologist. So here we are now, there's no gigs like anywhere... I played my first gig in three months, just a few days ago on Mother's Day, and it was for a really nice couple, and we stood like 20 feet away from them and sang some songs for an hour... That's it. In 15 years of my music career, I have not had a break like this, so admittedly, for the first two weeks or so, I think like many people, I just sat around and I didn't really do much. Now, after watching Netflix for way too much and probably more than I ever have in my entire life, I finally got tired of that too, and I had to come to grips with the reality that one day this is going to end.
So my question is to you, have you been on vacation this entire time, are you still sitting on the couch watching Netflix, well, guess what, it's time for you to take a moment and think about the future of your career. What does that look like? Are you still playing gigs at bars and restaurants for the rest of your life, are you... And if so, that's totally cool because if that's a conscious choice that you're making, then that means you've thought about everything that goes into that, and that's your decision, which is totally cool, but if you're just going out and taking gigs as a musician and not really thinking about the direction that you're going in, you're gonna wake up in 20 years and realize what happened. So without further ado, here are the four steps we're gonna walk through to see if you're on the right path.
Number one, self-evaluate.
That's right, it's time to take stock in everything that you've been doing, so if you're a musician or a creative... What kind of gigs are you doing right now, are you happy with those gigs that you're doing, are they fulfilling you... Is the majority of your work something that you like doing or is it something that you don't like doing, do you feel like you're stuck doing something within the career field that you wanna do, but you're not exactly happy with how it's working out. I can say at one point I was doing a ton of singer/songwriter cover gigs, and at some point I had just had enough of that and I made a cold stop and move to something else, that's something for me was playing jazz and more improvisational based music.
Another question to ask yourself is, how did you get there? What sequence of events did you say yes to to get you into this position, knowing this information is gonna help you not make the same mistake again, if you are unhappy with your situation, what are the positives and negatives of your current direction in evaluating your situation was it something as simple as you made one short little wrong turn and maybe you can just write the ship really quick, or maybe you made a series of decisions based upon maybe money or something, and now you're stuck in this world and you're like, Man, how do I get out of this, it's not fulfilling me, even though maybe it's filling the bank account, so once you've taken stock and where you are and where you're going…
Number two comes into play, which is recalculate.
Now, I've gotta tell you, this particular part takes a lot of guts, it's easy to continue down the path that you've been going down, it's usually the one with least resistance, but that's okay. People think about the end result here. You gotta understand, whenever you recalculate your life from an artistic perspective, it takes a lot of courage and it's something that's not gonna happen overnight, so this process of figuring out which direction you wanna go in can last as long as it needs to... I remember for me, whenever I left all those cover gigss and all those singer song writer gigs, and I went to a more improvisational and jazz direction with my career, it was difficult for a few months, the phone kind of stopped ringing... I didn't really have a lot of money, I had to say no to some gigs because they weren't fulfilling me, and even though the world that I was stepping into was pretty well defined for me as to what I wanted to do, jazz and improvisational. Music is something you just can't step into and start doing overnight, I mean, yes, you can... And I guess you could call it art too, but the point is, is that it's a high art, it's hard to learn, it's hard to take the concepts and the practices and somehow turn them into music, and that is music that somebody would like to pay to see you do. So I had to go through this phase of trying to figure out how to do all this, and what I felt like had to be a light speed amount of time, but through it all... You have to remember one thing, the promise of the future stands taller than your current situation, remember the work that you're putting in is worth it because it means something to you, so once you figure out how to recalculate... It's time to move on to number three.
Make a plan.
Making a plan in the beginning is easy, the hard part is in the details. So you hear a lot of talk about five-year plans through your plans on your plans and breaking it all down... I'm sure everybody's heard that before, right? You just need to make sure that the goals you make are realistic for you to execute, so a great thing you can do is just study other people that are on similar paths as you study everything about that person or that company figure out the trends and the way they do things by observing someone that's successful within your career field, it will give you a path, but in doing so, don't take yourself out of the equation here you're not the same person as someone else, so in learning their tips and tricks, hopefully you can evolve those and make them your own, lastly on this, you should consider how to give to others as a part of your plan. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you one of my early jazz mentors, his name is Cory Christians, and Hikari, he told me once that if you wanted to advance your career, that you need to figure out 10 people in your life that could do that and figure out some way, any way I mean, any way to impact their lives for the better and do something that can help their career. That one piece of advice has been better than any scale that I've ever learned, any core that I've ever learned. Any marketing tip that I've ever been given, it's probably the number one piece of advice I would give anyone at any time, but here's the trick with that, you can't exactly just call them and say, Hey, what can I do for you? Or maybe you could, I guess, I think it's really cool for you to do the research about that particular person and then figure out a way to impact their lives for the better, they'll be genuinely surprised, and you'll be surprised at the relationship that you form with this person could impact you for the future. I should also note in this whole giving thing, that you should be willing to give to these people without any reciprocation whatsoever, your intentions have to be pure and truly helpful to that person, this is not an exchange services, this is you seeing something in this person, giving to that person because you believe in what they're doing, and you want to be a part of that, if your intentions are pure and giving, it's likely that at some point it will come back to you, that could be one month that could be six years away, you just don't know, but giving is what makes the world go round, so if you're not actively doing that in your life and in your career, that's probably the number one thing you could change immediately for the better.
And finally, number four start new habits.
How long does it take you to start a new habit? A week, a day, a month? Sometimes a year, maybe. Hopefully not. I think for me, starting a new habit takes about two weeks, the first two weeks for me are always the hardest, I have to really muscle myself to do whatever it is that I'm telling myself that I need to do, whether it's opening my calendar that I make like starting an exercise routine, for example, that has always been a hard thing, but once I get into it, for me, I can't live without it, but somehow when I'm out of the habit of it, I just forget that it's supposed to be happening, so I starting habits don't do everything at once, just do one thing at a time to get you to where you are a brand new habit machine, pumping out all sorts of efficiency and your new goals and dreams, set small goals so that you achieve them and then that confidence will build you into larger ones. A great way to keep yourself accountable is to find people with common interest and try and get you to go along with the journey. So for example, once upon a time I was doing this 30day fitness challenge. I got about four or five people to join up, and we kept each other accountable for pretty much the whole month, and we got through the Fitness Challenge, and it was cool, support groups always work when you're changing your habits. So seek them out, you might be surprised who might be looking for a change too.