Personal Development

So this post comes a little late to be any real use to people setting goals for 2014. But it emerged from my own process of goal-setting, and it's kind of in the nature of reflecting on things that you have to do the things before you can reflect on them. These thoughts build on my musings about work-life balance from last March, but also emerge from the realisation that this summer it will be five years since I turned freelance.

One of the things that I was interested in when I left full-time employment in higher education was developing a new relationship with time. I had spent every year except one since the age of 5 governed by the academic calendar, and the patterns of dash-and-crash that it seemed to encourage. What has developed in tandem with this is a new relationship with a sense of duty.

Everybody in the creative and/or performing worlds (and I suppose many other areas too) needs feedback. We have our own sense of how well we are managing with our tasks, and to what extent we are achieving what we were aiming for, but we need the reality check of other people to calibrate our self-awareness. Does it come over to others as we perceive it ourselves? Do they notice things that we don't? Are the things that are important to us as we work also important to others?

Without feedback, we can't grow.

But receiving feedback can be an emotionally wearing experience. People who may have only a brief or casual relationship with our work can make throw-away remarks that make us question everything we've done. Conversely, people who already love what we do can validate things that really should be questioned. Confidence and self-knowledge are both at risk when we hear commentary on what we do.

Every so often I get a request to for someone to observe me while I'm working with an ensemble, and I'm writing this post partly so I can point people to it rather than writing very long emails in reply every time! But working through my thoughts about it has also been interesting, and I like to share when I think I've learned something.

So, there are two basic scenarios, and I have found they elicit quite different responses.

Scenario 1: the ensemble I'll be working with contacts me to say they have a visitor who would like to watch, and do I mind? My answer: no problem!

Scenario 2: somebody I know gets in touch with me to ask if they can come and watch when I do some coaching. My response: not comfortable.

I spent a very happy day last month at the English Schools Athletics Association championships in Birmingham. We went because a family member was competing for his county, and since it was on our doorstep we could go along to support him, but once there we made a day of it, and I found myself learning quite a lot about performance psychology.

The thing about sports at this level - i.e. the best in the country, but not yet fully mature - is that you see a lot of technically very able performances, but the mental and emotional control displayed by professional athletes is not yet fully developed. It makes you realise how much high-level achievement is governed not only by what someone can achieve, but also what they will allow themselves to achieve.

The importance of challenge has been a recurrent theme in my reflections over the years both on what makes us happy, and what makes us better at what we do. A recent conversation with a friend brought into focus for me an interesting dimension to this: that it is not so much the objective level of achievement that determines our sense of an activity being rewarding, but the extent to which we feel we are growing through it.

Maybe this is obvious, but I found it worth stopping to think about for a moment.

The conversation was about that decision that we all periodically have to make to discontinue a commitment. My friend had found herself taking on more and more activities - as interesting people are prone to do - to a level that had been sustainable when she was in a job she was familiar with, but was just too much when she took on a new role. What was interesting was that the ensemble she chose to resign from was the one that (a) she had been performing with for the longest time and (b) operates at the highest level of all her current activities.

The concept of work-life balance is a useful one in that world of competitive workaholicism that so many First World people seem to inhabit these days. But it rather assumes that you can tell which is which. How you define 'work' is only ever unproblematic if you are in a full-time salaried post and - possibly more important - don't think about it too much.

The standard concept of 'work' as economic activity is tricky, as any feminist will tell you, for two related reasons. First, it devalues domestic labour; being a stay-at-home mum is not the same as 'not working'. Second, it renders the second shift of women in employment invisible, hiding the inequalities in relationships that persist in the face of ostensible equality in the workplace.

Musicians have an interesting variant of this critique, in that one's most artistically significant work is not necessarily the best paid. Particularly in your early career, the bread-and-butter routine work is there to subsidise those projects where you develop most as a musician, and make your most distinctive contributions. The most extreme example of this: you don't get paid to practise, but that's still the bedrock that all other musical activity is built upon.

I recently had an email conversation with someone who wanted comments on an arrangement, that framed the request for feedback as a matter of urgency, as they wanted to get the teach tracks out to their chorus. As it happens, I was in a position to juggle my schedule to fit this in, but at the same time I felt it only fair to question whether this was the right moment to be doing this.

This is a conversation I used to have frequently with students in my years as a lecturer. It was a reasonably common pattern for someone to work on an essay at length and then come for feedback only a day or two before the deadline. Often this was because they either felt there was no point in bothering me while there were still things they knew needed fixing or because they were embarrassed to show me work in an obviously incomplete (and therefore as yet inadequate) state – which does feel a bit like answering the door in your pyjamas of course. Other times it had a more cynical motivation – ‘just tell me it’s going to pass’ – which I felt rather less sympathy for, but actually didn’t change the answer.

A few months ago, my friend Sarra sent me a link to an interesting post on The Fluent Self blog about different phases of skill level. It is worth reading in its entirety, but the executive summary is as follows:

Beginners don’t need to be given challenges because everything is challenging.

In an advanced practice, you find challenges, because you have a conscious, intentional relationship with yourself and the world around you.
It’s the middle you want to watch out for. When you need other people to create challenges for you.

Most people think the middle is where you are until you get good, but the middle is where you stay until you decide it’s time to be conscious.

This is an intriguing observation, and I’m finding it resonates in all kinds of ways with my observations of how people develop musically.