Personal Development

This is something I’ve talked about in my Make Your Nerves Work For You sessions at various events over the years, but I think it’s worth mulling over in a wider context too. Goal-setting is not just about managing performance psychology, after all. (Though I think this wider context does help draw attention to the way that things we think of as specifically performance-related issues are often rooted far deeper in our whole relationship with our praxis.) And first blog-post of the New Year feels like a good moment to share these thoughts.

So, this is a nice simple formulation, borrowed from sports psychology. It distinguishes 3 different types of goal:

I have often thought that when people complain of being short of time, it is more often that they are short of brain space. If you do an audit of every minute in your day, there are often plenty of minutes that are ‘unproductive’ if regarded from the outside. But, from the inside, you can’t make use of those minutes for anything very much because it just takes too much energy to upload something productive into your head for a brief time, and then - just when you’ve got going - dump it out again for something else.

This is of course that standard wisdom about why multitasking is inefficient - there are frictional costs of attention involved in every switch, so switch often enough and you get nothing done. Multitasking still has its place, I’d say, but only with routine tasks that you have at the tip of your brain anyway. I quite like the definition that multitasking is a technique for avoiding several dull tasks by doing them all at once.

I’ve been wondering for a while if I’m going to have a rant about this, and it seems the thought won’t go away so here goes. The following graphic has been doing the rounds on social media and it has been irritating me quite disproportionately for what is intended to be a friendly and empathy-inducing little picture.

To start with, let’s acknowledge the psychological truths that it does capture with some success. The red phase says something valid about how resistance to a task is proportionate to its demands on your brain’s background-processing functions. The things that are the hardest to start are the ones that, once embarked upon, will invade your dreams. And the flurry of work up to the deadline reminds us about the end-effect, and the way it so helpfully refreshes attention as we head into the finish line.

I had an email recently introducing me to a 12-year-old who was expressing an ambition to study music in college and become a barbershop arranger. Some of her questions were unique to her circumstances, but the general issue of what kind of things should she be doing to position herself to be ready at age 18 to fulfil these ambitions are things I thought worth discussing here. After all, though I am mildly boggled at someone having such clearly formed ambitions at that age (I am sure I didn’t!), she is probably not the only person wanting to tread such a path.

So the first thing to point out is that studying music in higher education is moderately unlikely to include studying barbershop arranging per se; it is a genre that may occasionally appear briefly in college curricula, but you can generally expect your education as a barbershopper to be largely self-directed. Don’t let that stop you studying music; I’m just clarifying so as to set your expectations. Studying music will make you a much better barbershopper, and doing barbershop will be great for your musicianship. Just be aware that it is a niche specialism within a wider discipline.

I was having an online conversation with some choral directors recently in which we were grappling with the perennial issue of how to fit in preparation of music. In particular, the issue was the prep needed for special events above and beyond your regular musical activities. The person who started the conversation is going to two training events over the summer that each require prior learning of music and was finding herself in a state of some overwhelm trying to fit this in around an already busy schedule.

This is in a music-specific version of the classic workflow issue of how you accommodate projects within a role that is already full-time. By their nature, projects are relatively short-term commitments that start, go through a period of focused activity, and then finish. So they demand considerable inputs of time and attention, but since they are inherently temporary, you rarely have that kind of time and attention going spare in your capacity. Take on two at once and you get a real bottle-neck.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been helping Bristol Fashion with a similar kind of review/audit process that I undertook with Hallmark of Harmony back in March. As with that exercise, I am not going to share the detail of what the review produced here - as that is for the chorus use - but I would like to reflect somewhat on the process.

The review with Bristol Fashion worked as a two-stage process. It started off with a visit to observe their Music Team in action on a regular rehearsal night, which produced a report that identified things that are working well (i.e. to make sure they keep doing them!) and areas that can be developed as individuals and as a team.

This was followed, two weeks later, by a second visit in which I facilitated a values- and goal-setting exercise with the whole chorus. The aim of this was for the singers to articulate to each other the things that matter the most to them about their musical life together, and to generate concrete actions that each individual could undertake to enhance their shared experience.

My friend Monica Funnell introduced me to the classification of people into radiators and drains in a recent conversation about how directors can build effective teams. It is one of those wonderfully self-explanatory concepts that sheds immediate light onto aspects of interpersonal relationships in real life. And, as these things are apt to do, it helped me identify what’s been going on in situation that has been a source of low-grade anxiety in my own life.

But the thing about these personality labels is that they’re more useful in some situations than others. If you are putting together a group of people to work together, yes it’s very useful. If you are going in for a spot of introspection, it could potentially be useful, depending on how self-aware you are. (One of my niggling questions is whether drains know they are draining; I’m reasonably sure the person I’ve been worried about thinks they are a radiator. This in turn fills me with self-doubt: does everybody else see me as needy and whining without my realising it?)

Third in a series that starts here

The fluid interplay between Simon Halsey's speech-accompanying and conducting gestures was a fascinating case study in the research that feeds this post

The very term ‘expressive gesture’ encapsulates the idea of musical thought made physical. And it is an interesting question as to how this happens. Often in conducting manuals, you get lots of useful detail on technique such as the conventions for indicating musical structures such as metre, but notions of creating musical beauty are sealed off in a box marked ‘Magic: do not open’.

To an extent, this is not as much of a cop-out as it may seem. Spontaneous, speech-accompanying gesture is something we all do intuitively as part of the act of thinking and communicating, without needing to be taught how to do it. And musicotopographic gestures (i.e. those than emerge as part of the act of thinking in music) are equally spontaneous and intuitive. This is why I argued that the most important first step in developing expressive gesture was to develop the musical imagination.