S3 E40: 12 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting My Creative Career (Part 2)
There are many things I wish I had known when I graduated from music school in 2005, and was just starting my creative career, but all life experiences are part of our own personal evolution, and teach us so much. Listen in as I reflect on the lessons I’ve learned (and will continue to learn) along the way, and some advice I might have for that earlier version of myself that you might find helpful, too, no matter your creative discipline!
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If you want to integrate managing your time and energy, so you have enough to accomplish the projects that are most important to you - that’s what my PDF workbook Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity helps you do!
It’s full of amazing tools for creating a humane to do list and schedule that you can actually complete, no matter your level of energy and overwhelm, along with ways to self-compassionately adapt when things don’t work out as planned.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 40 of Being A Whole Person. Last week, I talked to you about six things I wish I had known when I graduated from music school back in 2005, and I'm going to share six more with you today. If you missed that episode, you don't have to listen to that one for this one to make sense.
I wrote a blog post back in 2016, five years ago at this point when I'm recording it. At that point, it had been 11 years since I had graduated from college, and I was reflecting on what I wish I had known things that I have learned, the growth that had happened. In May, I just turned 38, which means 20 years of adulthood, 20 years since I had started college. Of course, that made me start reflecting, too, and I wanted to revisit this post to see what needed adding, and see what I thought about it. So here we go with some more things.
Number seven, make friends with rejection. This is one that I've only taken more to heart pretty recently, because rejection is uncomfortable. We don't like to fail, right? The more that I make peace with the fact that it's just a numbers game, the more that you apply for things, the more that you put yourself out there, the more people you reach out to, the more likely you are to succeed at whatever it is you're trying to do.
You're going to get rejected along the way, and I've actually started collecting rejections. This idea came from Tiffany Han, who is a great life coach that I've been following along with on her podcast, which was called Raise Your Hand Say Yes. It's just now the Tiffany Han Show. She used to have this program called 100 Rejection Letters, which I never joined, but I was inspired by the fact that you would specifically try to collect rejections, like it's your goal to get 100 of them. Because, inevitably, if you're going to collect that many rejections, there are going to be successes mixed in there too - for grants, for gigs, for opportunities, shows.
The more you try, the more you're going to get selected. I know this discomfort feels terrible while you're mid-process and you're thinking about how inadequate your resume is. As you're filling out that grant application, or you're putting together your portfolio to submit to a gallery and you're like, “Oh, is this good enough? I can't possibly be as good as everyone else who is applying for this.”
But you really never know how people are going to make decisions to choose you. You might be surprised at what they're looking for. We often underestimate our own abilities, because we are most self critical of ourselves. So it's probably better than you think it is.
Then, when you're less afraid of rejection, it's so much easier to activate your imagination, and be open to what the possibilities are, because it doesn't matter if you fail, if you're not afraid of rejection.
That's not to say you have to completely overcome your fear of rejection. Like I was saying in the last episode, you work through the fear. You can have both - it's a both/and. You can be afraid of rejection, and you can do it anyway. But I really like the question: What is possible if you're not afraid of failing, or if you don't let that fear stop you?
I bet tons of stuff is possible. It might even be overwhelming to think about. But it's also pretty exciting.
Speaking of things I'm afraid of, or have been afraid of, number eight is get comfortable with public speaking. 2005 Me would not have agreed with this. She was very afraid and against any sort of public speaking. Even speaking in class made me kind of nervous at that point. Again, it's doing stuff making it less scary, but public speaking in all of its forms just opens up so many opportunities, like being more comfortable teaching in front of a group, doing this podcast, sharing online, either in a video that's recorded or live, doing actual speaking gigs in the traditional sense. All of these things can open up so many opportunities to get your work out there to allow you to connect with more people that can be helped by your work.
I feel like I'm pretty comfortable with it at this point - even five years ago, this was not on the list. This was not in that blog post before. I started to desensitize myself, when I was doing a teaching certification with MTNA, which is the Music Teachers National Association. So, I was getting the private teacher certification, which you don't have to do to teach private music lessons, but I really wanted to have that legitimacy, and go through the learning process that would help me grow as a teacher.
Part of that certification process was watching videos of myself teaching and analyzing them, which was super uncomfortable at first, just to even watch and listen to myself, but then also to critique myself on top of that, and know that someone else was going to be watching it after me. I don't know how it really got easier, besides that I just started doing it more. It wasn't that intentional or tactical of a process.
Then, after that, I also started this podcast back in 2019, which seems like way longer ago than it actually is, with my friend, Lexie. Of course, we were both editing, and listening to ourselves. So I think that just pushed me further down the path of feeling more desensitized. Then, I think people just started asking me to do speaking things, like speaking at a piano teacher meeting, or speaking for a pre concert talk.
I just started to embrace those opportunities more, and actually feel pretty comfortable with it now, which I still kind of can't believe. I still definitely have my moments of cringing and vulnerability hangovers. That's real. But the more I do it, the less that I obsess about how I sound, the more I feel like it's just a process. It's just showing up and being present with people and the easier that it has gotten. I think this, and probably everything, comes back to embracing the process.
Number nine is also kind of related to that same idea: You're never done, and that can be a good thing. So when it comes to practicing music, or whatever your particular artistic discipline is, there's always more to learn, right? That can be overwhelming, but it can also be really exciting. That curiosity is what makes it interesting to keep making stuff, to keep doing what we're doing, to keep learning. I know that I never feel like I'm done as a musician, or as a coach, or as a self employed business owner, or really just a human who is excited about learning.
The hard part about it is coming to that acceptance that we maybe can't do as much as we would like to, but that we can keep showing up and making consistent effort. That consistency is worth so much more than it seems when you're like, “Wow, I only got 15 minutes worth of work done on that thing today.” But really, it adds up.
I've talked about this on the show before - how I did a 100 Day Project of writing eight measures a day. That eight plus eight plus eight plus eight, you know, for 100 days, really does add up and allowed me to write a lot of the music that I ended up recording on my album the next year.
Showing up is more important than we think, even when we talk ourselves out of making a small effort. I say this to my students all the time. It's hard advice to follow, but a bunch of tiny steps are going to add up so much faster than zero big steps, right?
This also comes up in noting the length of your to do list and wanting to do all the things, and cram all the things on your list and then not being able to do them all, because you're a human without infinite abilities. We just have to set those boundaries on our work time to make space for the other parts of our life.
If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend picking up my e-book, Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity, because it really outlines how to make a plan for your day and make a schedule that has enough structure that you can get things done, but also that gives you the space to be a human with a body, with needs, and to make your to do lists in a more humane way that doesn't make you feel bad about yourself. You deserve to not feel bad about yourself, you deserve to feel like you're a whole person. So I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to check that out.
Number 10 is very related: Don't work all the time. That has been such a hard one for me over the years. The culture of music school glorified being as busy as possible, bragging about your lack of free time, your lack of sleep, how many credits you were taking, and how many hours you practice. All these messages add up to “work more”, not necessarily to “work better.” If you're working yourself into the ground, you're probably not doing your best work.
I kind of hate that the culture of school is reinforcing this message. I talked about this a bit with Dacy Gillespie a couple episodes ago. We talked about that harmful culture of music school, and how the effect has really lasted for us. I feel like I'm still deprogramming myself from this attitude. As much as this is my work and things that I teach, this is going to be a lifelong process. It really comes down to, yes, I love my work, but do I want to work constantly with this feeling of pressure looming over me, or this guilt and shame from not working all the time? That is not how I want to live my life. And you probably feel the same way.
If we think back to the art that we're trying to make, great songs, great art is not made about productivity and to do list apps. I mean, if you want to accept that challenge, cool. Maybe you can write a good song about that, or make a good piece of art about that, but that's not what the richness of real life is about.
These things that we create come out of our real life experiences. We have to give ourselves the time and space to actually have those experiences, in order for it to trickle down into what we make. So you not working all the time is also helping populate your store of what is eventually going to make it into your art. So so important.
Number 11 is: It doesn't have to be hard, or it doesn't have to be that hard. We're taught to work so hard. I'm a descendant of farmers on both sides of my family. I have this Midwestern work ethic baked into my DNA, it seems. So when something isn't as hard as I expect it to be, or just isn't that hard, I'm almost suspicious because it feels like there's this expectation, isn't it supposed to be hard? If it's not hard, am I doing it wrong?
That doesn't necessarily have to be true, but it's interesting how that can be a self fulfilling prophecy sometimes, that we subconsciously make things more hard in order to fulfill that expectation. That happens to me anyway, I don't know if it happens to you, too. You can really go, on the spectrum of things feeling difficult, you can go too far.
Things that feel extremely hard, where you're meeting a lot of resistance, maybe aren't the best fit. I'm speaking in such broad generalizations right now. I'd have to talk to you specifically to know what actually feels right, but sometimes if things just feel so hard, and you've been making an effort for a long time, and it's just not working, that's when you might want to question: “Is this something I should really be doing?”
It definitely has taken me more life experience to understand how things feel when they're in different places of that difficulty spectrum. To understand what the differences are between “this is hard because I'm trying to shove a square peg into a round hole” and it's more of a “should” than something I'm really passionate about, or is this just hard because it's bringing up some things for me that are difficult? It is really valuable.
There's a lot of gray area there, but I think life experience makes us better at deciding when something is difficult enough that it's going to take away from what is most rewarding. It's all about prioritizing, I guess. If you really want to do something, and it's difficult, then doing it will probably end up being rewarding, but if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, because it's for somebody else, because it's a should, because you want to prove that you can do it and any of those reasons, then fulfilling something being hard is not necessarily worth it.
If you've ever had an experience, where something just suddenly seems really easy, it just clicks, it just flows out, you know how magical that is when that blog post just writes itself, or that painting just creates itself or that song just pours out of you, whatever it is. So that's really helpful to reinforce that, yes, it doesn't have to be super hard. Sometimes it can be super easy. But on the flip side, we can't expect it to be super easy all the time, either. It's usually somewhere in between.
Lastly, number 12. This one is maybe the most important one: your work is intrinsically valuable, because you want to do it. It has always been easier for me to see how my actions are measuring up with other people's and with other people's expectations, than to really decide what's most important to me. Of course, that has gotten easier over time, as well.
It's kind of silly to try and measure up against people's expectations, because we're always making a guess at what other people's expectations are. They usually don't tell us. Usually those voices that you hear in your head, you know the ones - the critical ones that are like, that teacher you had in college, or your dad who always says, “Why don't you get a stable job?” or whoever's voice it is that you hear. They often get inflated out of proportion. We're often just guessing at different ideas of what we think people expect for us. This is totally a recipe for unhappiness.
If your work makes you happy, it will make other people happy. It won't make everyone happy. But when you see someone doing what they are clearly here to do in the world, what they feel completely fulfilled and invested in, isn't that such a satisfying experience to observe? This energy is totally contagious.
I know that deriving personal value from my work as a musician, and you know, the art that I make is the most important part for me, but showing up for other people is a huge part of that too, in the abundant-and-giving sort of way, not in the having-to-please-people sort of way.
Also, financial value is a concern to those of us doing creative work and trying to make our living from it. That can really be tricky too. It could really, sometimes, if there's desperation involved, it can tamp down that personal value that you're getting from your work. Hopefully they coincide, that's awesome.
Sometimes we think about, okay, this is the stuff I do for money. And this is the stuff I do for passion. Maybe they're separate. There are all kinds of different balances on that. But it's always a struggle to strike that balance, especially if you have many different things going on, like what my mom likes to call the “mosaic of jobs” that many artists have. We have all this calculus involving our energy, our time, how easy a project will be, all these different factors.
My hope is that no matter what your situation is that you can be working on something that you're passionate about, at least some of the time, with some consistency, because that makes you happy. I know I'm happier than if I had given up that not-profitable project or not-as-important, you know, in my rationalizations, in favor of having more free time, or in favor of doing the thing that will make me more money.
So you don't have to prove the value of your work to anybody, just know that it's valuable to you. If you need reminders of that, give yourself reminders, that's great. I'm rooting for you to show up, do the work that matters the most to you, and create the stuff that will make you happy.
So I hope hearing about all these different life lessons of mine has been helpful for you. Maybe you've seen yourself in some of them. I'd love to hear about it. If so, let me know if there are things you wish you had known that I didn't mention. You can always email me at hello@rebeccahass.com or find me on Instagram. I love hearing from you. I love being able to share in your stories, too. So, until next time, be well, and be kind to yourself.
Pianist and composer