Is your music career headed in the right direction?

I’m often asked what it takes to create a successful music career. The truth is, it depends on the musician’s readiness. Is your music career headed in the right direction? Are you ready to make real change?

I’m asking because I find that many of us are fooling ourselves.

If you’re anything like me, getting to the point of starting scary projects takes longer than expected. A lot longer. If it weren’t for my publisher’s deadline I would never have started, let alone finished Beyond Talent. Deadlines can help.

But career projects don’t always come with handy external deadlines. Starting my consulting practice and later on quitting my day job—these took far far longer than I thought or hoped they would.

Why?

I just wasn’t ready.

We may be frustrated with where our career is now, that it isn’t unfolding as we’d like. We may feel stuck in our current situation and imagine that we don’t have options.

Like I said, it’s easy to fool ourselves. We may really want to move our careers forward. But we tell ourselves that we’ll start that ambitious project tomorrow, or “when we have more time.”

Which may be never.

So we delay the necessary networking. We delay writing the proposal, creating the website, or starting the fundraising. In short, we delay doing what we fear.

Here’s what Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art says,

“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are . . . the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”

What does it really take to make change happen?

To get past the fear we need to, as Steven Pressfield describes, ‘turn pro.’ This isn’t about whether or not you’re in school or getting paid to play. Turning pro is about the mindset we adopt and the actions we take as a result. Pressfield says:

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

“The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. [He or she] is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be.”

“What happens when we turn pro is, we finally listen to that still, small voice inside our heads. At last we find the courage to identify the secret dream or love or bliss that we have known all along was our passion, our calling, our destiny.”

What’s your ‘secret’ project?

Many musicians often have a ‘secret project’ that they haven’t dared to tackle. It might be starting their own concert series, festival, or ensemble, or it may be releasing an album or starting their own teaching studio. Or like me, writing a book, and starting my consulting practice. Too often we haven’t done anything about it because there’s too much riding on it. Like our sense of self-worth—our identities.

But it’s these very projects — these scary projects — that offer the most satisfaction, reward, and growth. To get the future we want, turning pro means launching the project despite the fear and doing the work day in and day out. Pressfield says:

“What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.”

Lessons Learned

Here’s what my clients (and my own struggles) have taught me: in order to move ahead, to get ourselves to do what we fear, there are some predictable steps.

It comes down to being able to take action even though we’re scared. That’s what courage is. Moving forward takes building this up as a habit—taking the actions we fear. Doing the necessary work we’ve been avoiding.

We can break down readiness for change into 4 steps:

1. Clarify what you want: get specific.

Too often our goals are vague—we wish to be ‘successful.’ This is often about external validation, status, an idealized lifestyle. In other words, we have a fantasy instead of a concrete goal.

To get more specific, try this. Imagine that we fast-forward in time to one year from today. And we’re celebrating all of the progress you’ve made in your career over the past year. What would you have to have done to feel like you could really celebrate?

Maybe in one year you want to have gained college-level teaching experience, or to have recorded an album, performed 2 different solo programs, or to have added 7 new students to your teaching studio. Whatever it is, write it down with the date you want to achieve this goal.

2. Identify what’s getting in the way.

Time is the most frequent excuse. There’s never enough. But let’s face it, we don’t really know where all the time goes. The best antidote is to track your use of time for a week by keeping a log detailing what you’re doing when.

Hint: don’t simply write ‘career projects” 10:30 am-noon. Get specific: 10:30-10:50 answered emails; 10:50-11:30 FBing; 11:30-noon drafted proposal. This way you can find out where your time is really going and then make changes as needed. Time management strategies that have proven helpful to my clients include time blocking and the pomodoro technique.

3. Confront what you’ve been avoiding.

So if it’s not really that we don’t have time, what is it? Most of us know the thing that we’re avoiding: the phone call or email that scares because it represents committing ourselves to the project. We’re afraid of rejection, or of success, failure, or of being judged—choose your poison).

Once you admit what you’re actually afraid of, it’s easier to plan how to get past the fear. Interventions include scripting the phone call and practicing with a colleague or coach. Or drafting the email and having someone you trust review it before you hit ‘send.’ There’s also bribing yourself with a healthy reward for doing the scary task.

There’s also what I call scenario planning. Think through what’s the worst thing that could happen if you take the action? And be honest about what you gain by not taking action. It allows your desired future to remain a possibility. Keeping it a “some day.” But those “some days” easily become would-a, could-a, should-a’s.

The bottom line is if you’re truly wanting to make a change and to take charge of your future, you need to act.

4. Schedule your work with deadlines and accountability.

In your calendar designate specific time for specific actions. If it’s an email you’ve been avoiding, schedule a specific day and time to write the draft and to send it to a colleague for feedback. And schedule the “drop dead” deadline for actually sending it. Treat these scheduled events the way you would an appointment or work obligation. Your future depends on it.

Having an accountability partner — a mentor, coach, or colleague — can make a huge difference. Someone you can check in with and who will not only cheer you on but help you get back on the horse when you fall off. Because we all fall. What matters is that we get back up. That we face our fears and get the work done day after day. That’s what Pros do.

Pressfield says, “Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

So my question again to you is: