'Seeing' what you want
Welcome to the ArtsBound Newsletter. Every Tuesday, I share three thoughts or insights meant to help performing arts students and young professionals flourish in their life and career. Discussed today: 1) how do you know what you want?; 2) using visualization as a tool for achieving your goals; and 3) an amendment to a former newsletter.
- 6-minute read -
(NOTE: I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.)
1. How do you know what you want?
Eight or so years into my tenure in the public school - when it was apparent to me that I was ready for a professional change - a single piece of paper showed up on the wall of the faculty room.
I never learned who put it there - or why - but for years, that piece of paper caused me to feel frustration, anxiety, and self-doubt every time I saw it.
It was a quote attributed to Ben Stein:
The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this:
decide what you want.
When it came to my career, I knew I wanted something different, but I hadn’t a clue what type of work would bring me more fulfillment. I felt like I had only one chance to make my move out of teaching, and I couldn’t afford to mess it up. I thought there must be something wrong with me that I couldn’t actually heed to advice on this homemade poster.
Who knew Ben Stein could be so antagonizing?!
This story came to mind this week because I’ve been reading Harry Potter, and I recently read the chapter in which he finds a magic mirror that displays the viewer’s deepest desires.
I read that and thought, Pretty sweet mirror… I wish I had one of those sometimes.
Knowing what I wanted was always a struggle for me. (The way my sister and I would get dressed as kids serves as a great illustration: she would put on bold, clashing patterns and refuse to allow my artist mother to suggest a better-matching alternative; I, on the other hand, would stand in front of my closet, staring at the clothes in a state of indecision, and eventually ask my mom to help pick something out for me.)
When I shared the Ben Stein story with the coach that helped me start ArtsBound, he said, “Oh, interesting… I would change that just slightly to say ‘decided what you want to feel’.”
I went through an exercise of writing down all the ways I want to feel about myself. Nothing that relies on other people.
I now have this piece of paper (LINK) hanging in my home office.
I found that checking in with this list every morning serves both as an affirmation, and a way of determining what I could do better on in a given day… and it actually has me working in the space of my bigger goals that felt so far off before.
Give it a try! And if you do, I’d be curious to know how it works for you.
2. Seeing what you want
If you know the Harry Potter story, you know there’s another side to the mirror.
Harry’s mentor warns him that men have wanted their lives away in front of the mirror - seduced by what it displays, or maddened by whether it could become true.
This got me thinking about some of the arguments I’ve heard against the use of vision boards as a tool for accomplishing your goals. After doing some reading, I wrote an article titled “Using visualization to advance your music, theatre, or dance career: 6 tips and no hype”. In the article, I summarize the argument for and against the use of vision boards and offer a criticism of both sides.
Honestly, I’ve never created a classic vision board myself, and so it felt a bit awkward writing about them. I do, however, make use of other visualization techniques, and after reading what others had written, I felt there was a need for more practical tips for doing so, as well as a need to address how the science was being misrepresented.
You can read the full article (an 11-minute read) HERE.
3. Amending something I wrote about about how we use grades in school
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how grading students’ work in school effectively kills the creativity in their thinking (actually, it kind of kills thinking altogether!) - a troubling scenario for arts education. My thesis centers around the evidence presented by Dan Pink in his well-known TedTalk on motivation.
I wrote that using grades could possibly work well to incentivize something like math drills, but nothing that requires more critical thinking.
After reading what I wrote, the same friend who introduced me to Peter Gray’s work sent me THIS ARTICLE highlighting creativity’s role in learning even the simplest of math concepts. In it, the author uses scholarship and research to slowly and skillfully deconstruct our entire systems of assumptions about how math is best learned.
Long story short… no grades for math either!
See you next week!
Lee
PS - I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.