When you feel pulled in too many directions
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. Today we’re looking at finding unity within your life and work.
- 4.5-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. ‘Composing’ an artful career.
When you get to be a certain age, you find yourself sharing the same stories and axioms over and over again, sometimes to the same people. This phenomenon is amplified when you are a teacher; these quips and pearls of wisdom become a part of the ‘act’ you play on on the stage of your classroom.
In college, I had a venerable professor who taught melodic composition as a part of his theory classes. Having taught for what seemed like 50 years, he had well-established ways of introducing the topics he covered in class.
When it came to melodic composition, I think it will be quite some time before any of his students forget him saying, “Your composition must possess the three tenets of a successful melody: unity, variety, and coherence.”
I can still picture him scratching out those three words - unity, variety, and coherence - on the chalkboard.
Students would often chuckle at the old man’s ‘ism-s’, but as time goes by, I’ve found more and more value in the three characteristics that were so often scrawled on the sheets of manuscript we submitted as classwork.
It occurs to me that, while unity, variety, and coherence, make for a satisfying melody, they also foster a fulfilling career.
It’s not uncommon for performing artists to be working multiple jobs and/or gigs, and we are typically engaged in multiple creative projects at any given moment. It can be easy to feel pulled in too many directions and to feel that our efforts and energy have become too diffuse to do anything well.
The obvious solution to this problem is to do less, but I believe there’s a crucial attitude to strike before we start cancelling items on our calendars. If you can identify a sense of unity in the purpose that underlies your work, it can re-energize your efforts, as well as guide your decisions regarding what projects to take on and what to turn down.
As you could imagine, pursuing a career marked with variety and characterized by coherence is also crucial for keeping us interested and sane. In the next item, we’ll look at specific skills and understandings you can develop to foster more unity, variety, and coherence in your work.
2. Skills for the journey.
If you are looking to foster more unity, variety, and coherence in your career, it is helpful to develop a certain set of skills that are often overlooked or taken for granted in many traditional educational settings.
A unified perspective on your professional and creative endeavors requires a sense of self-knowing and intentionality that only comes through a considerable amount of reflection. After you’ve done the work to identify your core values, I find it helpful (even transformational!) to craft a statement that sums up that core purpose behind the work you do; think of it as a personal mission statement.
For example, my most recent version of this statement is as follows, and all of my professional and creative work fits within this description:
“Nurturing individuals and organizations as they become more self-knowing, connected to their communities, and empowered as agents of their own destiny. Creating music and telling stories – as a self-led artist, and as an innovative programming specialist – for the sake of flourishing young people, resilient communities, and pure joy.”
As I already mentioned, drafting such a statement can give you focus and renewed energy for what you do, as well as help you make decisions about what projects to take on and which to respectfully decline.
Variety in your work is crucial to staying interested, engaged, and inspired. Incorporating variety into your life calls for the curiosity and courage to seek out new experiences. Many artists are drawn to variety, having a plethora of interests and a drive to pursue multiple projects at once; as addressed above, the challenge is often having the right amount of variety without going overboard and driving yourself into a manic frenzy (sometimes, ‘variety’ might mean taking a day off!). When you strike the right balance, variety can introduce a degree of playfulness into your work - and if you ask me, that’s one of the things we all are looking for.
There’s a bit less of a clear picture when it comes to what makes a life or a career coherent. Coherence implies that something holds together; it’s logical, consistent, and well-connected. Having a sense of purpose that unifies your work is one of the first steps in making sense of your professional journey, allowing you to weave a consistent narrative throughout the twists and turns we all inevitably go through.
Another powerful tool is an attunement to your own intuition, letting it act as your guide when it comes to making important decisions and exploring your possibilities. At a more concrete level, building a coherent career can mean exercising a degree of savvy in building your professional network and arranging the projects you pursue into a sequence that leads you towards your goals.
Each of these skills can be practiced and developed, and that takes us to the final item of the day.
3. If you work with high school and/or college students.
As I announced last week, I’ve started work on a cohort-style course meant to address the special needs of high school and college students who are motivated to build a creative career for themselves. With a focus on career readiness and vocational flourishing, the course will take a potent and practical approach to building the skills discussed above.
I’ve created a survey that I’m using to guide the development of the course. It’s designed for anyone high school and older to reflect on their journey thus far and what their needs have been along the way.
If you missed taking the survey last week, I invite you to do so now.
If you work with high school and/or college students, I would especially appreciate you sharing the link with your students. All responses are anonymous and extremely appreciated!
That’s it for today :-) 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.