Building a Sustainable Career
Regular readers of my blog will already know that I've recently returned to professional playing following a multi-year battle with Musician's Focal Dystonia. Recovery was a tremendous relief, and gave me permission to throw myself into a whirlwind of new projects. Throughout the fall, ideas that had been percolating for years felt like they were ready to burst through, and I couldn't wait to get moving.
At first, this rush of activity was thrilling. That hit of adrenaline and the accompanying little voice in my head whispering, “and then after this you'll do that, and then you'll do that, and...” were novel, and frankly a little addictive after so much stagnation. I got a lot done, started getting back into the world and connecting with people, learning new things, and it felt great.
And then, predictably, I crashed. Starting the week before Christmas, the holiday chill vibe started taking over, and within a few days my interest in doing anything besides lying on the couch totally evaporated. It's ok, I reassured myself. It's just time for a break. But before long, the relaxed, cozy, Netflix-all-day thing started to turn from comforting to lethargic. The breathless craving for movement I'd indulged all fall settled into a pile of gray mush.
After a couple of listless weeks, a path out of the gloom began to emerge. The new year came and went. I had a few meetings that cleared up my hesitation and resistance to some projects, and my confusion dissipated. Before long I was at it again: writing scripts, filming, practicing, teaching. And in a moment of inspiration, I added something else to my to-do list, mostly because I recognized I needed to learn about it myself.
Article about stress and burnout.
As the days flew by, each one stuffed to the brim, I started noticing that the “wheeeee!!” feeling I'd had during the fall frenzy had shifted. The force driving me was no longer the spontaneous release of pent-up energy being freely expressed; it was a kind of intoxicating desperation.
Let's see how much you can get done.
You have to keep making stuff otherwise no one will pay attention.
More often throughout the day, I noticed my breathing was shallow and my mind was racing. In conversations with my husband I found myself responding mechanically without really taking in what he was saying. My sleep quality started to suffer. A complex, self-managed video project—a recording of the Penderecki Cadenza—nearly sent me over the edge. I made sure to do the things that work for me: meditation, exercise, healthy diet. But I dismissed the idea of slowing down. After all, I hadn't busted my butt to recover from dystonia just to sit on the couch: I wanted to make an impact.
Stepping Off the Treadmill
Then, as often happens, I got a big, fat wake-up call from the universe. I awoke at 1 a.m. one night to the sound of my husband returning from a late recording session and glanced at my phone to check the time. Waiting for me was a text about one of our plane tickets for a major international trip:
Your trip has been changed and the original itinerary is no longer possible.
Instantly my mind exploded and my nervous system revved into panic mode:
More money wasted.
Fighting with the travel company.
Finding a new flight.
Canceling other reservations.
Changing my online teaching schedule.
Time lost from other projects.
What if I can't sleep and am exhausted tomorrow?
What if I'm too stressed to focus?
But luckily, I remembered to pause, to arrest the torrent of anxious thoughts:
What's the belief behind all of this?
I watched, waiting for an answer from a place deeper than the frantic chatter. It came quickly:
I have to control myself and everything else so it's all perfect.
I softened, put my hand on my heart. And I thought back to the many, many nights during my injury when the only way to calm down was remember that all I had to survive the next day was showing up to teach some little kids “The Wheels on the Bus.” When I was forced to drastically lower my standards, treat myself with real kindness, and walk away from the non-stop “Well, what have you accomplished lately?” social media game. How had I let myself fall back into my old pattern so quickly?
Amazingly, I was able to relax and get back to sleep. The next two days were spent dealing with the trip fallout. I rested as much as possible, accepting that I might not get much of anything done before we set off for South America. Practicing, creating dystonia resources, planning my next video—it might all have to go. But by the third day, I woke up feeling refreshed and noted that I had nothing on the calendar. Nothing except the same thing that had been pushed back half a dozen times already:
Draft stress/burnout article.
A Path for Sustained Growth
Even during the darkest moments of my injury, I fundamentally recognized it as an opportunity to change my relationship to my playing and my career. At the core, my way of doing things before just wasn't sustainable at any level—physically, psychologically, professionally. I didn't want to just retreat to “safety,” self-imposed smallness, a defensive strategy that wouldn't allow me to share myself. But if I wanted to continue growing, I had to regroup and construct a more stable base to support my work.
The playing part of that process happened over the course of several difficult years of retraining through the Till Approach, which now gives me a solid and reliable technical perch from which to spread my creative wings. And the reckoning forced by that challenging time had a profound effect on my relationship to myself. But the professional transformation couldn't take place until I plunged into the projects I'd been longing to create and started working with what came up.
So here's what I've learned over the past four months: the first step to a sustainable, growth-oriented musical career is a technique that can truly support our creative endeavors. With that in place, we can begin cultivating the following internal practices:
First of all, it means giving ourselves adequate rest. This seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but it's non-negotiable, and we steamroll right over it much of the time.
It means really, honest-to-God supporting ourselves. That doesn't mean never feeling fear or doubt, it just means not letting that fear or doubt take us over. It means cultivating a calm, loving, reassuring presence that's strong enough to help us through it.
It requires letting go of the concept of perfection. I know, easier said than done. But consider the cost: perfectionism takes energy, time, and vitality away from everything else, including our overall quality of life (and isn't that what matters most, really?).
Lastly, building a sustainable career requires committing to a messy, time-consuming learning process. It means feeling frustrated, overwhelmed and dumb, making lots of mistakes, and spending time cleaning them up. And it's worth it.
As a way of closing—I don't think there's any way to shortcut the process of developing these three qualities if we want our careers to be sustainable. How does a tree grow, after all? A seed is planted in the cold ground. At first, it has to push against all that dirt just to burst open and sprout. Then it gets buffeted by wind and water, and maybe even chomped on by a curious animal. Meanwhile, it's being nourished by the nutrients in the soil, the energy of the sun and the rain. If it survives the challenges, in the end it isn't damaged by them—they are how it grows.
May we be like the trees, bending in the wind and becoming again upright; some of us a little more battered than others, perhaps, but with new buds each spring. May we grow tall and strong. The world needs our shelter, our beauty, and our oxygen.