When you’re a musician, all to often, you’re self-employed. And, contrary to the common belief, if you are a musician who wants to stay in business, you need to get busy in order to be busy. This is the subject of this blog: where to spend your energy.
I discovered very early on in my profession that it is much better to anticipate than to cope. Anticipating, to take a very simple example, is to plan paying the mortgage every month instead of letting it surprise you and you’ve got no money in your bank account.
Anticipating means that you put out the fire when it’s in the frying pan before it gets to the whole house.
You get my meaning.
What I do most of the time is preventing bad things from happening. For that reason, I don’t want tensions in my studio when I teach. I’ll joke and diffuse any bad feelings I might sense between two people who happened to be there. And, for the record, the tension is almost never coming from me but more likely from a sibling or a parent that is witnessing the progress (or most likely lack thereof) of the student. That, for me, is preventing a slew of bad consequences that I really don’t want when I work. The first one being a student that cannot perform, the last one being a student that decides that my place is not good environment for them to grow musically. So: no tension.
But the anticipating doesn’t stop there. I try to get ahead with my internet visibility before my business slows down. I try to keep a healthy budget in order to be able to cope with an unpredictable expense. I try to have a good relationship with my own body and not eat too much and feel sleepy during my time with a student.
There are a thousand things big and small that I do and maintain every day in order to keep my business afloat.
Now, when I mentioned what I do, my hygienic routine so-to-speak, I used the word “try”. Because I do. But I am not perfect. I am not a robot. Sometimes, no matter the amount of caution and planning, things go wrong. “Life is what’s happening when you’re making other plans” John Lennon used to sing. So true. So painfully true.
