Five Words for 2019
Community. Compassion. Curiosity. Inner Harmony. Adventure.
Sit with those five words for a minute. Toss them around in your head, maybe say them out loud. I’ve been doing the same the last couple weeks.
For those of you who know me in person, it probably doesn’t surprise you that I am a goal oriented person. I like to know exactly where I am going, what steps I need to take to get there and what will happen next. While I feel like my studio has done some fun things in the past that make it stand out like our annual recital, the group classes in the summers and performing at our local nursing homes, I’m always trying to find a way to top the last event, the last performance and the last year.
So you would be right in assuming I love this time of year – A new start where I can choose where to put my focus and energies. Especially after looking back at the last year and feeling like new things were aligning well. But at first it wasn’t. Perhaps it was because my husband and I were on our honeymoon to celebrate the New Year or maybe it was because the end of 2018 happened in a blur. But when I sat down in my office on Monday, January 7th with no new goals in mind, I felt stuck and let down. ‘Where’s my new year excitement?’ I thought.
So I buckled down and looking online for resources on goal setting for creative and business goals. This search lead me to Emily Jefford’s free guide “Intuitive Goal Setting For Creatives” - Check it out and happy goal setting! While I won’t go into the specifics of how her guide book works, I would recommend it to anyone who is looking to narrow down their interests and values to find themes to guide their goals.
One of the first activities in this workbook is to look over a list of words and mark off any that particularly resonate with you and embody where you’d like to go from here. Which leads us to the five words listed at the top of this post again.
Community. Compassion. Curiosity. Inner Harmony. Adventure.
I’d like to unpack these five words and openly brainstorm how I’m seeing them in relation to my studio.
Community.
This one seems simple, but can be difficult to attain. I would love to have a studio where my students know each other’s by name and have relationships to support each other’s successes and failures. When I see parents of my students getting together during group classes or chatting at our recitals, I am thrilled because I hope it means they find support amongst each other. We are all experiencing learning new skills together, so we can all provide insight from our own experiences, right? I’m still working on ways to do this, but I do my best to refer to other families in lessons. Jog their memories about the last recital, remind them of a fun game we played together at group class. At our largest recital of the year, I hold a fun activity where we give positive responses to others’ performances on notecards and then give them out to students at the end, so everyone can see the impact their work has made on someone else. I’m still working on some other fun ways to boost this in my studio – So anyone with some fun recommendations, please feel free to send them my way!
I’d also love to see a greater sense of community between the music teachers of our area. I’m hoping to take some bigger steps and build more relationships with others. Often times it is easy to become so hyper focused on our studio or our program that we forget there are other teachers out there doing some of the same things with the same goals. Between all the different hats and jobs we have as a part of our jobs, it is easy to feel isolated and alone. I’d love to create a community of teachers who collaborate on performances in the community, support each other at our studio recitals and give a listening ear for those things only another teacher would understand. How to make that happen is still in the works, but it’s a large aspect for my vision of 2019.
Compassion.
This is a word I’ve spent a lot of time with over the years and the act of it is easier said than done. There was a time in college when my church did a study on the word compassion, the golden rule and how it is woven all belief systems, not just Christianity. Admittedly this is a tall order somedays. But I’m using this word as a reminder for me in lessons through the week. My students aren’t just students – They’re sons and daughters and parents and artists and old and young and all sorts of things in between. I’m hoping by reminding myself of this word on a regular basis, I can try to be actively compassionate and demonstrate it more clearly to students as I work with them.
I also like how this relates back to the community aspect – You can’t have community if you can’t have some compassion for each other. Relating to everyone’s struggles and successes, getting to know each other at studio events… These all help foster compassion. And compassion feeds into community. I see a lot of potential for a positive loop between these two words.
Curiosity.
I want this for both my students and myself. I think curiosity fuels learning, it pushes us to want to know and understand more. So how can we bolster curiosity with ourselves? What regular habits can I do in my life to keep me engaged? What can we do in lessons to build up our curiosity? It is so easy for me to get caught up in the rush to cover all the things I feel my students need to know about their instrument and music. But what if I focused my energy on piquing their curiosity? What if we had more play in our lessons? There are ways to do that with my beginning students all the way up to advancing high schoolers or adults. I want to be more aware of incorporating these aspects into our lessons regularly. A goal for this year is finding a space to hold regular group classes again, because I have found these to be a wonderful avenue for students to literally play on their instruments. I’m ready to add that back into the mix for my students and find ways to expand on that.
Inner Harmony.
Did you know in a recent study conducted by the University of Westminster, 71.1% of musicians said they had suffered from panic attacks or anxiety, while 68.5% said they struggled with depression ? While correlation does not equal causation and therefore having music in your life doesn’t make you more susceptible to these struggles, based on my own experiences I feel there might be something that pulls the same people to music that might have more struggles with mental health. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve known many musicians who have dealt with these issues, myself included. Even if you don’t related to these areas in a clinical way, life is wrought with anxiety. As I was going through the word list ‘inner harmony’ stuck out to me more than similar words like peace because it implies a sense of balance, along with calm. We talk about harmony all the time when working with musical groups, so the concept of balance between different voices is familiar to me and probably other musicians. For myself, I want to find a balance between the main “voices” in my life. This includes the studio and other work I do, my home life that I’m still creating with my new little family and more. It is my hope that finding the right levels between the voices will achieve a source of harmony. I’m also reminding myself that harmony might only look like harmony to me, which is what makes it an inner harmony.
What this might look like for my students would be a balance between their multiple voices and interests. Is music important to them? Probably. But they also have interests in helping the community, being active in their churches or schools, spending time with their family or friends. Some of the inner harmony might be about finding the sweet spot of working hard on a piece for performance, yet letting go enough to really enjoy the piece when the time comes to share it. Inner harmony might mean that different seasons we push harder with our music and others we lighten up and use it for enjoyment or unwinding. But these are personal decisions so what it looks like for every student will be different. I want to help every one find that balance for themselves this year and be more mindful of the individual aspect of this phrase for myself and the students I work with this year.
Adventure.
I love adventures! Whether it is simply checking out a new area in my local Washington County, Maryland, going to the West Coast or even back to France, I think there’s so much to be gained from adventures big and small. It feeds into curiosity, while showing how others exist in the world. You learn what how other communities function, which can also give you more facets to that concept of compassion. As you can see, all of my personal words relate to each other as well. But when I think about the studio and how I can bring a bit of adventure to my students, I’m still starting to dream a bit. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was last fall when our performance at Porchfest was cancelled – Because I would have seen that as a wonderful adventure for everyone! Our concert field trips are also local adventures, especially for those students and families who are visiting our Maryland Theater for the first time. But how can we do something like this on a larger scale? Lately I’ve been thinking we should do more and take bigger trips. Could we visit the National Symphony in Washington D.C.? What would need to happen for us to get together and see the Baltimore Symphony? Would students be interested in visiting New York City together and catching the New York Philharmonic? Go to a Suzuki Institute together? If I collaborated with other teachers, could we go even larger and visit another country someday?
A lot of these dreams seem audacious. I’m well aware of this. But I also remember the trips and parts of the world I was exposed to through my music study – I went to New York City. I went to Philadelphia. I went to France, Monaco and Germany. These were through groups like my high school orchestra program or my college’s university choir, but who is to say that someday the private teachers of this area couldn’t do the same thing? Would it be a logistical nightmare? Probably. But how much would our students stand to gain? I think some of the potential benefits line up with these five words.
In summary…
I’m using these five words to move through 2019: Community. Compassion. Curiosity. Inner Harmony. Adventure. Notice how often I’ve said them here, just in this post. Multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll start to get an idea for how much they’ve been on my mind lately. But for now, I’m curious to know what you think. Do you share any of these goals for your own teaching this year? Or maybe one of these areas are something you’ve worked on yourself before and you have some words of wisdom? What process do you have for keeping your work aligned with yourself while pushing the students you work with forward? Please share in the comments below. I’d love to learn a bit from what you’ve found works for you!