There are no shortcuts to any place worth going Beverly Sills
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A Creative Career -vs- A Creative Life
One of the concepts that I want to explore on this blog is how to be creative for your entire life. What I am calling “creative sustainability.” So much of our creative training, whether art school, drama school, music school etc (and since I went to all three, I think I have an idea of […]
Offhand comments
(this is another post I found buried which never got published. It’s from a few months ago “Your voice sounds tired.” it was an off hand remark after I was trying to vocally warm up at 7:45am before heading out the door to teach all day and do another performance of my show. How am […]
The Spiritual Business – the art of making people feel good
(I found this post hiding on computer, so it was no longer last night, but point is still valid.) Last night I went to a London concert for Krishna Das, a spiritual musician of Indian chants with a significant following. The event was at the Camden Centre with approximately 800 people in attendance. I was […]
Weaning off the Teat
One of my portfolio of jobs is that I teach singing at the London College of Music. This is a three year musical theatre training programme and I teach students across all three years. The current graduating class started with me last year and I have been teaching them now for two years. This year […]
When to Walk
I posted a slightly smug message yesterday about how I was going to leverage an opportunity. However, after meeting with the potential client, I’ve got cold feet. He’s young. He’s ambitious. He’s got big plans. These are all fantastic traits. What he doesn’t seem to have is a solid business plan. Don’t tell me how […]
How to work for free (without losing your shirt!)
It’s raining, it’s pouring and this old man is (hopefully) scoring. Off to have a meeting with a young editor of a new, local online magazine. One of those ‘grand ambition, no budget’ type organisations. They had a post on Gumtree (or Craig’slist – I always get them mixed up) which was looking for young […]
Advance Warning
I saw this sign on my way to teach the other morning and it made me stop and take a picture. I love that we need advance warning of when we will have fun, as if it’s somehow detrimental to our health or such a low priority that it needs to be scheduled into the […]
6. Follow the leaders in your field
In your quest to keep your ear to the ground, you should be following all of the leaders in your field on social media. Set up bookmarks for their blogs, follow them on Twitter, or follow their fan pages on Facebook. You may decide you want to try and connect with them directly on LinkedIn, […]
5. Listen first, then talk
Good face-to-face conversation involves listening more than you talk. Likewise in social media. You want to spend more time listening to what it already being said, and seeing where you can contribute to the dialogue, rather than shouting overtop of existing conversations or trying to monopolise the bandwidth. This is true at all times, but […]