Posts Tagged ‘personal development’

Note: This is a guest post by Maria Rainier, enjoy!

Personal Development for Musicians: Developing Plans for Success

As a musician, I often find that I’m struggling to remain a well-rounded person. I’m a classical pianist, and for the most part, that translates to a large number of hours spent in the practice room. While that’s great for my technique and musicianship, it’s not so wonderful when I start to think about other aspects of my life. Because I’ve focused so much on practice, it’s easy to feel that I’m underdeveloped in other areas – and that has led me to spend some time and energy on personal development. Although it got me far outside of my comfort zone, I identified several areas of my life that seemed lacking in attention and proficiency. It wasn’t easy to start developing these areas, but it’s been well worth the investment for me. Here are some of the areas of my life that I’ve been working on (besides being a musician, of course) – and I’ve found that development in these areas has helped me to feel well-rounded again.

Written Communication

Guest post by me over at Gen Y Rockstars, which is kind of ironic, seeing as I am about as Gen Y as Kurt Cobain ha ha. First of a series of 3 posts.

My Music Marketing Epiphany

As a writer I am kind of happy with this series, nice combination of can’t-help-myself sales hype-type and genuine reflection.

Book review by Seamus Anthony

Recently an “Internet Acquaintance” of mine, Shann Vander Leek sent me her book, Life On Your Terms, and as I knew very little about her or her book, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that I really enjoyed it.

Actually, I didn’t just “really enjoy it” …

I flippin’ loved it!

Here’s the email I sent to Shann before I had even finished reading it:

Hi Shann,

I am dipping in and out of your book and each time it’s like an inspiration espresso!

Accordingly, the following is pretty turbo-charged but I assure you, written by one stone-cold sober musician.

Reading this book, both your words and your interviewees, I have made quantum leaps – especially in the areas of legacy, clarity and courage – and (very rare) was on the verge of tears just a moment ago due to several impactful moments in a short space of time as I flipped randomly through knockout chapter after knockout chapter, too buzzed to read for long without acting on my passion – right now.

By Seamus Anthony

You may or may not have noticed that I have not written as much for Rebel Zen of late as I used to. There is a twofold explanation for this:

1) Lack of time – not a lot I can do about this at the moment; gotta put food on the table.

2) Negative frame of mind – basically, I am a musician who also writes personal development stuff, and over the years of I have noticed a roller-coaster shaped trend to my personal development content output based on my reoccurring and longish cycles of depression.

Basically when I am feeling groovy, I write lots of personal development stuff, but when I am going through a prolonged “dark night of the soul” my armchair-Zen-style blatherings tend to dry up (which is very inconvenient because it is quite a lucrative writing market for me when I have good momentum going).

Zen and the Art of Being Miserable?

When I am dark, I find it easy to keep writing music, because these are works of art that feel fully at home with states of mind of like depression, anxiety and paranoia. After all where would some of my favourite musicians like Nick Cave, Pink Floyd or Morrissey be without their “black dogs”?

By Seamus Anthony

Now that I have made the commitment to blogging here again, I have been pondering what this blog is actually about. To start with it was about “personal development”, “self-improvement” and “success” but I have never felt comfortable with any of these labels whatsoever.

I think I prefer to decide that this blog is about “Meaning”.

Why? Because that’s what we all need and crave in this life – Meaning – and big time.

It is my humble opinion that all of human activity, everything we do, is shaped and coloured by the fact that we are given life, wonder “why?”, get no answer and then have to die. This shaky sequence of events, facts and mystery is the foundation on which the entire human condition is built.

But Why?

The thing that sets us apart from the animals, as far as we know, is that we hit the age of 2 or 3 and suddenly we wonder: “Why?”

It’s like – all this stuff exists … ok … got my head around that …

… but why?

By Seamus Anthony

I was just reading a blog post that explained something I kind of knew but hadn’t really thought about – that the old gatekeeper barriers (to a career in the creative arts, creative business, etc) that the Internet has famously blown away were only ever a smokescreen anyway and that the real barrier still exists – hard work, persistence, focus – all that tough stuff that we don’t wanna do a lot.

Just so happens that I was also just reminiscing with an old friend who I used to live with in the 90s and with whom I have recently made contact with again ala Facebook. We were talking about where the time goes and how did we get this “old” already so fast and I said something about how I wish I could time travel so I could go back and tell the very happy-go-lucky 26 year old me to get the fuck on with it and do some hard work (that mattered, as opposed to tending bars until 4:30am like a crazed go-bot for minimum wage).

Then the thought struck me that I CAN time-travel and that I SHOULD and that in fact it is VITAL to do so.

By Seamus Anthony

Do you find yourself confused as to what your main direction in life is? Do you find yourself exploring This and then That and then berating yourself because you reckon you should have spent that time working on One Major Purpose instead of allowing yourself to get distracted?

Well, if so, RELAX!

Maybe you aren’t wasting time at all!

Maybe – just maybe – you are in the process of creating something amazing and highly original by combining different concepts and fields into One New Thing – a new category even!

READ

Can’t see how this applies to you and your disparate interests? Well, then maybe you need to explore this concept a bit more. Some good books to read are “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin, “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Kim and R. Mauborgne and “The Medici Effect” by Frans Johansson. All great books about the importance and methods of creating extraordinarily original offerings.

DRAW

By Seamus Anthony

If there is something you are truly shit scared of doing then I reckon that the best gift you can possibly give yourself is to step up to the plate and do it. But how do you get yourself off the couch and into the fire? Here’s a couple of personal examples of how I managed to confront my worst fears and come out reasonably unscathed.

Flying into the Face of Fear

Ok – so “feel the fear and do it anyway” has become one of many clichés in the Personal Development world, but nevertheless, like most clichés it contains a powerful truth. I have repeatedly found that if something is worth doing then it is probably going to be a bit scary. Why? Because it means stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking failure.

OK so my last post was a bit hardcore, but it was meant to be. I wanted it to be a short, sharp, unexpected shock.

Why? Because I don’t want Rebel Zen to be just another blog. In fact, Steve and I do not intend Rebel Zen to just be a blog but something much more multi-faceted than that.

We have both of us had a break from regular posting in order to refresh and now I think we are ready to come back to Rebel Zen with a fresh perspective for 2009. And no, it’s not going to turn into a ‘doom and gloom’ activist blog BUT we are hoping to shake up the personal development scene as best we can – to confound expectation. That’s why it’s ‘Rebel’ Zen not ‘Feel Good Zen’, y’know?

What I am interested in is how can we move boundaries around and mix the idea of a personal development brand with activism, with art-for-art’s-sake, with music, with offline ‘real world’ happenings, and with whatever else we want to throw into the mix. And importantly – how can we make this something about ACTION not just IDEAS – because ideas are fantastic but without action they are just puffs of smoke on the breeze.

How’s that for a positive “personal development” message?

But it’s true; life on Earth is actually pretty fucked up.

We live on an insane planet full of misery, illness and evil. Right now millions of people are dying of horrible illness, injuries caused by accidents, crime and war or they are starving to death. They are starving to death because of “man’s inhumanity to man”, in other words they are dying because those in power are too evil and selfish to do the right thing.

People, often innocent women and children, are terrified, injured and/or dying because of war. Stop and think for a minute what war is, how truly insane and disgusting it is: Governments sending armed soldiers (usually under-educated, immature men who have been encouraged to act like savages) with high-tech weaponry to tear other people’s flesh, to smash heads and bodies in a splatter of gore, to put other people through massive, unbearable agony, burning, disfiguring, severing limbs – babies, children, women, men. The horror is so hard to face up to, so easy to ignore and yet so real for a great number of people.