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You know, there’s much more to playing music than learning scales and chops. There’s a whole other side to playing music that’s in your mind and your heart. As a musician, if you create your own personal development plans and follow them, you’ll be able to do much more than you every believed you could.

Setting Goals

This is first and foremost. You probably don’t remember, but one year ago today, you didn’t play nearly as well as you do now. You also hadn’t heard some of the music that’s influenced your playing. There were ideas out there in the universe that you couldn’t have even imagined one year ago today.

So, where would you like to be next year on this day? Nobody ever gets anywhere without setting goals. Decide what it is you’d like to achieve in the next year, and then take the steps you need to achieve it.

But, don’t set unrealistic goals for yourself. This is a real confidence killer. “I want to become proficient in six more orchestral instruments in the next year.” Whoah, put on the breaks a minute! Think about what you realistically can do; take steps toward your goal, and each step along the way will be joyous and inspiring. You can do what you want, but some things take longer than others.

Keep An Open Mind

Every musician has a subconscious checklist. This checklist says, “I am this” and “I am that.” It also says, “I can do this” and “I can’t do that.”

Everybody can benefit from exploration. Get out and check out new music you’ve never heard before. If you’re a jazz player, get some hip hop records. What do you like and what don’t you like about them? What is similar and what is different? You’d be surprised how different styles of music mesh together into something else. Don’t restrict yourself.

If you’re a classical musician, go the library and check out some CDs of music from some other part of the world. If at first it sounds jarring, give it a good listen. Maybe you can bring something unique to your music from a faraway place.

Turn Mistakes Into Learning Opportunities

One thing that holds everybody back, musician or otherwise, is focusing on failure. Regret is a terrible thing. When you make a mistake, reflect on it. Think about what went wrong and how you can make it go better next time.

This is especially important with your performances. When you have a bad show, you just want to go somewhere alone and stew about it. You might want to give the whole thing up and get an office job. But, it’s really important not to think about it that way.

Whether you have a good performance or a bad performance, reflect. Think about what went well, and what went badly. What got the most audience response, and what could you maybe skip next time. This is all part of honing our performance skills.

Relax And …

What’s it all about?

What is teamwork? Why is it that a team of people can achieve greater success than an individual working alone? I’d like to try and answer those questions with reference to my own personal experience.

Teamwork is obviously a subject about which many people seek to know more. If you search the Internet for teamwork related resources and a plethora of information turns up for free. Team building activities, teamwork games, team work articles and motivational teamwork quotes being just a few of the resources readily available to the researcher.

To gather my own thoughts I’ve looked back over my own experiences and thought about the best team I’ve ever worked with, I’ve contemplated what made that team great and asked myself the questions: Why did we we all work so well together? Why were we able to achieve greater than the sum of our individual achievements?

It’s made me think about what stops teams from working well too, what prevents them from being a team?

What is it that make a team great?

Here’s a few dictionary definitions:

Team – “two or more persons working together”

Teamwork – “combined action of a team, especially when effective and efficient”.

In my analysis the key words are “working together” and “when effective and efficient”.

You see those two short phrases describe to me exactly what a great team is all about. I’ll give another dictionary definition before I go on:

Team-spirit – the spirit of a group that makes the members want the group to succeed

I agree wholeheartedly with that definition, there’s nothing quite like being a member of a great team, where everyone is working together in harmony, their individual abilities all harnessed into a single focused effort. It’s genuinely very effective, it makes you feel that together you could achieve anything. You probably could too!!

Why can a team be more effective than one person?

Physical laws would tend to suggest that the overall ability of a group can be no more than the sum of the individual team member’s abilities, and could be slightly reduced due to inefficiencies within the grouping. Sadly this is often true for many so called teams, because in truth they are just a group of people suffering from a lack of motivation and individual selfishness, not what I would define as a team. True teams are empowered by team-spirit, the willingness to act as a member of the group rather than as an individual. Individuals empowered by team-spirit benefit from much greater motivation and therefore achieve greater success than they would acting alone. It follows then that a whole group of people empowered by team-spirit will achieve greater things than all of its individuals would alone.

What motivates people to work as a team?

I’ll never forget my first experience of working with a really inspired team , it was awesome! You could actually feel the energy it generated! I was one member of a great team of …