Finding Your Passions for Success: Think Expansively To Find Your Sweet Spot

I am a huge advocate of doing what you love and finding passion in your life’s work. Passion is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Not only is it incredibly motivating to have your work reflect what you love but chances are that you will be more successful if you are able to able to find happiness in your life, including …

Managing Career Transitions: How to Make the Most of Your Career Cycle

 

“The only constant is change.” –Heraclitus

When you think about life, we are constantly changing. This includes our career paths. Many people believe that once you find your “perfect” career, you are set for life. That only sets up an unrealistic expectation that leads people to feel frustrated that they have not found “it” and to ignore the marvelous process of growth and change.

Creative Personal Branding – Find Your Brand in 4 Easy Steps

One of the most important tools for advancing your career is defining and using your personal brand.  A brand is your vision of who you are and what you do for your audiences.  It is a message that distinguishes you from your competition by expressing what makes you unique and memorable, so that your target audience connects with you emotionally and wants to work with you.
Defining your personal brand is simple using this four-step process:

The SPIRE of Career Planning: How to Build Happiness and Optimism with Meaningful Career Goals

My first post on the SPIRE of career planning explained how to embrace a positive mindset around your career planning and then conduct a personal assessment of your purpose, values, passions, and strengths. In this post, we will explore how to incorporate those elements to set meaningful career goals and create an action plan.  The result will help you to …

Strengths and Happiness Part 2: The SPIRE of Strengths

How do you feel when you are doing something that you are really good at and that you love? Probably pretty terrific! That’s because you are using your strengths: the talents that energize you.  Research from positive psychology demonstrates that identifying and using your strengths enhances your capacity for greater well-being and happiness. Strengths connect closely to Tal Ben-Shahar’s research-based …

How to Recharge and Prevent Burnout: 5 Happiness Practices for Creatives

The fall season is upon us and the arts are back! Along with the excitement of a new season, there are still many challenges for people in the arts. And these challenges can lead to burnout on the part of arts leaders and creative artists. Let’s explore five happiness practices that can help prevent burnout in these creatives and allow …

Authentic Personal Leadership for Arts Leaders: Goal-setting for Leadership Development

Once again, I had the privilege and pleasure to train the mid-career leaders selected for Opera America’s Leadership Intensive 2020. Our work together centers on authentic personal leadership to prepare the participants to step into larger leadership roles. Authentic Personal Leadership Development Curriculum My curriculum focused on how to develop the necessary qualities and skills for taking on larger leadership roles …

Ideas into Action: How Music Entrepreneurs Create and Innovate

One of my favorite aspects of teaching my Innovation and Collaboration class at Yale is the project whereby the students take on a critical problem in the classical music field and work in collaborative groups to create and implement new solutions to these problems.  It was fascinating to see how we were able to take the spark of an idea …

Creativity for Music Entrepreneurs: Leave Time for Incubation

Have you ever found yourself grappling with a challenging problem and then leaving your desk in disgust and frustration, only to find the answer when you wake up the next morning or when you are out for a nice walk? Welcome to incubation, one of the magical elements of the creativity process, where you work hard on a problem, give …

Events

2024 Events February Events February 29, 2024 Positive Relational Energy Zoom Roundtable March Events March 27, 2024 OPERA America Women’s Opera Network Forum SPIRE and Life Balance: How Women in Opera Can Thrive April Events April 2, 2024 Chicago Opera Theater Vanguard Composer’s Initiative Time Management for Composers April 15, 2024 Ensemble Connect Playing to Strengths: How to Optimize Collaboration …