TAG: Juilliard

Cultivate the Happiness Habit: Maximize Flow in Your Creative Career

Last week, I had the privilege of teaching at the Juilliard Lower Strings Seminar, taught by Astrid Schween, the fabulous cellist of the Juilliard Quartet. The  class provides strategies on how to succeed in the world of music.  My topic was how to cultivate the happiness habit and experience more flow in your creative career. Happiness Breeds Success I am …

Conflict Management for Musicians Part II: Getting Past Difficult Personalities

As a musician, how often have you found yourself thinking along the following lines when you have encountered a conflict in dealing with your colleagues?   “She is so unreasonable.  She always wants us to conduct rehearsals according to her plan.”   “He is so disrespectful of my ideas and will not accept my input on this project.  It is …

Conflict Management for Musicians Part I: Take Charge by Using the Right Conflict Management Strategy

This week, I had the privilege and the pleasure of leading Professional Development training on conflict management with alumni of The Academy—one of the country’s leading teaching artist program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.

The 9 nine outstanding musicians who participated in the training are serving as Advisors to the current 20 Fellows of the Academy and the training was designed to provide them with skills and processes to help the Fellows manage conflict in the course of their work.

It is not surprising that conflict arises between musicians. Indeed, musician-leaders—the music entrepreneurs of the 21st Century– are passionate about their work and their ideas, have high standards of excellence, and are deeply committed to your cause.  And when they meet up with others who have the same depth and level of commitment to their ideas, it is going to cause friction. 

In essence, that is what conflict is:  a discomforting difference with someone where the two of you have incompatible issues, principles, behaviors or goals.

Conflict management is an essential leadership skill for the music entrepreneur of the 21st Century since it can help you to face challenges and look for opportunities in your conflict situations and our training provided these talented musician leaders with some great skills for handling the inevitable conflicts that arise in the music world.

Personal Branding for Musicians: How What I Do Makes Me Unique and Memorable

I have been doing a lot of work with students these days around branding and the results have been fascinating! 

First, I worked with the Choral Conducting students at the Yale School of Music to teach them the basics of branding and how to use a brand statement to write a professional bio.  Then I was at Juilliard to help the students create a brand statement that we then converted into an elevator speech. 

A lot of the focus of these classes is to help students discover how they are unique so that they can best present themselves to the audiences that will hire them. One of the best ways to do this is by looking at what you do besides music and figuring out what that says about you.  But first, some basics.