Music For Kiddos Podcast
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This blog post is part two of a three part series and I'm calling “We’re Fried”. In part 1 of this series, I talked about how we are fried professionally today. On this blog post and on episode 66 of the Music For Kiddos Podcast, we're gonna talk about how being fried creatively, which is something I care deeply about.
I don't want to be fried creatively as a music therapist and music educator. I feel my most alive when I am creating. And it doesn't really matter what I'm creating. When my brain is open to the possibility and the opportunity for creativity and there's space for it in my brain, it just feels really, really good.
For me, creativity happens to be connected to music most of the time but it can be so many different mediums. It can just even be the fact that your mind feels open and that there's a little bit of space in it.
I've learned that for me, I have to have capacity and room in my brain, otherwise I cannot create.
An anecdote about efficiency in my life
There's a joke in my family and it is that I am absolutely obsessed with efficiency. I love things like farming combines and farming equipment and machinery that can do an incredible job in detailed things and create something in a short amount of time. I figured this out about myself when I was living in somewhat rural Indiana when my husband was getting his PhD there (I'm from Idaho). One time, I followed my Google Maps and it took me the most bizarre way, through very small towns in Indiana, and I found myself staring at this incredible harvesting operation. They were harvesting like 10 rows of corn at once with this combine. And it was huge! Perfect corn was coming out of the other side and I literally sat there and watched in utter disbelief at how amazing it was. I went home and I probably spent a whole afternoon looking at YouTube videos for the different ways that you can harvest corn.
Now it's a joke in my family and everybody sends me farming machine Instagram posts and stuff like that. So, that was a little side note to let you know how much I love efficiency in my life. It is a really big deal.
Efficiency at work: Batch working
I've shared on the podcast before that I batch work. I look at my calendar pretty far out and when I have a big project coming up, I just put it on a weekend so that I'm not stressing about it and I decide that for that weekend, I'm going to abandon all other work and I'm only going to think about and do that one thing. Ideally, I wouldn't work on weekends— it’s definitely a problem and I haven't figured this out completely but for me, that means maybe four hours on a Saturday. If it's a larger project, then maybe I'm diving in a little bit more, but it's certainly not like my whole weekend.
For example, this weekend is my podcast weekend. What that means is that I am focusing on creating as many podcast episodes as I can comfortably over the course of the weekend and I'm not really giving myself anything else to do. So whatever energy I have to focus on work, just goes on the podcast. I'm not catching up on emails. I'm not really doing anything else; just the podcast.
Sometimes I just need to take a break
Right now, I'm at the point of being able to work ahead and doing batch work. But not too long ago, I had been in this stage for months where I was recording the podcast episode the Sunday night before it came out because I was too busy. I had too much going on and this was the only time I was able to dedicate to recording new episodes. Eventually, the podcast that was one of the things where something had to give up and I had to reprioritize, drop some things, shift other things around and take a pretty extreme break in order to restructure things so that I could start the Music For Kiddos Podcast up again. You can listen more about this reprioritizing experience here.
This also happens in a lot of areas of my life. If I need to sit down and write a song for one of our lesson plans, for example, I now take an entire block of time to write as many as I can over the course of that time so that I have songs to use in the future. When I'm in creativity mode, I'm set up and I've been able to get started, I don't like to stop the momentum. I like to keep the momentum going.
Not all creativity is equal. Even though I can do this with songwriting because now is a practice that flows easily for me, from an efficiency point of view, unfortunately, creativity sometimes doesn't always work that way.
All creativity requires space, not efficiency
It needs time to breathe and it needs genuine nothingness. Here’s an example of that: I got so burnt out at one point in my life that I actually left the field (I shared this in the last episode of the podcast) and I had a full-time job in an unrelated field. Then I started Music For Kiddos as a hobby, and it was very much a hobby until 2020 when it became a business.
Then COVID hit and suddenly everybody went online. Around that same time, the amazing Kerry Devlin and I started talking and we worked really hard to release a Telehealth course when it was very desperately needed. I remember being exhausted. I remember Kerry being exhausted because we put this course together really quickly and I hadn't really had the experience of marketing something like this. And so, she worked on the course content, I worked on the marketing and there wasn't anybody else working for Music For Kiddos at the time. To date, it's our best selling CMTE course because the demand was there. I was such a newbie but we went for it and we figured it out. We released this Telehealth course and we could not believe how much work it was, which I have since learned that anytime you release a course or anything like that, it is an enormous amount of work.
Later that summer, I remember taking my first day off in months, probably since the pandemic hit and after my family and I moved back across the country in April. So this was like the end of July/early August that I took my first day off in months. My family and I went up to the mountains to a cabin and I sat down and I breathed and I rested, like I hadn't rested in a long time. There was finally space in my brain and relief; that feeling of relief when you've had done something so big that you've been working on for a long time. There was a feeling of nothingness in my brain.
I’ve noticed that this has repeated itself so many times in my life, but when I actually rest and I don't keep going and going, I get an idea.
I remember sitting there and it’s like as if the idea was ready to pounce and it was just right there. It just needed a little room in my brain. The idea? I thought of Symposium, our online conference, which is now our biggest event we do every single year. We got to the cabin on a Friday afternoon and within hours by Friday evening, I had that idea. What did that idea mean? That idea completely changed the trajectory of Music For Kiddos.
Last year we had Laurie Berkner as the keynote of our online conference with about 600 attendees. So what this idea that completely changed my business, which changed my life and that allowed me to hire somebody to help me with Music For Kiddos need? That idea needed space and it needed nothingness.
I have learned that breaks are productive, breaks are necessary.
Doing nothing is productive and it's actually necessary to life. I'm gonna say that again, breaks are productive. Nothingness is productive.
Doing nothing and having times where you do absolutely nothing is necessary to your life.
I know, it's really hard to tell a hard working person like you, somebody who has a lot on their plate and a lot on their shoulders to embrace that. But, think about how creativity makes you feel.
Over the last few months when I hit this wall, this “I am fried wall”, I was out of ideas for the podcast. I took a break and now I'm overflowing with ideas and I feel more passionate about what I'm saying.
I have really started to think of outside time as productive.
I am a person who likes to listen to podcasts and similar things when I'm outside. I want to just be. Just looking at the grass grow is productive for me. I put my phone away. I turn off my podcast and I spend time looking at beautiful things outside. We live right by a river and I've started taking a walk to the river, this time, looking at the river and listening to the birds, the trees and noticing, and feeling and allowing is productive and absolutely necessary to my creative process.
My challenge for you
Can you make space for creativity? Can you make space for what creativity needs? Space? Rest? Nothingness? Can you do nothing and feel okay with it? Think about allowing that shift in your brain where it feels productive instead of “lazy”— since when did we learn that resting or whatever is lazy??
If you literally have to schedule nothingness into your schedule in order to make sure that you've done it, that's totally fine. And remember: doing nothing is productive.
Listen to this episode of the Music For Kiddos Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher or wherever you listen to your favorite shows!
We have partnered with West Music to offer free shipping on orders above $59.95 to Music For Kiddos Podcast’s listeners. Check out their incredible instruments and their incredible offerings at WestMusic.com or you can place your order at their customer service hotline at (800) 397-9378.
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We've also partnered with Bear Paw Creek, who creates some of my favorite movement props for my music classes and music therapy sessions. Check them out at www.musicandmovementproducts.com
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