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Being prepared is more than just
practicing your music.
Quincy Jones knew about preparing when he produced the hit,
"We Are The World." In dealing with so many superstars, he
put a note on the studio entrance that said "Check your ego
at the door." Quincy knew that there would only be a select
number of musicians who would end up on the finished record,
even though many of them would start out tracking on the
multitrack master. It was inevitable that someone was going
to get dumped!
Key: Being open. Quincy
had to prepare all them to be open to giving their
best performance, regardless of whether they ended up on the
record or not. By releasing their attachment to the outcome
they would all satisfy a purpose greater than any one
person. This didn't mean giving up who they are. It meant
bringing who they are forward with an eye on the
perfect end result. Being open makes seeing the perfect
end result easier.
This is "expanded thinking" in action. Expanded thinking
means you know the power you have as a unique human
being, and you also know the power you have when your
personal agenda is flexible, instead of rigid. This is one of
the most common success techniques used by the best studio
players in the world. They do their best in the present
moment and they have an open, balanced viewpoint of the
whole picture.
Are you prepared with the right
attitude, the right tools, the right amount of discipline
combined with spontaneity? Or are you resistant to
opening more doors in order to have more results in your
life? Sometimes it's our old beliefs about things that keep
us in a pattern of resistance.
Hidden: Our inner belief system
often shuts down our openness. On the outside we may
think that we deserve success, but we may have a
pattern of saying, "I can't afford to pay for more music
lessons." And then our growth toward success is slowed down
because we set ourselves up to afford less. Maybe
what we think and what believe inside are two
different things.
Key: If you consciously
choose to be open, you will start to undo
self-defeating beliefs. Being closed is a form of
resistance. Being open is a way of releasing resistance
without giving up who you are. When we're open, big things
can happen. It's like having a much bigger mitt for your
opportunities to land in - and it's key to be aware of
the source from which your opportunities come from. And
just what IS the source?
Important:
Your source isn't money. Your source is people.
Every check you have ever gotten has come from people. Every
gift or meal or kiss or coupon or record deal or food stamp
or dinner date has come from people. Every idea, every
thought, every notion you've ever had has come from either
you or from other people. People are your source.
And knowing how many people there are out there, it's almost
unthinkable that we don't have a massive overflowing
abundance of everything, We must really have a lot of
resistance going on for us if we're still broke or
unsatisfied at what we're doing! And like I said, much of
our resistance is subtle. We don't know it's there and we
don't stop to think in a different way so as to be less
resistant. And musicians have a special challenge in the
area of resistance.
Trap: Musicians often learn
their craft by repeating the same pattern over and over
again. Step-by-step, you start out slowly, finding
the best fingering position or the correct posture, and you
repeat the drill many times the same way. Eventually, you
get it under your belt, and then the teacher gives you
something more advanced. Again, you lock in a pattern of
focused repetition to reach your technical goal. When you've
gotten it technically, you bring in the other elements of
interpretation and feeling, but the pattern of repetitive,
linear action becomes your standard map for achieving
results. And, it works!
If you think about it, using just one patterned
method - is simultaneously resisting sixteen other
methods of reaching the same goal! Now maybe it doesn't make
sense to use sixteen different fingering positions to play
the same riff, but if we don't practice being open to a
variety of solutions, we don't tend to be accustomed to
looking in a variety of places for solutions! We tend to get
stuck in narrow thinking. We even develop selective loyalty
to a particular teacher, and often find it uncomfortable
changing over to someone new!
This pattern of thinking begins to blend into other areas of
life. We get comfortable recording another demo, when we've
only sent the first one out to five different places, or we
haven't sent it out at all. We get stuck thinking money is
tight, but we shouldn't risk seeking an investor because we
we'd have to give up a piece of the "pie." We use the same
manager or producer even though our sales haven't risen
above the level of the first hit record, and concert
attendance is dropping. We leave another love relationship
because women are all the same, or men are all the same.
This is all linear thinking, instead of expanded
thinking.
Learn more ways to expand your thinking with the entire
Life Success tape
series. Every step you take makes a difference in the
direction of your life.
Created 7/12/98 • Modified
1/28/01
©
Copyright 1998 - 2005 John Vestman
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