Running your music career: an analogy

I love run­ning. Yeah, I know — to some of you that may seem like com­plete lunacy; but to me, there is noth­ing more exhil­a­rat­ing than push­ing myself to the limit by chal­leng­ing myself to go that extra dis­tance. I rec­om­mend it for any­one who wants to learn how the mind can truly pre­vail over sub­stance. Ath­letes often to refer to this as being in the zone.

At any rate, as I was run­ning the other day, I sud­denly found myself cre­at­ing an anal­ogy between run­ning (as a sport) and ones career in music. Two sig­nif­i­cant things hap­pened from this. One, is that I real­ized there were many inter­est­ing cor­re­la­tions between the two and the other is that before I knew it, I had run my 5K in no time at all. Love those times when my mind is pre-occupied with every­thing BUT pain!

1) Train hard and your body will adapt

Repeated expo­sure to mild stress stim­u­lates adap­tion. What this means is that when a run­ner con­tin­ues to place demands on the body (push­ing them­selves); the body in turn begins to adapt to those demands and per­for­mance begins to increase.

Let’s look at your music career in par­al­lel to this con­cept. Gui­tarists: Remem­ber how frus­trat­ing it was to get your index fin­ger to form those bar chords when you first started out? Seemed impos­si­ble at the time, didn’t it? How about you key­board play­ers. Ever thought you’d get those left hand 4th and 5th fin­gers to respond? When you con­tinue to push your­self and get out of your head (a con­cept I use to stop lis­ten­ing to that lame “voice” in your head that tends to tell you that you’ll never be able do any­thing) results hap­pen and you adapt accordingly.

The same holds true with any­thing relat­ing to your career. Per­form­ing may ter­rify you, but the more you impel your­self to get out there and do it, a strange thing hap­pens: you actu­ally become good at it! Lol.

2) Get out of your head: clear­ing your mind

One of the emi­nent chal­lenges for run­ners is restrict­ing the propen­sity for pain. Our brain likes to react to even the slight­est dis­com­fort. Because of this, that famil­iar voice starts talk­ing smack inside our head: “stop, this sucks….and this HURTS.”  This is the very rea­son why most peo­ple who start work­ing out or run­ning, give up too early.  They lis­ten to that lit­tle voice say­ing “I can’t.” Amaz­ing how such a pow­er­ful thing as the brain can work against us in such an aggra­vat­ing and destruc­tive way.

DON’T LISTEN!

To get away from this agi­tat­ing self-defeating talk, run­ners often dis­as­so­ci­ate these feel­ings; step­ping away from them in the mind and going some­where else. Not try­ing to get all weird here. I’m not talk­ing about going to some planet 10 galax­ies away.  I’m just talk­ing about re-focusing on another topic (very much like I did with this blog idea). Some­times I just place more focus on my sur­round­ings rather than what I’m feel­ing. The body is much more resilient then we give it credit for. It’s our brains that tend to fake us out into think­ing that we can’t go further.

“I don’t think the aver­age per­son real­izes what sort of impact the mind has on per­for­mance. They know it impacts, but at most they might think, ‘Well, I read about it once but it doesn’t affect me that much.’ Rest assured, it does.” –Leonard Zaichkowsky; Boston Uni­ver­sity sports psy­chol­o­gist who has worked with every­one from lit­tle lea­guers to Olympians.

Suc­cess in your music career will weigh heav­ily on mind games – mainly you and the chat­ter inside your head.  I some­times have musi­cians shrug me off when it comes to this, but you can’t get around the valid­ity of it no mat­ter how much denial seems to seep through. The faster you get your mind off the neg­a­tive bab­ble that res­onates inside your head, the bet­ter. What is crazy is how we tend to believe these innu­en­dos, as if it were actu­ally true. That’s the thing…it’s not real. One of my favorite acronyms is one for fear:

FEAR = False Evi­dence Appear­ing Real

Focus on what mat­ters and spend your time research­ing and react­ing to the best alter­na­tives to reach your music goals, aka the fin­ish line. The idle chat­ter inside your head telling you it’s not pos­si­ble is not pro­duc­tive, nor accurate.

3) You reap in races what you sow in training

Ok. I actu­ally got this one from The Runner’s World Com­plete Book of Run­ning, but it relates well to this topic. The premise is that the speci­ficity of ones train­ing will result in the suc­cess (or lack of) in the races ran. If a run­ner runs slow and long, then they will only run this way in a race. If a run­ner decides to train at a fast pace, but at short dis­tances, then that run­ner won’t have the sta­mina to run a marathon.

How does this relate to your music career?  How you “train” within the many facets of your career, will decide your success.

“The idea that a band prac­tic­ing 10 hours a week is a good thing does not always hold true. Quan­tity does not equal qual­ity. It’s the what of what you do that counts.”  –Hugh Hession

Just doing some­thing (any­thing) towards the advance­ment of your career doesn’t sub­stan­ti­ate pos­i­tive results. You have to be cal­cu­lated about the actions you take.

A lead vocal­ist can scream a song 10 times in one band prac­tice but if they are killing their voice doing it, what good will that do at the big gig?

If a band is prac­tic­ing the wrong back­ups over and over, they will only be singing erro­neous back­ups excep­tion­ally well. Basi­cally this means you will be con­sis­tent in suck­ing each and every time. Same goes to wrong chords, ter­ri­ble sound, lousy arrange­ments or a tyronic per­for­mance. Take the time to train con­sis­tently, but also correctly!

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