Mindset Archives - DJ Chimney Sparrow

Want Your Goals Like the Air You Breathe

I used to love listening to motivational speeches, the kind you can find on YouTube, usually with lots of rah-rah music in the background.

One of the most important lessons those inspirational people managed to pound into my head was this: Find a way to make your goals important to you.

Doesn’t that sound obvious? And yet, most of us only half-a** our goals, having little appreciation for how hard it can be to stay motivated during those long plateaus where it’s seems like nothing’s working.

Many adults conclude after a few failed attempts that they just don’t have that ‘special stuff’ that enables others to achieve their goals – never realizing they simply weren’t using the right mental tool for the job.

Stay in the Now

This article is inspired by Realizing the Power of Now, a series of talks by Eckhart Tolle. Don’t worry skeptics; I’m going to be talking psychology, not spirituality, today.

As I’ve written about many times previously, there is a great deal of conflict between the brain and body, or if you like, the conscious and subconscious. And it does NOT help you compose or produce any better.

The brain tends to be the biggest troublemaker, mostly because it doesn’t know when to shut up.

It will try and make creative decisions, but these will be based on logical factors like what your contemporaries are doing, what riffs worked for you in the past, etc.

This results in one-dimensional or ‘pandering’ music, where it sounds like a washed-out clone of it’s brethren.

The body is rather more mysterious in the eyes of science, expressing itself through sensations and emotions. The upside is those vague perceptions are informed by a LOT more information, as when we have an intuition about something.

Ideally the subconscious is the one pulling the strings, with the brain stepping in for more calculated decisions, like the length of reverb time, or the best mastering settings for a particular streaming service.

In practice however, the conscious brain is all too comfortable overriding the body’s intelligence. One way to prevent this, is by focusing on the present moment, or the now.

Okay, a little background: Our consciousness generally works by drawing from the past, or planning for the future. There’s some in-the-moment calculations, but most activity falls into the other two categories.

This can (and usually does) turn dysfunctional, as when we ruminate about the past, and/or worry about the future.

So to eliminate that, we can learn to keep our focus on what’s happening in the present moment – what Eckhart Tolle has called the razor’s edge of now.

Here’s a useful trick: Ask yourself, what at this very moment, is lacking?

You can probably think of tons of things you wish were different – the difficult client, the track you have to finish by tomorrow, etc. – but if you really think about it, these concerns only exist in the past or future.

What’s lacking at this very moment? Well, my back is a bit sore, I’m tired from a long week, but these are minor things. Nothing that would stand in the way of creating music.

And by the way, this does NOT mean you just go through life never thinking about the future. You still plan for the future, but you do so in the NOW, allowing your brain and body to work together.

As the picture above illustrates however, this is not so easily accomplished – the brain LOVES to get involved, so much so that as soon as you think about staying present, you are no longer present. You are just watching the thought.

When in front of your DAW or score sheet, your brain may try to assert itself with various thoughts and opinions, or even co-opt your body sensations of anxiety or impatience.

In time however, these feelings will start to die away, and ideas start to gently present themselves.

Which is great – in theory. So, how do we go from here to practicing our presence? (How’s that for alliteration?) Well please…

I’ve already talked about the advantages of improving your focus through meditation here, so “now” (heh) would be a good time to review them.

The more familiar you are with producing or composing music, the more easily ideas will come when you focus on the present. Keep honing that craft!

Also, it will take a little time, especially at the beginning, for your brain to quiet down and make way for the subconscious. Be sure to leave some extra time for your projects – rushed deadlines kill creativity.

Even when your brain calms down, ideas don’t always appear automatically. In that case, try something, anything, to get the ball rolling. Transpose a chord. Throw in an unusual plugin. Go outside and run around the house three times.

As you become more experienced, pay attention to the moment in which you hear each new or altered sound – before the brain kicks in.

As Eckhart explains, there’s a moment, when we first perceive something, when the brain has not yet analyzed and labelled it. There is only pure, undiluted, awareness.

This is where our honest feelings about what we hear surface, where we can genuinely tell whether we’ve created something beautiful to our ears, or it isn’t quite hitting the mark.

If we miss this, a moment later the brain steps in with, ‘ah, my fans will love this!’ or ‘ugh, that sounds so raspy’, or something, and then that thought will dictate how we feel next.

But developing this skill of staying in the now allows us increasingly to know what we are creating isn’t just generally ‘good’ music: It’s aligned with the kind of good WE want to create.

So learning to stay in the now is vital to getting our mental chatter out of the way and improving the quality of our creative insights. But it’s usefulness doesn’t end at the studio door.

Imagine going through your day without all the worrying, all the ruminating, about what was and could be. How much more pleasant would that make the experience?

One of the best things about staying focused on the now, is you can start practicing – right now. When else is there?

Credits:

‘A Barber Shaving a Client’s Face’ by Los Muertos Crew

‘Brain Anatomy Human Science Health’ by holdentrils from Pixabay

‘Close Up Photo of Men Having Conversation’ by ANTONI SHKRABA

‘Dreamy ethnic businessman thinking about project’ by Michael Burrows

‘Round Mirror’ by Ethan Sees

‘Woman making heart with hands while having video call’ by Artem Podrez

The “Real Job”

I’ve picked up a new job. It’s not music-related, at all. It’s menial, and tiring, and the hours are long. But it pays the bills. In short, it’s what others refer to as a “real” job.

Three times a week, I now go to bed at 9pm, wake up at 3am, and drive to the workplace, where I serve customers as a barista from 4-11am.

I then go home, stretch, nap, then work as much as I can on my musical projects before the evening. Which hasn’t been much so far, but I’m adapting – today is already one of the best so far.

You might think this would bother me, but so far at least, it hasn’t. And I think that is almost entirely due to something I love talking about in this blog – my mindset.

When You Don’t Feel Ready

A few years back, in a dance studio in Toronto, I was introduced to a fantastic tango song by another instructor. “This is great! When are you going to perform it?” I asked.

“Oh no”, she shook her head emphatically, “I need to find the right person to perform it with first.”

Most of us have certain projects we would LOVE to work on, but don’t – they’re so d*mn good, we feel we could ruin them if we rushed in before we have the right resources, skills, etc.

At the same time however, we risk taking this too far, adopting a perfectionist attitude that keeps us from taking on the work we love most. Where do we find the balance?

Music Composition, and the Levels of Competency

So I recently started putting together a music composition template with Native Instruments, and OH MY GOD is it gonna be good when it’s done.

It’s a little scary frankly, how effortlessly awesome the instruments sound. So good, it could convince some new composer they are better than they actually are (not me though).

That got me thinking about the stages we progress through as we improve our music composition skills.

It’s good to know where you are, honestly. It allows you to take pride in how far you’ve come, with a big spoonful of humble pie for the journey ahead.

So I decided to apply the Four Stages of Competency (*dun dun dunnnnnn*) to the world of music composition. May it help you define where you are – and maybe even help move you up a rung.

On Lovingkindness Meditation and Compassion

I wouldn’t say that compassion and empathy come naturally to me. I wish it did, at least up to a point, but it’s just not the direction my mind would go if I didn’t herd it in that direction.

This is a problem when it comes to doing good work. I mean, you just tend to push harder when you’re more aware of people who may benefit from your efforts.

There’s lots of other benefits too (read on for more).

There’s good news though: The latest research suggests that meditation can be effective at rewiring our brain to consider others more. Specifically through a special format known as lovingkindness.

Street Epistemology, and How It Can Help Your Music

I had my first real brush with street epistemology a week ago, on Anthony Magnabosco’s YouTube channel.

Most of the videos consist of him interviewing individuals on a variety of controversial topics, from the existence of God to karma, ghosts, political views, and so on.

Amazingly though, they don’t end (so far) with threats of violence. This is due to the unique way Anthony engages people, collaborating with them to explore how they know what they think they know.

And it got me thinking – can we turn this approach on itself to make us better composers? (Spoiler: Yes!)

But wait, there's more!

Book Review: The Power of Why

Question: Who are the most innovative people?

It’s not simply a matter of innate talents or predispositions, as Amanda Lang demonstrates in her book, The Power of Why, but rather the fostering and preserving of our natural curiousity.

The word natural is key here, because we’re ALL born curious. It’s how we oriented to the world and learned critical skills like language and mobility.

Obviously innovation and creativity are REALLY important in the music industry, so I wanted to share my thoughts about this terrific read while they’re fresh.

The Challenge of Being an Experiential Learner

Growing up, I was always lost when it came to envisioning the kind of work I wanted to do in the future.

By university, I figured I’d at least narrowed it down to the environmental sciences, because I liked the outdoors, and the prospect of doing research in the field seemed cool.

Boy, was THAT a mistake.

Prioritizing Your Goals is NOT Selfish

Remember to include yourself amongst the people you love.

- Anonymous

I was lucky.

Growing up, I had few friends, and the ones I had were kinda weird (like me). We were outcasts, so we had nothing to prove.

My parents too, had (relatively) few expectations on how I was “supposed” to live, the kinds of people I should spend time with, the type of job I should have, and so on.

In other words, I grew up relatively free from the obligations imposed on most people. In particular, I managed to – mostly – avoid that type of person who takes more than they give.