Does your head hurt yet?
How do you know when to leave a project or even life path behind for something else? Suz dives into intentional shifting vs. acting out of fear or boredom.
You’re listening to Episode 62 of the Music-Preneur Mindset Podcast.
Hello! You’re listening to Episode 62: Pivoting vs. Ping-Ponging.
I’m your host, Suz – a mindset coach helping music professionals get clear on their goals and find the time to get it all done while maintaining a healthy work/life balance. I’m also hosting The Music-Preneur Mindset Summit this September 26-28, but more on that later!
I wanted to talk about something that often happens when growing a business – pivoting.
Pivoting towards a new sound, a new service you wish to develop, rebranding, and even pivoting on a smaller level to where you’re putting your focus at any given time.
Pivoting can breathe new life into your daily routine, and even be necessary at times for your growth on a larger scale. But sometimes, when we react out of fear it becomes more like ping-ponging – bouncing from one thing to the next and hoping something sticks.
Have you every felt like that?
Maybe it feels more like a spinning top – scurrying around the surface, knocking into ideas and possible collaborations and opportunities, but nothing sticks as you move onto the next idea or opportunity.
Or maybe it feels more like a game of pin ball to you. You shoot towards a goal, it doesn’t work out and so you get shot right back down to square one and need to find the oomph to keep shooting for the next thing.
For me, my whole life I’ve had different passions and pursuits – from wanting to be on The Mickey Mouse Club to gymnastics to horse back riding to starting a label to becoming The Rock/Star Advocate. And each time I left something behind I felt like such a quitter. I’d panic wondering if I was making the right decision or if I was just giving up too soon.
I’d often cry to my mom when she’s tell me, “If you don’t like it stop doing it,” because then I’d think well then how’d I’d ever master anything????
As I got older, I began to realize that when you truly love something you’ll do it regardless of how hard it gets. Clearly my mom knew that all along which is why she never pushed me to stick with something when I stopped enjoying it. I enjoy what I do now even when it’s hard.
Even when it feels like nothing is going right, there’s still nothing else I’d rather be doing. That’s how you know. And when it stops feeling like that I have the freedom to change my mind and pivot to the next thing.
And that’s great to accept on a larger, macro level – knowing you’ve found your calling and you’re working towards your goals and all the pivoting you did before this point was necessary. Ok great! So thanks for listening to this lesson on pivoting, I think we’re done… Kidding.
It’s easy to understand the concept in a big picture way. But feeling like a spinning top or a pin ball machine or a ping-pong is often how it can feel day-to-day when being an entrepreneur in the music industry.
There’s no blueprint for your career. Everyone’s path in this industry is different. It’s not like you want to be a real estate agent, for example, and a book or seminar can show you all of the steps to become a great salesperson. In real estate you make your money selling property to people. Period.
In music, you might make your living writing for other artists, or managing them, or performing live, or being a session musician, or consulting artists, or a mixture of all of those things. Or completely making up your role and building it from there. Either way – there’s no real blueprint that’s going to be the silver bullet to your success because the music and the people you work with and the audience you serve are always going to be fully unique to
you.
So it’s messy. There’s a lot of bouncing around.
But how can we identify when we’re bouncing around out of fear or boredom and when we’re intentionally pivoting onto the next best thing for our career?
How do you know if walking away from an opportunity or collaboration or song or client is the right thing to do or your biggest mistake yet?
This is something I had planned to talk about weeks ago and then I found myself both pivoting and ping-ponging around so much so that I was having trouble understanding it myself.
Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, the difference on the smaller scale is rooted in intention and evidence based practices.
What do I mean by that? Great question as I had to ask myself that same thing when the thought came to me.
As I said earlier, when it comes to our larger “calling” towards the path we take in life, that passion and drive to want to do something even when it’s hard is a great indicator that it’s the right path for us to move on.
But while we’re on that path, the small pivots we make are identified through intentional decisions. When we make changes to our initial plan without any discerning logic it’s likely we are ping-ponging.
If you’re working on something, even if it’s working for you and you’ve invested time and money and other resources into it, if you’ve decided your goals have changed then you can move forward with intention. That’s all the data you need in some cases.
Don’t stick with something just because you’ve invested a lot of resources into it. It’s not wasted if it brought you to the conclusion that your goals have shifted.
If you have explored and come to find out something new about yourself and/or your passion, then pivot. Take a look at where you are and figure out how you can use your current experience, resources and network to get further ahead in your newly chosen path.
But our intention isn’t the only piece of the puzzle here.
Some solid decisions are made by a “gut” feeling that we can’t explain, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a moment to check in with ourselves and make sure that feeling is our gut and not either our fear wanting us to run away or our boredom finding distraction for “the next best thing.”
If you can eliminate the possibility that it’s boredom or fear steering the ship then full speed ahead!
But, a good way to know the difference lies in something called Evidence Based Practice. In psychology, EBP is the cornerstone for making a diagnosis or decision on something. It’s made up of clinical expertise, the current best evidence available, and the client or patient’s input.
In your case, it’s made up of you being the best expert on you and your life, the data that’s available to you, and your intention or “gut” feeling. ASHA, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, describes implementing EBP in these 4 steps:
- Framing the clinical question
- Finding the evidence
- Assessing the evidence
- Making the clinical decision
Have I lost you yet? I know this may all sound too clinical, but this 4-step process inside the 3-pronged map of being an expert in your own life, looking at the facts in front of you, and listening to what your gut is telling you have always lead me to the right decisions in my daily growth as an entrepreneur.
If I make it a habit to reflect on my work and take notice that the data is telling me this is no longer moving me where I want to go and I’m not feeling too great about how things are currently going then leaving behind what I was working on is not only the right thing to do, but a much easier decision to make.
However, if I move to the next thing without looking at any data, without checking in with myself, without any real strategy or understanding of what my intention is then I know I’m acting out of fear or boredom and I rarely end up where I want to be.
If there’s not enough data or evidence to draw any real conclusions then I haven’t stuck with something long enough to know if it’s the right place to keep my focus.
And “enough” is subjective. If I begin working with someone and they immediately show themselves to be untrustworthy then there’s enough there to know this isn’t a good fit. I don’t need to keep seeing how many times they’ll be untrustworthy. “Enough” isn’t always tied to time, but it is tied to boundaries.
If you’re not sure you know what “enough” feels like to you then I suggest first working on your boundaries – around who you will and won’t work with, what you will and won’t do for your art, what you will and won’t accept as payment, etc. – and then coming back to finishing this episode. We talk about all things boundaries in Episode 18.
But, if you feel you have enough evidence/data to really know if something’s not working, and or something else would work better, then it’s time to pivot.
If you’re still a little fuzzy on the difference between pivoting and ping-ponging let’s take a look at some examples. Here are two things I’ve been going through lately and I’ll explain which bucket each one falls into.
Currently, and for the last 3 months, I’ve been fully focused on building and promoting the Music-Preneur Mindset Summit – a 2.5 day event in Long Beach, NY focused on helping musicians learn how to build a strong foundation and develop a healthy work-life balance in order to create a sustainable career in music.
As my team and I began flushing out tasks and a plan for the remaining months I became a little manic and would start working on one area of the event only to switch my focus with no warning to another area before finishing what I was working on, including these podcast episodes.
I would start writing and outlining episodes and then drop everything and start brainstorming speakers or looking at what merch to order, and so on with the hopes of being productive, however the results left a lot to be desired.
I also wrote and re-wrote plans and abandoned initial outlines because I wasn’t leaving enough time to get them done due to all of the bouncing around from one thing to another.
This event is very important to me and given a slew of other personal responsibilities I was juggling at the time a HUGE amount of fear set in that I wouldn’t be able to handle it all and so with a dash of self-destructiveness and a sprinkle of fraud talk, I was moving in circles rather than down a path I had planned out and envisioned.
So what does this sound like to you? I think we can all agree I was a ping-pong champion right here. I didn’t abandon any plans based on what any data told me or any intentional reason – I was simply running away before finishing things in hopes that I wouldn’t have to deal with any task not being good enough or failing to have the impact I wanted it to have.
Another thing that’s been in flux lately is my current Facebook Group – The Rock/Star Collective – currently it has over 1200 members. Approximately three years ago I created it to serve as a place for musicians to feel safe to ask the questions that were on their mind without judgement, to find support from fellow creatives when the industry took its toll, and to celebrate each other’s small wins in order to stay motivated daily.
I was doing Facebook Lives 2x/week, running daily challenges, posting prompts for people to answer. And then due to low engagement during the live feeds {many watched the replays due to time zone differences}, I began doing only one broadcast per week, and then eventually posting the occasional pre-recorded video.
I even had a signup sheet to encourage other members to host their own FB Lives in the group so that they could practice in a safe space before doing their own in their community.
As the group grew in size the spam posts began to increase and no matter HOW MANY TIMES I deleted posts, left warnings, posted rules of the group, did a video about how to get better engagement from your peers, and explained the purpose of this community, the spamming continued.
So then I started vetting the member requests and turning anyone away who didn’t have any activity in other music-related groups {which took time and research}. But that didn’t help. Then I made it so that you couldn’t post without my approval, but now all I do is delete a bunch of posts before they’re seen by the other members.
The community has slowly become something that I no longer enjoy doing because too many people have entered the space who don’t share the same vision and now I’m no longer inspiring those who DO share the same vision to participate freely.
After much debate, with the help of my assistant, Jenn, I decided the other month to begin building a membership site on my website with a nominal aka practically non-existent admission fee for people to join and be supported in a much more valuable way with the option of being able to promote their music, learn from each other, get feedback, and share their stories all in manageable, organized channels that can be more useful to the community as a whole than a running newsfeed of spam in Facebook.
While that’s being built I also turned my focus to something that allowed me to interact with music-preneurs on a much more intimate level – which is more my speed – in my growing group consulting service – Rock/Star Slackers™.
In this weekly accountability program I meet individually with music professionals in Slack to keep them accountable on their goals, and then consult with the group as a whole, answering their burning questions, in a monthly video call everyone can join.
Growing this group has been a blast and THAT community has become a tight-knit, supportive space.
Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date on the membership site and feel free to visit the show notes of this episode to learn more about Rock/Star Slackers™ – www.therockstaradvocate.com/ep62.
Can you see how in this instance I pivoted? After reflecting on the decreased engagement in the group, the changing tone of the community, and what my intention for the community was, I decided to dismantle and rebuild something I spent years promoting and building in order to give my time and energy to things that felt more aligned with my vision.
Making decisions as the CEO of your career is never easy, but it’s even worse when there’s no rhyme or reason to it.
It’s very easy to let fear take over. Because then the possible failure isn’t on you – it’s on the universe that’s against you or the people who don’t get you or the lack of resources you feel you have, or whatever you tell yourself to talk yourself out of doing anything in the first place.
But, as Tom Hanks says in A League of Their Own, “If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
Side note – if you haven’t seen A League of Their Own please stop listening to this podcast right now and don’t come back to this episode or any other until you’ve seen it. It’s pretty much a requirement if you and I are going to have any level of a relationship in this industry.
Sorry, just needed to make that clear…
If you’re wondering how to stop ping-ponging, I stopped the madness by unplugging and walking away. I also met with my team to reevaluate what was still needed in various areas, I delegated certain tasks, broke other tasks down further so I could more easily digest them, and I set specific deadlines on each.
To recap: take a breath, as for help, break things down, and find a way to stay accountable.
So how are things going for you lately? Are you focused and working towards your goals? Are you taking time to reflect, as a pivot is looming around the corner? Or are you feeling untethered and ping-ponging through life right now?
Whatever group you may fall into there’s no need to judge yourself in any way. Simply acknowledge where you’re at so you can take the necessary steps to improve where needed.
Acknowledge it, own it, and then take action.
Feel free to tell me in the comments of the show notes page or send me an email – suz@therockstaradvocate.com and let me know how things have been going for you!
If you’d like additional help and support feel free to take a deeper look into Rock/Star Slackers™ and/or join us THIS SEPTEMBER 26-28, virtually or in-person, at The MusicPreneur Mindset Summit.
More information and a link to tickets are available in the show notes page, or you can visit bit.ly/lbny2019. Ticket prices increase Sept 1 and hotel discount deals go away August 26, so don’t dawdle, it’s almost the end of July already! We’ve also recently revealed the workshops and panels that will be featured throughout this special weekend so don’t miss out!
Head on over to www.therockstaradvocate.com/ep62 and check out more details on this year’s Summit and everything else I’ve mentioned in this episode.
And I wasn’t playing – I’d LOVE to hear from you! So let me know what you thought about this episode in the comments section or email me directly.
As always, I thank you for listening and I’m here if you have any questions. Email me at anytime:
suz@therockstaradvocate.com.
Until next time, Rockstar! Have a wonderful week and I hope to see you back here next week so we can get grounded to get rising! Take care.
Key Highlights
- Why growing a career in music can feel like ping-ponging
- What it means to pivot on the large scale
- What Evidence-Based Practice means
- The importance of boundaries
- Why it took me so long to get this episode out
- Example of ping-ponging
- Example of pivoting
- How I stop ping-ponging
Links/Rocksources
- Theme music brought to you by DC-based Indie/Pop band Sub-Radio
- More podcast episodes can be found here
- You can download a copy of the episode’s transcript here
- Need help with boundaries? Listen to Episode 18 here
- Join us in Rock/Star Slackers™
- If you haven’t yet, go watch A League of Their Own
- JOIN US AT THE SUMMIT! {SEE BELOW}
The Music-Preneur Mindset Summit is Back!
Topics & Speakers Announced!
Buy your tickets here!
Thanks for listening!
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