Defining Success as a Modern Musician Part 2

Let's continue on your journey to greatness.

To become exceptional you have to build a development system to become that way. It won’t accidentally happen, you have to train for your performance in life.

But optimal performance is the most satisfying place to be, so the game is to structure your life in a way that allows you to perform and produce at your best.

To get into flow. Workflow, bloodflow, cashflow. Flow with your thinking, your speaking, your writing, flow with conversation and any other ways you get into flow if you have a hobby or play a sport.

If you wanted to be a professional athlete you’d train for most of your life. In order to be the person you want to become you have to train to become that. You have to understand what it is that you want to have and become and you have to develop and train for becoming and having that in all areas of your life.

Modern Musicianship is all about becoming.

It's the heart and science of success.

It’s a technology for becoming the best version of yourself and living your best life as an artist, musician, dj or songwriter.

It’s a technology for achieving success in your career and life.

You have to fall in love with the process of becoming, fall in love with doing the work that will express your value and your potential.

In order to stay lit you must remain motivated and this requires your mind to work with you. Which means you must go about things the right way so to build the positive grooves and the pathways to your successes and being a successful person.

You have to be stronger than the breeze and you have to remain true to your mission and your objectives despite all internal and external conflict.

This requires your constant reinforcement of your why’s. Exactly why you are motivated to achieve a goal and exactly why you are doing everything.

You should only have a handful of things to accomplish for the day, usually about 4-10, and your job is to complete those tasks and log everything that happened. What you did, how you were feeling, incoming and outgoing expenses and then review and plan for the next day.

Why should you track your progress to success?

How will you know how your life works if you are not tracking what impact your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are having on your life and career?

How can you determine where you should place your attention on the biggest opportunities to pursue?

Whats evenflow?

What are your baselines?

Your life can be a chaotic and random set of happenings or it can be a targeted and triumphant song that sings your message.

You track your life so you can calibrate your baselines and improve in every area of your life. So you can proactively become the person you most want to be and create the life of your dreams.

You improve what you measure. What you measure you manage.

We want to utilize all the tools available to us to and track our life thoroughly so as to improve in every way, all the time, forever. We want to build good pathways that lead us to the promised land of glory and honor and freedom and fulfillment.

Without having key measures in place to manage what’s happening and make intelligent decisions about what actions can be taken to improve them you don’t have much control.

Concentration and focus

It starts with clarity and focus. It’s a repeated coming back to this place of total focus and presence and then driving the dream. Driving the dream means allowing yourself to feel the feelings that doing the work allows you to have. Driving the dream is the desire fueled cycle of living and enjoying the journey while progressing the actions and beliefs  along the path. Focus on expanding your capabilities -  What can you commit to doing for the next 90 days to strengthen your focus?

A Meditation practice is a mandatory practice for my students in the Music Business Liberation Coaching and Training Academy.

The goals - you have to start with your goals in each of the three dimensions and work backwards from them.

You have to turn goals into sub-goals that you can achieve on a weekly basis

For example if I wanted to make 4 sales in 3 months what do I need to do everyday to achieve that?

The strategy comes next - for example I will need to incorporate email marketing and text messages with fb group outreach and advertising

It’s a hypothesis until you find out what works and takes daily testing to find that.

So I presume, in order to hit 4 sales in 3 months I need to to be putting appointments on the calendar as often as possible. At a rate of at least several new appointments each week. I can have a traffic generation campaign running to generate new leads which will in turn generate a number of new appointments.

In addition to that I can do email and social media marketing to generate new subscribers and book new appointments.

I will email my list 1-3 times a week this year and try to post onto all my socials every day or every week I aim to consistently produce content each week. 1 new complete piece of content every other week is the target for 2020.

My outcome targets are to generate 5 leads per day, 25 per week and 15 appointments per week is the goal.

In addition to the daily ad campaign running to generate new business, hitting Targets will come from email marketing and the Top 10 leads followed up with via email or text message daily

The Metrics - KPI’s

Metrics are your measurements of success. Income, subscribers, productivity, weight, even happiness can be a metric if you measure it.

The metrics are what you track. According the business dictionary they are the standards of measurement by which efficiency, performance, progress, or quality of a plan, process, or product can be assessed.

Fans, income, productivity and happiness are what we focus on in the Academy.

Visualization - Visualization can be the most motivating and inspiring mode of communication, and foundational to your game as the CEO and visionary of your Content Business. It is one of the underused powers in your mental faculties. It takes some time to develop but it is a super powerful way to communicate within yourself. You have to get emotionally involved with your dream and visualization is one of the best ways to get emotionally involved. Visualization is how you steer the ship. It’s how you send and receive important communications with your highest self and the universal intelligence. God is in your imagination.

Visualization should be used to set yourself up for success and can be used to solve problems and to motivate yourself in many different ways.

Journaling is one of the best things you can do for your own personal growth. one of the best tools at your disposal is to journal. You can do it via written or audio journaling such as with the voice recorder app on your iPhone. Journaling is something I’ve done since I was 19, and it has shaped my world and structured the development of my content over the years as I grew into the music business architect. I’ve found the impact it has on my thinking and my connection to the world and myself is worth the extra bit of time clarifying and fleshing things out.

Tracking - You have to track everything that matters to you. Website visitors I.e. Google analytics, clicky, specific links I.e. pretty link, your socials I.e fb analytics, social report. In the academy we use our daily tracking system for tracking your motivation and productivity. When we measure and track the right things we can iteratively adjust, improve and grow in all the ways that are meaningful to us.

When I do another cycle of muscle building I’ll track my calories, my daily weight changes and my performance targets and as well as my gains in strength and performance.

The strategy or strategies - heres the thing you need to have in order to achieve your goals. You cannot say to me jamie I want to achieve x and then not complete the statement by following that goal up with a strategy for how you can achieve that. Most of the time we are talking about marketing strategies for running traffic generation campaigns for either sales, subscribers, likes, or followers.

Your strategy is your approach to achieve your goals.

If you have a goal you must have a strategy. If my goal is $20,000 in sales, my strategy could be to generate 4 sales at 5k each via email marketing, fb ad campaign, and podcasting. Those would be my 3 strategies for achieving my goal.

Your Targets - Performance vs. Outcome Targets

Your outcome targets may be to get 3 placements with film and tv licensing, while your performance targets may be to pitch to 10 libraries each day for 6 weeks.

What you are responsible for is hitting your targets.

The activity - The procedure - The tactics and the process

So if your strategy was email marketing your tactics would be the process of you writing the email, and sending the email at specific times and the process you go through for doing that.

Your learning journey - This is one of the most important journeys of your life. It’s how you grow and develop as a person. Your learning journey is your educational training as well as your souls development. It’s vitally important that you remain open to learning new things.

Your success habits - Your success habits are the rituals, routines, habits and practices that you do that lead to the success you set out to achieve. These are what contribute to the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that lead to becoming the type of person capable of achieving that success. Your success habits are the foundation that also build the momentum toward your success.

Your rituals and routines - These are the grounding processes/things you do to remain centered and aligned with what you want in your life and to keep you coming back to wholeness and oneness with yourself and source energy.

Your Beliefs - “Everything we believe is a belief about reality. These beliefs ultimately determine what we decide to value (pleasure, goodness, the Bugatti Veyron, etc.), and what we value determines our behavior. If our value is personal pleasure, then we will seek only to please ourselves in our actions; however, if we value goodness, we will try to be good. This is the linear process of belief, value, and behavior.” Your beliefs are the lens that you see the world through. Fear, family, environment, your education, your own drives, needs and desires all have gone into shaping your beliefs. Now it’s likely that a number of these beliefs are holding you back in some way, and that don’t serve you.

Your beliefs are programs that play a script that often leads to a negative feeling and is something that can be negatively reinforced until it becomes a conditioned belief, which leads to a negative attitude or behavior, that can lead to a negative result. With just as much effort, that belief program can be a positive one that leads to a positive outcome or desired result. Your beliefs become conditioned when they are reinforced with emotion and habits or patterns of response.

When you combine a number of these mental habits in your subsconscious mind you form a paradigm, which dictates your behavior and your results. If your paradigm is healthy and happy and wise, you will continue to take actions to progress and perpetuate that in your world.

If you believe you are not good enough, nothing you will ever do will be good enough.

You’ll constantly have thoughts that make you feel like you don’t measure up.

It’ll play out something like this…

Belief = it’s still not good enough.

Trigger = you will find something that’s wrong with it, consciously or unconsciously and then sure enough in your eyes it will not be good enough.

What must be done is that you must recognize this belief loop and your conditioned response… You have to learn how to consciously break the pattern. The errant belief and result loop.

You have to be aware of what is happening and then notice where your beliefs are holding you back. That’s hard to do. Much of these conditioned beliefs are worn in so to speak and accurately identifying them can be difficult. You must then learn how to Recognize common triggers in your life and thinking patterns.

In order to change these patterns you have to Plan new responses. So once you’ve identified the patterns now come up with a quick NEW idealized response based on your values.

Reinforce and build the new pathway until you build the paradigm that drives the behavior which drives the results.

Your beliefs along with your values are the programs in your matrix. Your models of how the world works along with your beliefs and values shape your view of the world. These are essential elements in the foundation for your life, you have to understand and align them to serve you. You can view them like programs in the matrix.

True beliefs are expressed in behavior.

Values are the ideas that we hold to be important. They are usually the ideals the we strive for. Core values are the values that we hold that guide our decisions, behavior and thinking processes.

The main difference between values and beliefs is that values are principles, ideals or standards of behavior, while beliefs are convictions that we generally accept to be true.

Your reasons why - your mission motifs are your mantras, what you keep coming back to and how you tap into the deeper drives behind what you are doing for inspiration and motivation.

My 5 reasons why = my mission motifs are

First to experience and enjoy, and realize all that is and all that is available and all that is the promise of life as human beings on earth in the modern world.

Second I COMMIT to my audience who NEED and value and become who THEY are supposed to be, who do what THEY are supposed to do, and WHOM I honor, enjoy the company of, and sincerely find joy and fulfillment in sharing with, inspiring, teaching, learning from, and creating WITH.

Third, I commit to honoring all of those who have sacrificed-with the greatest gift that any man can give, their life. It is my responsibility to be my best, to live my best, and to fulfill ALL that is possible, and in so doing honor the stories and the memories of the heroes whom i’ve been proud to call my brother.

Fourth, I commit to my family, whom i must protect and encourage and nurture and inspire THEIR greatest potential and enjoy their greatest realization of heaven on earth. The guardian, the guide on their side. The leader by example. That speaks when it’s time to say something, and that can handle both the pressure and enjoy the spotlight when it’s time to share something.

Fifth and finally, I commit to all the lives and people and contributions I can make, to ways I can innovate, and develop, and lead, and serve, and inspire, and teach, and to learn from and finally to share the stories of those whose lives intersect and those whom I can touch. I will always attempt to leave people better than when I found them. To draw out the greatest talents and gifts and amplify their potential to any degree i can.

Everything covered over the last two articles are the fundamentals. As you practice them - Discipline becomes blissipline as you play the game. The game becomes more enjoyable to play than anything else and you have the conditions to thrive. Your fundamentals are the core to your foundation. Your fundamentals are your thoughts, emotions, speech and behavior, they are your meditation and your music, your writing or your content creation, they are your blog, your email and your socials… Modern musicians do their morning success ritual everyday, they Meditate everyday, they do their visualization every day, they move everyday, they journal every day, they try to write or create something new everyday, they strive to bring joy and love and have gratitude every day. They create new content every week, they email their list every week, they post to their socials most days and hit their targets most days.

They strive for progress and not perfection. But they maintain a very high standard.