Prioritizing

My word for 2020 is "evolve."

I spent a long time thinking and brainstorming and dreaming and thinking some more about what word I wanted to use to guide me into the new year, decade, and personal age decade. After many different thoughts, I finally decided that this word encompassed everything that I wanted from myself.

So, I selected the word "evolve" as my guiding word for the year. I also decided that the word "evolve" was a purple type of word. I'm not sure why, but it felt right. This interests me because I have never had a word/color association happen so strongly, but this is a purple word. Everything that has to do with my word of the year will be in purple.

Purple is my sister's favorite color and the color of my alma mater's biggest local rival so using this color is a bit of a difficult thing for me, but "evolve" is purple. End of story.

I am currently sitting in my home, watching the snow fall, and thinking about this word and my current goals and objectives. I have my purple highlighter ready to indicate ideas that I feel will help me grow and change and develop and all the other words that I thought of before I got to the concept of evolving from my current state to my next state of being.

Last year, I took a course from Rachelle Morgan and Mary Altom called Rock That Practice. It was something that I needed to spur my creativity, business-building, and visions for myself into the future. If you are interested in more information, check out this link for more information! In addition to earning 16 CMTEs, I spent lots of time thinking about what I can do and what I want to do for my own professional development and for the benefit of other music therapists out there in the world. I started thinking more about how to get to my personal goals and less about my barriers. This was a great course for me, and I think it was a great course for the others who went through it with me.

Anyway...

One of the best things that came out of that course (for me, anyway) was the idea of making 30-60-90 day goals. I've found (in the four months since everything finished up) that the way others do these goals don't really work all that well for me, so I've made some adaptations to the process for myself, and I am up and running. My 30-60-90 day goals morph on a regular basis. Each type of thing that I do has it's own timeline and 30-60-90 goal timeline. This makes things a bit more complicated.

So, I prioritize.

For example, in the next 30 days, I am intending to develop a recording library of presentations for sale to music therapists. I want to make this into a CMTE course library, but I also want to offer free opportunities, so I am thinking through this process and how to accomplish everything. I think I have it figured out conceptually, but I need to get CBMT approval before it all goes live. It's this part of the plan that is holding me up - how to explain what I want to do to the folks at CBMT so they can understand what I'm thinking about...that's the highest priority right now.

To do this, I also want to develop some branding materials - visual, audio, and video - to use on all the recordings and marketing formats. This is a step that has to be done before I can finish the recordings, but it is not something that has anything to do with the CBMT process. It is not as high of a priority as the CBMT application, but it still needs to be done at some point in the next 30 days.

In 60 days, I want to expand that library. In 90 days, I want to continue to expand the library and continue to offer free live presentations as well. I would like to be offering two free webinars per month and build my recording library to offer to viewers.

This is just one example of the goals that I have at the moment. 

My problem is that I always have goals. Many of them never really finish up and just keep getting bigger and bigger. Today's list of goals includes writing a sermon for tomorrow's church service (high priority today), cleaning the crafting desk (somewhat less of a priority but something that has to be done before the next task can start), making file folder activities to sell in April (on-going task that will increase in priority if I don't get started), and cooking meals for the next week (shared priority for today and tomorrow). Now is the time to get cracking because the one thing I know about me is that I can talk about this stuff forever, but that doesn't get things done! Time to go.

See you on the other side of this weekend and my list of tasks!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear AMTA

Dear American Music Therapy Association: I am debating long and hard about remaining in this relationship. I have been in this relationship since college, and this is not a decision that I am taking lightly or without great cost.  I am not happy with what you are bringing to this relationship. Now, I have been a selfish partner over the past several years - mainly because I am not feeling like we share a common mission anymore. It is easy for me to place the blame on you, but I know that this is not all on me. I have tried to be invested in communication and support and understanding, but everyone comes to a time where enough is enough. I am trying very hard to decide if the benefits that you provide to me are worth the feelings that I have about where I think you and I are going. I am not sure that our destination is the same anymore, and this makes me sad. To be completely honest, I am only in this relationship these days for the music therapy interns. I don't think that is a hea...
Read more

Songwriting Sunday: Repetition

Image
One of the things that I find to be helpful with my client population (children, adolescents, and young adults with dual diagnoses) is repetition of phrases, lyrics, and music. As a result of 30+ years of working with this population in various iterations, I have found that my clients respond the most to songs with three repeated phrases to prime their responses with a different phrase to communicate the important part of the experience. DISCLAIMER: This is not a definite way to write music for clinical interactions. This is what seems to work well with my particular group of human beings. Don't go to your supervisors and tell them that I told you that this is the ONLY way to write music - It is NOT! You have to find what works for your clients and for their clinical goals. Since my clients respond well to this type of song, I tend to write songs in this format more than any other. What I have found is that my clients remember these songs more than the ones that I do in different f...
Read more

Being An Internship Director: On Hiatus

Image
It has been long enough since I have had an intern that I am seriously feeling like I have little to say on the subject. At the same time, I am currently writing Chapter 5 of my general internship handbook, so I am able to write about being an intern and what types of things to think about during this important time in our professional development. It is a strange place to be in, and it is one that is a bit challenging for me. Right now, I have had three vacant internship positions since the beginning of the calendar year. I will have a vacant position next month and that will be an entire year of rejected offers. In the past nine months, I have offered positions to three applicants who have declined. It is interesting how people complain that there aren't enough internship programs, but programs like mine are empty. I guess there aren't enough internship programs that pay large stipends (which mine cannot) out there. I get it. It is interesting to me how we have moved from an ...
Read more