Time Is Valuable, You Know?

I have been offering free intern webinars for about nine years now (I think it's that long...it might only be seven years...hm), and I have never had times when there wasn't someone attending. This series of webinars, though, has been rotten for attendance. My policy is that I wait only 5 minutes. If no one shows up, then I close the webinar and go into my evening routine. This series, I have had two sessions with no show interns. It is very strange to me, but my policy stands. Five minutes. That is all that I am willing to sit and wait for a group of people who are expecting to access my knowledge, wisdom, and experience. That's it. Five minutes.

This decision has made me feel a bit guilty lately, but I am working through those feelings. I offer these experiences for free. I give information and knowledge away, and it takes a chunk of time out of my evenings to do this service for interns. If they can't be bothered to show up, then I should (goblin!) not be feeling guilty for deciding not to sit there waiting for someone to bother. Right?

I know that we are all Zoom-austed. (My new term - copyright here, today, in this blog!) Can you figure out what I mean by it?? It has been a long stretch of time since we started living entirely through our screens, but still...

Being Zoom-austed myself, I relish my evenings where I can just go to bed rather than having to keep myself awake to talk about current issues in internships. There is a bit of relief when no one arrives at my webinar, because that means that this is not something that is valuable and so I can give up on it as well. There is also a bit of sadness that the only people that have bothered to arrive at this round have not been all that invested in what I have to say.

So, being a therapist, an introvert, a highly sensitive person, and having a bit of imposter syndrome at times, I go immediately to what I need to change in order to make these webinars more attractive to interns. I have no idea how to do this, but I am trying really hard to figure it all out. It may just be time for these to transfer into YouTube videos on my channel so people can search them rather than trying to foster the interaction that I want to nurture between interns from all over. Perhaps that is where this is heading...out of the evening time commitment and into the YouTube world. If I did that, I could make my Monthly Music Therapy Meets my full focus and encourage interns to come to something like that to network and build music therapy community. Hm. Just brainstorming here...

A couple of years ago, after watching a rant on Music Therapists Unite about how professional music therapists should just give away all of their ideas to future music therapists without asking for compensation, I made a difficult decision for me. I stopped publishing my TME ideas on this blog. I changed my TME posts into a subscription service so people could pay me for my intellectual property and my time. I significantly undercharge for this and for most of the products that I offer into the competitive world of music therapy resources on purpose, but I do feel that we music therapists have to realize that we don't like working for free, so why should we expect each other to work for free? I no longer work for free for most things - for interns, though, that has been a different story. I am thinking that is not going to be the case for much longer. When things are free, people think they can dictate the circumstances (in my experience).

Ugh. I hate doing this side of things, but I have learned these lessons the hard way.