TME Tuesday: Take An Idea...
I received some disappointing news yesterday. Now, in the long range scheme of things, not having enough registrants to justify my CMTE is not a big deal, but for me, it is disappointing. So, I go into some of my coping skills and strategies to find my center again.
Today is Tuesday, which means that I try to focus my writing on therapeutic music experiences (what I call the things I do with my clients in sessions - AKA TMEs). Today is a good day to talk about taking an idea and then making it into a TME - something that happens with music therapists all the time.
Ideas can come from any place. There are times when I am driving home after work, and a song pops into my head. I scramble to get out my pencil and my post-its to notate it a bit before it fades into oblivion. There are times when an object sparks some therapeutic intervention ideas. There are other times when I hear a song on the radio, and I just know that a particular client will enjoy it and welcome the song into music therapy.
I made my book out of two pieces of cardboard and some of the wrapping paper from my Christmas gifts. (If you don't know, my Mom, Sister, and I had to postpone our Christmas due to cancelled flights in December, so we are celebrating now.) I am a bit of a Star Wars fanatic, so I tend to get lots of things with SW wrapping papers. I hate to send that off to the landfill, so I keep it to make things. The things I like to make the best are books, so there you go.
For the moment, the pages are blank in this book, but that will change as I go through the events of each day. As I said, this will be a travel journal and a temporary place for ideas to start. I have a more formal system for my ideas, but it is safely waiting for me in my work backpack at home...
It is nice to have some places to jot down ideas. When I am in a creating type mood but cannot figure out what I want to do, I go to my ideas book to find all sorts of sparks for creating ideas.
As you know, if you have read my blog for a bit, I use a specific format for my TMEs. This is the final format and is not how TME ideas start off in my brain or world or anything like that. To begin, all ideas start off on a post-it note or index card, hastily scribbled with just enough information to help me remember how the idea goes when I can get home and develop it into a full TME. I keep those post-it notes until a TME is completely finished, so I have those ideas waiting for their times to flower into being. It is a system that works for me.
To start developing your own TMEs, all you have to do is think about what you want clients to accomplish, and then go! There is no limit to how you can work through and with music and your clients to reach their goals. There are no ways to do this wrongly. I have written TMEs that have been abject failures the first time I have presented them to clients. I have written TMEs that have become a part of the musical culture of my facility and no one (not even me) can remember a time before we engaged in this particular TME. There is no way to predict how a client will respond, so just write down the ideas and keep working on them until they find the person that needs them.
So, just to complete an idea. Let's take this book that I just made. To turn this into a tool for clients, I might encourage them to go through lyric analyses in this book - keep a lyric journal - and encourage songwriting in this little book as well. I might use this as something that we can use as a metaphor for their journeys through life. We might write a song about the promise of a blank book. We might be able to make our own journals to keep playlists that help us navigate our emotions. There are all sorts of possibilities on how I could use a journal like this one with my clients...
Just take an idea....
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