Thoughtful Thursday: Goals? Nah...Not This Year...I Don't Even Have Any Quests

It is the first day of the 2023-2024 regular school year at my job.

Depending on how the temperature situation is in my room, I will be doing some clearing and cleaning and organizing my schedule today. When I left my job the week before our extended school year session was over, today was supposed to be an uninterrupted work day. I am hoping that we will not have any sort of meeting or professional development scheduled for today because I really need some time to work in my space to get ready for music therapy sessions this year.

Usually, at this time of year, I have thought about specific goals and objectives or quests for my school year, but that isn't happening this year, for some reason. I think it is part of my entire "meh" attitude. I am not as excited about the start of the school year this year as I have been in other years. Who knows why I am feeling this way right now, but I am, so I am allowing myself to wallow for a little bit before rolling up my metaphorical sleeves and getting to work.

I have an idea for new decorations for my music therapy room. We are going to construct a music timeline associated with our Musician of the Month series. I have four cabinets along one of my walls, so we are going to use those flat surfaces to illustrate some of the timeline concepts. I figure that one and a half cabinets will be for music before 1900 and the rest will be for music past 1900. We will focus most on current music because that is what my clients are most interested in, of course. I have some different colored tapes to use as part of my illustrations to indicate different genres. This idea is an ongoing one - another project that is never ending - like my need for complete communication systems.

Once I am in my music therapy room today, I will be able to figure out if I will be able to be in the room for sustained amounts of time due to the temperature. We have had significant issues with the heating/cooling system this summer with temperatures ranging from 58-82 degrees in my room. I am no longer interested in working in unsafe conditions, so I don't know if I will actually be able to be in my room today. If so, I can work on cleaning materials and organizing my task box area. If not, I am not sure what I will be doing. My plans have changed a bit for today because my intern will be present for the entire day rather than the half day that we both thought would happen today. I will be myself tomorrow for professional development day.

So, back to the topic for today's post.

I have not established any sort of goals or quests for this year. I think this might be a "survival" year rather than a "growth" year. I've never really identified these types of years before, but I can identify other "survival" years in my career and time at this particular facility. I have never really started a school year with the attitude that survival is the ultimate quest of the year. That is changing this year.

I am not really interested in growing. I want to get back to the music therapy basics that I have moved away from in the past three years. Perhaps that is my quest, but I am not doing anything formal to make these thoughts into quests right now. I just want to use the systems that work and eliminate the systems that are just busy work. Unfortunately, I am not in charge of everything that has to be done at my facility - there are administrative tasks and things that have to occur because of where I work - so I will try to find a good balance between doing what I need to do and doing what is expected but has little to no relevance or benefit for my program or for my clients.

More than anything else, I feel the need to be more client-directed these days.

Since 2020, I think I have been stuck in survival mode rather than exploring the therapeutic relationships that are present in my music therapy setting. While I hear that COVID cases are increasing right now, things have definitely moved from COVID protocols to "normal" ways of doing music therapy and school. I don't want to be in "survival" mode for much longer, so I will start to shift things by going back into the thing that brought me into music therapy to begin with - the client interactions. After all, if you don't have client interactions, you don't have therapy.

I guess I do have a quest - to get back into my client-direction focus that I feel I might have neglected a bit recently.

Of course, this is coinciding with an intern taking over half of the groups at my facility, so I will have less opportunity to do this but more time to reflect on what I am wanting.

So, I guess I am heading into this school year with a quest after all. This always happens - I can't help myself. Rather than "survival," I think I will make this year a "back to basics" year. That makes me feel a bit happier about how I am feeling and what I want to do this year. 

It is amazing how a small shift in focus can change an attitude!

Back to the music therapy basics that I value and turning away from the busy work that is not needed... there's my quest for this school year. I need to write that down.

I have another hour before I need to leave for the day. I woke up an hour earlier than my alarm, turned the alarm off, and got up to write. Now that this task is coming to a close, I have some time to kill before I get ready for the day. I am not sure what to wear as I have no idea what temperature will be waiting for me. So, I have to plan for both hot and cold temperatures - layers and options. I also want some background noise, so I will be taking in some movies to keep going as I am working on various tasks. I want to get my individual schedule figured out by the end of the day, so I will be visiting teachers to get those sessions scheduled. We have two empty classrooms, so we will have a bit more planning time that cannot be filled with individual sessions in case we find two teachers to fill those classrooms. Several of my individual students either graduated or moved to new schools, so I will be evaluating my criteria for who to include in individual programming.

For now, though, I am going to find some time to just enjoy the early morning before getting into my car and driving to my school building to wade through a whole bunch of emails that don't relate to me and then get going with my work day. Tomorrow is our professional development day (ugh!), so it will be a day with limited opportunity to work in my room. Monday is the first day with students. I have only one group on Mondays since we no longer have one classroom that we had last month. I have more time to work on other things. I may make my extra half hour on Mondays my YouTube filming time...that would be a good use of the group time that cannot be filled with anything else. I could give that up without too much of an issue if we get a new teacher for that classroom...

Time to shift my focus, so I will see you tomorrow.