music, therapy, and me

It is time for Spring Break from my school job, and I am getting ready for a week of staycation and time to myself. As a result, I may or may not be writing as much this week. I am getting myself ready for rest and cleaning. I just now realized that my plans to go to the library on Monday have to change because there will be a St. Patrick's Day parade on Monday. I will not be going anywhere near my downtown area because of the parade. Getting free parking will be difficult, so I will be remaining away from the library on the 17th. Already, I am shifting my plans around. Going to the library was one of two things that I have to do outside of my house, and now the plan has changed. I am really thankful that I remembered the parade today and not on Monday morning when I was stuck in the whole mess!! It is time to buckle down and get my home environment working for me. I am working on my motivation and follow through for this week, so I am going to try to work on reconfiguring my livin...

It's day 3 of my new school year, and I am not interested in going to work today. Now, don't get me wrong - this has absolutely NOTHING to do with my clients, my intern, or my co-workers today. This has absolutely EVERYTHING to do with me! I just don't want to have to get up and get going. Now, in the interest of full authenticity and disclosure, I am dressed in my uniform, I will leave my house when I need to leave, and I will be going to work where I will have a good day, but at the moment, I just don't want to HAVE to work. Does that make sense? This happens to me every summer. I'd like to have the option of taking time off during summer school because I don't want to have to work, but I still want to be able to work if I get too bored with being at home. I think I would go stir crazy if I had to stay at my home during the entire summer - I would probably go home to California to keep myself entertained - but I would really like to have the option to f...

I am sitting here, at my computer, watching Father Brown on Netflix, and striving to find something to write about. It is Thursday, and I have managed to make it to work every single day this week (first time in about three weeks that I've accomplished this feat), and I am exhausted beyond belief. I have enough energy for my five sessions today, but I'm not sure that I'll do much this afternoon when I get home. I saw a post on one of my social media feeds about a lack of motivation. I can relate to that on so many levels. This person wanted suggestions about how to find motivation in a current slump. I can relate to that on so many levels as well.  I am currently recovering from a phase of "severe lack of motivation." My thought is that most of this lack has been actually caused by my recent illness, but there are other things out there that are affecting my motivation as well. I'm glad to be on the recovery side of this phase because I really do not li...

I spend lots of time talking to interns about time management. I don't spend much time talking about motivation with them, and I've recently come to the realization that those two things have to go together before anything works. I have had little to no motivation to do my clinical documentation lately. That has led me to doing avoidance tasks rather than my work. I've paid for that decision as I have had to dedicate more and more of my time to documentation than I do when I am managing my time well. This week has to be a good time management week - I have lots of stuff to do and not as much time available to me to get it done. I have a plan to help me with these tasks. It all starts with my to-do and my not-to-do lists. It continues with my 30-minute on and off strategy, and finishes with prioritization of every task I do for the next 48 hours. If I didn't have to be at work for some of those hours, my to-do list would be really manageable. I do, though, so that ma...

I've been listening to lots of music lately. I left the iPod at work, so I decided to take some CDs, and I randomly popped in some Haydn. My first thought, "Okay, at least it isn't rap." My second thought, "Ooh, I could say this during my presentation." I talked to myself the entire way to work - all centered around my upcoming presentations, and I generated several new ideas! This led me into remembering the foundations of my music therapy theory. Here's the foundational thought that is my current focus - music is motivating. By listening to something that was inherently familiar to me, and not something that intruded too much, I was able to create some new ideas. Music engaged my brain and allowed synapses to interact in ways that they hadn't in quite some time. I had ideas and the music spurred my presentation practice. Well, duh, right? One of the presenters that spoke at last week's Online Conference for Music Therapy reminded me t...

I am currently rearranging my living area to incorporate some new shelves and to move some older shelving to my office areas at work. This is due to the fact that I've already had an inquiry about an intern placement, so I am feeling some pressure to be ready for intern #24 at any moment. That was the impetus I needed to get off my chair and start being proactive. As a result, my living area is more of a mess than usual. At the moment, the far wall of (what is supposed to be) the dining area is looking pretty good. I have the new shelving over there, and the shelves are filling up with books and boxes and trinkets of various origins. I have some of my personal instruments along the top of the shelving. I have some new canvas boxes that will store various things. I am making shelves for music therapy texts and for songbooks. There are shelves for visual aid making materials and for instruments. I still have three more shelving units to put together, so I have some additional plann...

I have lots to do this weekend. So, what have I done already? Absolutely nothing. I took yesterday completely off from responsibility and productivity. Today, that has to change. The tasks that I have to do include dishes (always), laundry (always), and cleaning (always). I need to clean bathrooms. I've made progress on the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the front room (until I got distracted by projects and happily spent some time puttering with laminating sheets and file folders). Things were a bit complicated by some surprise maintenance work this week, but I'm determined to get back on track. My best and most valuable tool in this journey is my timer. I use Google Timer and set it for 30 minutes. Then, I start working. I spend 30 minutes on bathroom cleaning and then 30 minutes on something else. The next 30 minutes on cleaning and so forth. (I am currently 18 minutes into my 30 minute time frame here.) This allows me to focus on a task and accomplish quite a bit during my ...

One of my favorite self-challenges is to take an idea that I have and morph it into new ideas. For example, I spent most of yesterday making letter and number cards for a classroom of students with diagnoses on the Autism and psychiatric spectra. As I was making these simple cards, I started thinking about other things they could do with little to no change in the materials. They could play memory match - match capital letters to capital letters, match capital to small letters, or small letters to small letters. They could try to pick letters to spell specific words, or rearrange letters into familiar words from anagrams. You could do the same types of things with the number cards as well. We could play Go Fish - "Do you have any 3's?" "Go fish." We could place them around the room and the student would have to go find the letter or number cards in sequence. We could label items with their beginning letter. We could do any number of things with these cards. ...

One of the things that I like to do is to work with other music therapists doing music therapy things. I often interact with MTs so I can learn more about what we do as a collective (do we sound like the Borg?). What you do as a therapist in your particular environment fascinates me as it is probably COMPLETELY different from what I do as a therapist. As I've been a therapist, I have attended two world congresses. These experiences did a great job of opening my eyes to the differences between not only therapists, but the different philosophical viewpoints of therapists in other countries. I have realized that I approach music therapy in an American-centric manner, definitely influenced by the founders here in the United States. The world congresses of music therapy really opened up my eyes to the fact that there are different views of how music works that are extremely different from my own. The problem that I have found is that congresses are too short and too crammed to really ...

It is Saturday morning, and I am in need of some motivation to do some chores that need to be done but that are no fun to do. My desk has been taken over by junk - things that I've just left there that need to be placed in other places. The stove needs to be cleaned and the kitchen needs some reorganization. The bathrooms could use a scrub down as well. I am somewhat disorganized everywhere these days. It is time to get started. So, what motivates me?  Interestingly enough (at least to me), not music. Pandora is not an option when I need to get things done. I might be able to get some movement going when listening to my preferred music on my iPod, but not for long. I start to think about how I can use the songs that I'm listening to in therapy sessions, I have to go write things down, and then I have an excuse to stop my mundane tasks "for the benefit of my kids." So, nothing distracts me more than music. I will watch streaming episodes of television shows to ke...

I am always on the lookout for new opening and closing songs. I use both openings and closings with my clients because I find them to be good times for assessing how folks are doing and where I want to go with them. This one is called We're On Our Way . I use an upbeat tempo and strum pattern to motivate my clients to leave the room and go back to their classrooms... Enjoy! Purpose : To provide musical support during transition to class; motivation to leave session; to illustrate immediate expectations for behavior modification; to encourage impulse control through continuing music stimulation Source : Original song written during Room 9 session. © June 22, 2010 by Mary Jane Landaker, MME, MT-BC Materials : Guitar; body percussion source Environment : Moving down hallway from one location to another Song/Chant/Words : We’re On Our Way – MIDI file; We’re On Our Way - .pdf file I             ...

Well, it is early in the morning, and I am sitting in my bedroom postponing the moment when I have to get up, take my shower, go out into the frigid world, and go to yet another inservice at work. There are times (kinda like these) when I do not want to be a responsible adult... Motivation is an interesting thing. I am motivated to go to my job because I get paid. I am motivated to run music therapy sessions because I love showing my kids that music is something to be celebrated and enjoyed. I am not motivated to get out of bed this morning because the cat is cuddly, it is warm under the covers, it is cold outside, and many, many other reasons. (Jet lag is a big part of all of this, I am sure.) I will be motivated to finish my job today since tomorrow is the weekend. Plans for tomorrow? Sleep. Use the computer. Sleep some more. Sing a bit and sleep some more.