CREATIVE THRIVE - BETA - Masterclass

Masterclass

FOUND: The Preparation

In the beginning, we set the foundation for a life in flow. We learn the philosophical interpretations of how optimal performers think about and see reality...

TRAINING: Flow Short Scale

This is what we call the Flow Short Scale - a psychometrically sound measurement for measuring flow. Please answer the following questions in relation to your experience in your music.

There are no right or wrong answers. Think about how often you experience each characteristic during your activity, then click the number that best matches your experience.

Think about your experience at work over in the past six months to a year. On a scale of 1-5 please rate the extent to which the following are true during this time period:

(1=Never, 2=Rarely, 3=Sometimes, 4=Frequently, 5=Always)

I feel I am competent enough to meet the demands of the situation. (1-5)
I do things spontaneously and automatically without having to think. (1-5)
I have a strong sense of what I want to do. (1-5)
I have a good idea about how well I am doing while I am involved in the task/activity. (1-5)
I am completely focused on the task at hand. (1-5)
I have a feeling of total control over what I am doing. (1-5)
I am not worried about what others may be thinking of me. (1-5)
The way time passes seems to be different from normal. (1-5)
The experience is extremely rewarding. (1-5)

TRAINING: Flow Audit

A flow audit is one of the fundamental starting points for assessing the capacity for a high-flow lifestyle.

Answer the following questions:

What is your primary flow activity?
What is your secondary flow activity?
What percentage of your life is spent in flow?
What are three adjectives describe being in flow?
What was the set & setting of flow?

TRAINING: Musical Abilities Beliefs Assessment

Take the Musical Abilities Beliefs Assessment. It’s an assessment of current perceived musical skills on different musical beliefs on confidence, self-efficacy, self-satisfaction, and musicianship.

Choose how you feel about each statement on a scale of 1-5 (1 = strongly agree, 5 = strongly disagree).

I believe myself to be a good musician.
I am confident in my abilities as a musician.
I am confident in my abilities as a person.
I believe that I can put on a great performance.
I believe in my musical abilities, even when others might not.
I believe mistakes are learning experiences.
I trust myself to be resilient to denial and judgement.
I know not being chosen for a role or gig does not reflect upon my musicality or musical abilities.
I can overcome any obstacle thrown at me.
I am confident that I will succeed as a musician.
I am motivated to continue to make music.
Making music makes me happy, it is something I look forward to doing every day.

TRAINING: Finding Your Chronotype

Take the Automated Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (Auto-MEQ): ACCESS HERE
AutoMEQ is a Chronotype-Self-Test and gives you advice about your circadian rhythm type.
Find your Chronotype and plot your midpoint.

Finding Your Chronotype:

What time do you usually go to bed?
What time do you usually wake up?
What is the midpoint between those two times?

Converting Auto-MEQ Scores:

Scores between 70-86: a lark
Scores between 31-69: a third-bird
Scores between 16-30: an owl

TRAINING: Ultradian Rhythm

We need to respect our biological ultradian rhythm, which is a recurrent cycle that repeats itself in a 24-hour day. The natural rhythm of the human body is based on 90 minutes cycles during the night, which reflects the nature of the sleep stages. While we are awake during the day, those cycles are linked with different levels of alertness and energy. In general, we wanna shoot for 90-minutes intervals when it comes to our deep work/flow sessions. After each session we have a break of 20 minutes.

Ultradian Rhythm:

Prior: Alertness
Deep Work: 90-minute cycle
Post: Recovery (20 minutes)

GIG 1.1 - Optimal Engagement

The Art of Cultivating Flow in Life

Transform your relationship with your music to build the foundation for a meaningful and fulfilling artist journey. Turn your passion for music into a calling by finding vital engagement.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.1 - Knowing Oneself

Journal on the following questions:

What are the things that matter most to you?
Who are the people you admire most?
What do you admire about them?
What kind of person do you definitely not want to be?
What are the values you would not compromise under any circumstance?
How do you express your personality through your music?
What are the factors that motivate your actions in different areas of your life other than music?

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.2 - Big Five Personality Test

Take the free big five personality test: ACCESS HERE

It’s a scientific personality assessment and gives you accurate scores for the Big Five personality traits which are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.3 - Hallowell Self-Report

Take the 'Hallowell Self-Report' by psychiatrist Dr. Edward Hallowell: ACCESS HERE

The 'Hallowell Self-Report' is a structured interview designed to get to know yourself a little bit better. The process is based on self-reflection.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.4 - Know Your Strengths

Reflect on your greatest achievements and the biggest challenges you’ve faced.
Mentally review your most significant accomplishments and seeming leaps of understanding and inspiration.
Track what you think enabled you to arrive at these.
Think about 5 strengths that you used in each one of those areas.
Can you identify any overlaps or patterns among them?

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.5 - Strengths Assessment

Take Martin Seligman's Character Strengths Assessment and identify your signature strengths: ACCESS HERE

It is a free scientific survey of character strengths. It discovers your greatest strengths. Research shows that knowing and using our character strengths can help us:

Increase happiness and well-being
Find meaning and purpose
Boost relationships
Manage stress and health
Accomplish goals

Take the HIGH5 Test: ACCESS HERE

It’s a free strengths test that helps people to discover what they are naturally good at.
Training our strengths is important and becoming aware of what they are is the first step.
Consider how you apply these to your daily work and how shape your endeavors with them.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.6 - Reflect & Identify

Make a list of the concepts and ideas that are most fundamental to your individual experience as a musician.
Explore how those principles connect to other areas of life.
What were the early obstacles to your pursuit?
Did you have any mentors who nurtured your passion and skillset?
How did you prepare for “wins” and “losses” in your struggle for excellence?
Are you emotionally prepared to do the work necessary for learning and growth?

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.7 - The Power of Presence

Make a list of your commitments and activities and rate them on a scale of 1-5 in terms of your investment in them—this is not about time, but rather about your commitment to excellence.
Consider how your degree of presence fuels or inhibits your learning process.
Now think about how your level of presence affects your degree of personal success.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.8 - Intrinsic Motivation

Rate on a scale of 1-5:

How passionate am I about my music and what I’m doing? Think about how much you love the activities you’re doing day to day.
How deeply do I resonate with the purpose and mission what I’m doing contributes to?
How curious am I about my art and what I do day to day? Think about how often your attention is spiked and pulled in by curiosity around something you’re doing.
How possible is it to continuously grow and improve at my craft and what I’m doing? Think about whether you can reach your maximum at what you’re doing or can pursue mastery to infinite.
How much autonomy do I have around my music, creative expression, and what I’m doing? Think about how much control you have over your work and its direction.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.9 - Vital Engagement

On a scale of 1-5, how engaged is my relationship with my work (art, music).
On a scale of 1-5, how engaged is my relationship with others.
On a scale of 1-5, how engaged is my relationship with something greater than myself.
Solve the lowest score.

TRAINING: GIG 1.1.10 - Your One Big Thing

What's the one big thing you are here to achieve through completing the training?

GIG 1.2 - Optimal Mindset

Creating a Mindset to Thrive

Create the kind of mind that chooses flow as the moving force of your life and lay the foundation for a lifelong love of learning and a path to excellence. Break free from limiting beliefs to lift your music game.

TRAINING: GIG 1.2.1 - Transformation to Thrive

Reflect on the following questions:

What is your current state in each area (mental state, physical state, lifestyle, work life)?
How much of a priority is it in your life?
What are the benefits?
What are the obstacles?
How much time are you investing in each area?
How do you improve in each of them?

TRAINING: GIG 1.2.2 - Growth Mindset

Take the Growth Mindset Scale: ACCESS HERE

Choose how you feel about each statement on a scale of 0-3.

The first 5 statements: (0 = strongly agree, 3 = strongly disagree).

The second half it’s the other way around: (0 = strongly disagree, 3 = strongly agree).

Use the score chart to find out our level of growth mindset mindset:

22 - 30 = Strong growth mindset
17 - 21 = Growth mindset with some fixed ideas
11 - 16 = Fixed mindset with some growth ideas
0 - 10 = Strong fixed mindset

TRAINING: GIG 1.2.3 - Internal Locus of Control

Take the Locus of Control Scale: ACCESS HERE

The following questions concern your beliefs about work and jobs in general. They don’t refer only to your present work.
Choose how you feel about each statement on a scale of 1–7 (1 = disagree very much, 7 = agree very much).

Aim for accuracy and belief.
The higher the score the more internal locus of control you have.

TRAINING: GIG 1.2.4 - Resiliency & Grit

Resiliency:

Value process before results
Investment in loss
- Cultivate a willingness to learn from your mistakes and continue to fully invest in ongoing learning rather than giving up or only working in a halfhearted way.
Beginner’s mind
Using adversity
- Lean into challenges rather than avoiding them.

Grit:

Take the Grit Scale by Angela Duckworth: ACCESS HERE
It reflects how passionate and persevering you see yourself to be
Pick one of the six grit types
Schedule time to train it
Develop a resilient and gritty mindset:
- From fear to courage
- From anxiety to excitement

TRAINING: GIG 1.2.5 - Understanding the Natural Rhythm of Building Tension & Releasing It

Reflect on the following questions:

What is it that makes a musical experience come alive for you?
Why should you value the experience you are having?
Why do you spend so much time making music in the first place?
What is it about music that makes it so incredibly beautiful to you?

GIG 1.3 - Optimal Environment

Creating a Game Plan to Thrive

Follow an indispensable game plan that gives you razor-sharp clarity & fuels the performance and longevity of your music career.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.1 - Time Assumptions

Think about assumptions that you may have when it comes to how long it takes to write, produce, practice, or learn a song and lyrics.
Your aim is to cut that time with training.
What would it take to cut that time in half?

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.2 - The Highest-Leverage Activities

Make a list of everything you do over the course of a month and figure out the main activities tasks in your work (that’s your music).
Ask yourself: If you could only do one thing on that list all day long, which item on the list would add the most value to your work?
Third, ask: “If you could do only one more thing on your list of key tasks, which would be the second activity that contributes the most value to your work?”
Finally, ask yourself what the third most important task is.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.3 - Elimination

Keep taking notes of ideas to reduce cognitive load.
Think about the things you do outside of the Highest-Leverage Activities.
Think about other trade-offs (e.g., health and cooking).
Eliminate the top five.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.4 - Simplify

Think about the pursuits in your life and work which are not synergistic.
Decide if sequential processing is worth the cost.
- Yes: continue fully informed
- No: remove, double down, and continue

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.5 - Reducing Friction

To create an optimal practice environment, ask yourself:

Is my practice space comfortable and practical?
Can I reduce distractions?

Reducing Friction:

Think about ways to use friction as a catalyst.
Think about ways to use friction as a deterrent.
Think about places where you can eliminate friction.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.6 - Behavioral Change

Think about how you can leverage seven hours of work per day.
At the end of the day, imagine how tomorrow will look.
- Sit down and prepare your to-do list for the next day.
- Think about the three most important things that you need to start with at work in order to make this happen.
- Think about things that you need to do before you start working that will support this.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.7 - Building & Breaking Habits

Visualization Exercise

Think about the very specific sequence of steps from start to finish that are required to execute a desired habit.

Building Habits:
- Pick 4-6 new habits and incorporate them in your day for 21 days.
- Mark them off each day on your calendar.
- Do not fret about only doing four out of six
- Never compensate more than six per day. A no-compensation system works best.
- Phase 1 (0-8 after waking up): Set 1-4 habits for completion that require energy and focus.
- Phase 2 (9-16 after waking): Engage in habits that don’t require you to overcome much limbic friction.
- After the 21 days, take another 21 days to track your behavior but not incorporating further new habits.
- Then go back to another round of 21 days of habit formation, using your progress in the previous 21 days to determine if you can add more to your four to six per day list.
- How do you know if you made a new habit?
- The strength of a habit is dictated by how much limbic friction you need to overcome to perform the behavior and how much context-dependence there is—meaning, do you perform the habit no matter what or only when calm, rested or in the presence of others, caffeinated, etc.
Breaking Habits
- To break a habit, bring conscious awareness to the fact that you participated in the habit you are trying to break.
- When you realize you did, you need to engage in positive behavior immediately afterward.
- It must come immediately after the habit you’re trying to break, and it can’t be a negative behavior.
- Ten jumping jacks or pushups are good positive behaviors.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.8 - Timing & Cathedrals

Schedule analytical and challenging work during phase 1 and more creative tasks during 2.
- Phase 1: 0-8 hours after waking up
- Phase 2: 9-16 hours after waking
Consider using different locations for the specific type of work you want to accomplish that helps you accessing certain states of mind.
- Low ceilings: analytical work (incl. playing a particular song or learning scales)
- High ceilings: creative and abstract work (composing music or writing lyrics)

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.9 - Sit-Stand Approach & Screen Placement

Try and move back and forth between sitting and standing approximately every 30 minutes.
Place your screen slightly above your eye level and avoid working while looking down at your screen to achieve maximum benefits to your mind and work.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.10 - Binaural Beats

Listen to binaural beats at 40 Hertz via headphones for 30 minutes prior to musical performance.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.11 - Eliminate Distraction

What are the five biggest distractions in your life?
What are the things you could do to eliminate them?

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.12 - Beat Overwhelm

In which areas in your life are you overcommitted?
What demands have you brought upon yourself that you don’t have the resources (time, attention, energy, money etc.) to meet?
How are you complicit in creating the situation that you don't want?

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.13 - Track Interruption

Start noticing every time you’re interrupted.
Identify the source of the interruption (e.g., coworker, phone, outside noise) and the severity of the interruption.
Give an estimate of how much it has damaged your attention.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.14 - Minimize the Digital to Thrive

Disable notifications from all apps.
Set specific times for phone checking.
Choose a specific time when to batch email and how often.
See if you can collapse any appointments or meetings.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.15 - Creating the Life Rulebook

Think about decisions that you frequently make.
Create a rule for each of them.

TRAINING: GIG 1.3.16 - Creating Routines to Thrive

Deconstruct your morning & evening routines.
Map them in detail.
Execute them mindlessly.