Masterclass
FLOURISH: The Recovery
As human well-being is at the core of all of this, we end this journey by learning the importance of recovery and how to apply positive psychology and healthy self-care measures to our lives.
GIG 3.1 - Optimal Recovery
Achieving Rock Star Recovery
Apply science-based practices about the importance of recovery to music to avoid burnout and feel more at ease in your music career. Bounce back like a rock star after a demanding and stressful day in the creative game to feel energized and ready to rock in the next round.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.1 - Active Recovery
- Sleep (dark, cold, and 8 hours a night)
- Yoga
- Stretching
- Foam rolling
- Massages
- Breath work
- Mindfulness practices
- Nature
- Sauna
- Red Light
- Ice baths
- Cold showers
- Epsom salt baths
- Sensory deprivation tanks
- Hydration & nutrition
- Visualization: Musical imagery and imagination
- Neurofeedback training
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.2 - Psychological Burnout Immunity Scale
- Take the Psychological Burnout Immunity Scale: ACCESS HERE
- Discover where you are most susceptible to burnout and which of those six triggers for burnout you’re most at risk for, and then put in place next steps through either changing yourself, changing the situation, or changing your relationship to the situation.
- The higher the number, the bigger the mismatch, and the more Active Recovery will be required to reset.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.3 - Burnout Inventory Scale
- Take the Burnout Inventory Scale: ACCESS HERE
- There are 16 statements of job-related feelings.
- Please read each statement carefully and decide if you ever feel this way about your job.
- If you have never had this feeling, write the number “0” (zero) in the space before the statement.
- If you have had this feeling, indicate how often you feel it by writing the number (from 1 to 6) that best describes how frequently you feel that way.
- Note: Each scale score should be calculated and interpreted separately, not combined.
- EX (Exhaustion): The higher the score, the more burnt out you are.
- CY (Cynicism): The higher the score, the more burnt out you are.
- PE (Professional Efficacy): The lower the score, the higher the degree of burnout.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.4 - Reboot
- Block out a two-week Annual Reboot
- Block out a 10-day Quarterly Reboot
- Block out a four-day Monthly Reboot
- Block out a day per week for rest
- Deploy Active Recovery practices as often as possible throughout the week, choosing from three of the options below:
- Cold therapy — ice cold showers, cold plunges and ice baths
- Breathwork
- Heat therapy — saunas and steam rooms, red light
- Sensory deprivation chambers — float tanks
- Exercise
- Immersion in nature
- Intentional sleep
- Uplifting socializing
- Yoga
- Massage
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.5 - The Positive No
The Positive No is about getting a yes by saying no. Our no comes from a deeper virtuous belief about what is true. It is a no that shines in a more favorable light. We smoothly glide from a yes to a no and back to a yes. Insightful and elegant, we express our openness with a respectful hint towards the alternative.
Read the executive summary of the power of a positive no: ACCESS HERE
- Express your interest (yes)
- Find the peace of alignment. Find the ultimate outcome that you both want. Agree and nod.
- Assert your power (no)
- Say no to the specific thing within that overarching aligned intention.
- Strengthen the relationship (yes)
- Close the loop by bringing it back to a yes through proposing an alternative solution or situation.
The positive no starts with a matter-of-fact assertion and the declaration of intent. It is about expressing our yes that delivers a final no, which proceeds to seeking a solution.
- For the next week, reflect on moments and situations where you said yes, when you should have said no. This will make you more aware of excessive agreeableness.
- Deploy the power of a positive now. Become a “no-man”—if in doubt, SAY NO!
- Reflect on moments and situations where you were rushing in your work and personal life.
- Block out an additional 30 minutes of space into your day.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.6 - Blanket Policy/Diet
The Blanket Policy/Diet allows us to leverage our priorities, our life rulebook. The beauty of following the rulebook is that it depersonalizes things. It just communicates that this is a blanket policy. Examples:
- Meetings diet
- Coffee date diet
Try out this policy for yourself. It ensures people will not take things personally.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.7 - Turning Practice into Play
Having fun during practice leads to an increase in learning and performance. Schedule a practice session for 90 minutes. No interference from the outside. The goal is to have fun while you do it. Feel free to invent a musical game of your own or choose one of the following approaches:
- Invent a musical game
- Change the tuning of your instrument
- Play or sing your music in a different style
- Record yourself and play a duet with yourself afterwards
- Play and sing simultaneously
- Play your music backwards
After the session, reflect on the experience by thinking about what you learned about yourself, the music, your attention, and your instrument.
- What did you learn that can be of value for your learning, performance, and experience goals?
- What makes it worth exploring this kind of fun experience?
Change up the goals if needed to allow more enjoyment and enthusiasm to come through. When our practice sessions are a combination of play and discipline, we are on the road to fine musicianship.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.8 - Fighting Stress Tools
- Tool 1: Fight Stress by Adding More Stress!
- Tool 2: Cognitive Reframing
- Tool 3: Physiological Sigh (Breathing Technique to Create Calm): ACCESS HERE
- Tool 4: The Rapid Nasal Breath
- Tool 5: Lateralized Eye Movements
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.9 - Stressors
- List all of the biggest stressors in your life.
- Which of these stressors can you change (even if extremely difficult)?
- Which of these stressors are totally outside of your control?
- Discern, then accept or execute.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.10 - Performance & Psychological Status
- Think back on this past year (or go back further if it feels useful) and, in two columns, list the five or 10 errors in judgment or process that come to mind.
- In one column, list professional mistakes, and in the other, lapses in your personal life.
- Detail these from both a technical and psychological perspective.
- Do you notice any patterns?
- Now, repeat this exercise, but this time list your successes. Describe the patterns behind your best personal and professional plays from both a technical and psychological perspective.
- What have you learned about yourself through your pursuits and the approaches you have taken to engaging in and managing them?
- What did I believe three months ago that I know is not true today? Why did I believe that?
We turn weaknesses into strengths by cultivating an awareness of the nature of our difficulties and employing simple strategies for alleviating the stress they’ve inflicted.
TRAINING: GIG 3.1.11 - Making Sandals
- Journal about how you might go about raising your ‘tolerance for turbulence’ rather than denying it.
- Then, think about building a trigger for funneling your emotions into creative expression and action in a way that is in keeping with your personality.
GIG 2.2 - Optimal Fitness
Deploying the Basics of Positive Psychology
Apply science-based practices to increase well-being, cognitive & physical fitness, and to feel more at ease and balanced within your music journey.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.1 - Sleep
- Ask yourself: Is my sleep as good as it could be?
- If not, why not? What could you do to improve it?
- How might being sleep deprived be holding you back in life and business?
Sleep Quality:
- Timing
- Fixed wake and sleep times
- 8 hours of sleep
- Cold Temperature
- 18 degrees Celsius
- 65 degrees Fahrenheit
- Chilipad
- Dark Environment
- Sleep Mask
- Food & Fluids
- Last time: two hours before sleep
- Quiet environment
- Earplugs
- White noise sound reducer
- Exercise
- 3+ hours before bed
- Decompress the spine before bedtime
- Treats (Substances)
- Caffeine 2+ hours after waking up
- Caffeine and alcohol 10+ hours before bedtime
- Digital Entertainment
- At least an hour before bed
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.2 - Dream Recall
- Sleep well
- Sleeping well improves dream recall.
- The dreams we have during the first 4 to 6 hours of sleep are associated with memory and repair.
- Later periods of REM sleep lead to more interesting dreams.
- Keep a dream journal
- Keep a dream journal next to your bed.
- Alternative: use your phone or other device (a tape recorder) to record your dreams.
- It is common for some of us to wake up right after a REM stage and then fall back to sleep.
- When you wake up from a dream, take it slow and drift in and out a little bit.
- Keep your eyes closed and avoid moving because it can cause distraction.
- Try to remember the dream as fully as you can.
- Open your eyes and write down or record as much as you can remember before going back to sleep or getting up.
- Train observation
- Develop the power of observation.
- Train yourself to observe the waking world.
- This translates into improved skills to describe dreams.
- Practice linking the real world to the experience of dreaming, which is necessary for interpreting dreams and recognizing patterns.
- Examples:
- Look through a window.
- Pretend you are dreaming.
- Describe the scene in all its detail.
- Note the novel and the unpredictable
- Novelty and unpredictability stimulate vivid dreams.
- Do something unusual and interesting during your waking hours.
- Learn a new skill, go to a different place, take a different route, try a new activity or food – something like that.
- Remind yourself
- Remind yourself to remember your dreams.
- Set an intention to remember your dreams.
- On a note, write "remember your dreams" and put it next to your bed so you can see it before you go to bed and after waking up.
- Create a dream anchor
- As an alternative to keeping your eyes closed, choose a dream anchor instead.
- Pick any object you would like to look at when opening your eyes in the morning.
- It should be visible right after waking up.
- Looking past or through the object works just fine.
- No need for intense focus.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.3 - Dreamland Game
To have a positive effect on our dreams, psychologist Martin Seligman developed the “dreamland game” to help provide the foundation of a positive mental life and to create pleasant dreams.
- Call up a really detailed picture in your head.
- Concentrate on it and try to describe it mentally.
- Give it a name and words.
- As you drift into sleep, do the following three things:
- First, keep the picture in your head.
- Second, say the name over and over as you fall asleep.
- Third, intend to have a dream about it.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.4 - Fuel to Thrive
- Avoidance of Intolerances
- Calorie restriction and time restricted eating
- Hydration
- DNA-Testing
Mindful Eating:
- How mindful are you actually, in the moment, of fueling your system?
- How quickly do you eat?
- Do you not even take the time to breathe properly while eating?
- We should eat slowly and mindfully.
- It helps you to eat less and also enhances the pleasure of the entire experience.
- Create a relaxing environment with no distractions.
- Focus and concentrate on the food in front of you.
- Take your time and enjoy the process of nourishment more with mindful eating.
- Eating means to relax, restore, recover, and refuel.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.5 - Nutrition & Hydration
Reflect on the following questions:
- What is your apparent approach to nutrition?
- What are the things that may act as a hindrance to a more optimal nutritional status?
- What are your beneficial habits around nutrition?
- What can you do day to day to improve in those areas?
- What can you do day to day to increase your hydration overall?
- What can you do to increase the amount of water that you’re drinking in a day?
- Think about a particular eating strategy for preparing yourself for exertion, avoiding sugar crashes, and dulled senses.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.6 - Train to Thrive
The Mayo Clinic recommends a minimum of the following workout routines per week:
- 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity
- 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise
- Combination of both moderate and vigorous aerobic exercise
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.7 - Gratitude
Gratitude Journal:
- At the end and/or beginning of each day, write down all the things that happen during each day that you are grateful for.
- Each time you write an item down, really take the time to feel that gratitude.
- You’re trying to recall the somatic address of the emotion, discovering where it lives in the body (your gut, your head, your heart) and exactly how it feels.
Gratitude Story:
- The gratitude practice has to be grounded in a story.
- You have to know what that story was and what the gratitude practice references back to.
- The story can be one of you receiving genuine thanks wholeheartedly.
- Or it can be a story of you observing someone else receiving thanks or expressing thanks rooted in a genuine interaction between the giver and the receiver.
- Write down that story down in three or four simple bullet points as salient reminders of that story for you.
- Writing down something about the state that you or the other person were in before they received the gratitude, the state that you were in or that the person was in after they received the gratitude, and any other elements that lend some sort of emotional weight or tone to the story.
- This could be three pages of text, if you like, or it could just be a couple of bullet points.
- The important thing is that it's embedded in your memory and that it's really associated with this genuine exchange of thanks, and the receival of things.
- The entire practice involves reading off these bullet points as a cue to your nervous system of the sense of gratitude.
- Then for about one, two or up to five minutes, just really feel into that genuine experience of having received gratitude or observed someone else receiving gratitude.
- And then in terms of frequency, do that about three times a week.
- The time of day doesn't really matter. Do the practice before you go to sleep at night or on your lunch break or mid-morning or first thing in the morning.
- Do it at least three times a week.
- It's a very brief practice.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.8 - Mindfulness
- Activity & Mindfulness
- Pick an activity you do on a regular basis (sitting down at your desk, coming home, leaving home, having a meal, having a drink, getting out of the car, taking the train, etc.)
- Link a meditative practice with that activity.
- Meditative Practices
- Meditation
- Guided NSDR (Yoga Nidra): ACCESS HERE
- Guided Wheel of Awareness by Daniel Siegel: ACCESS HERE
- Breathwork:
- Guided Box Breathing by Mark Divine: ACCESS HERE
- Guided Box Breathing (4-4-4-4): ACCESS HERE
- Guided Wim Hof Breathing by Wim Hof: ACCESS HERE
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.9 - Connected
Emotional Intelligence
- Take the Emotional Intelligence test: ACCESS HERE
- It will evaluate several aspects of your emotional intelligence and will suggest ways to improve it.
- One of the major parts in the success equation is emotional intelligence.
- People with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful in life than those with lower EIQ even if their classical IQ is average.
Social Connectedness
- Take the Social Connectedness Scale: ACCESS HERE
- The following statements reflect various ways in which we view ourselves.
- Rate the degree to which you agree or disagree with each statement using the following scale: 1 = Strongly Disagree, 6 = Strongly Agree
- There is no right or wrong answer. Aim for an accurate score.
- Do not spend too much time with any one statement and do not leave any unanswered.
- When score is below 80, social connectedness is something you can improve and should address.
TRAINING: GIG 3.2.10 - Protect Your Schedule
Protect your schedule. Peak performance is nothing more than going through a to do list day after day.
GIG 3.3 - Optimal Energy
Optimizing Energy Levels
Become a creative athlete by using your unique biorhythms as an advantage to get ahead in your music career and know when to flow. Be in your element when doing your most important creative work.
TRAINING: GIG 3.3.1 - Finding Your Flowy Day
Your Optimal Flowy Day
- Use the following underlying principles of the optimal flowy day
- Map it all in detail (hour by hour)
- Start Executing
Underlying Principles
- Morning Routine
- Make your bed
- Drink warm water
- Meditative practices: meditation, breathwork
- Yoga, stretching, embodiment practice, movement
- Exercise
- Cold shower (recovery practice)
- Journaling (gratitude, creative writing, reflective)
- Fuel
- Deep Work/Flow Session (90 minutes)
- Leverage the flow cycle
- Surf with your ultradian rhythms including breaks
- 90 minutes of intense concentration
- Apply high performance tools to push through struggle
- Surf with your ultradian rhythms including breaks
- Leverage Flow Triggers
- Clear Goals
- Challenge-Skills Balance
- Complete Concentration
- Immediate Feedback
- etc.
- Aim for 3–6+ hours of protected time for flow during a day
- No interruptions / No incoming stimuli whatsoever
- Cognitively unstimulating break every 45 minutes for about 5 minutes
- MacGyver method (5 minutes)
- Leverage the flow cycle
- Recovery (20-60 minutes)
- Release Activity
- Hike in nature
- Yoga, stretching, embodiment practice, movement
- Basics of Positive Psychology
- Gratitude journal
- Mindfulness practice: meditation or breathwork
- Fuel (food & hydration)
- Exercise
- Recovery Practice
- NSDR (yoga nidra)
- Cold shower
- Nap
- Release Activity
- Batch shallow work
- Complete task sequentially
- Avoid reactivity
- Protect attention ferociously
- Stay embodied
- Inspiration paradox
- Finish Strong
- Evening Routine
- Deploying Power Down Ritual
- Recovering Effectively
- Meeting Social Needs (socializing)
- Winding Down Pre-Sleep
- Meditative practices: meditation, breathwork
- Yoga, stretching, massage, mobility exercise
- Active Recovery
- Hot shower (active recovery)
- Epsom salt bath (active recovery)
- Sauna (active recovery)
- Fuel
- Journaling (gratitude)
- Reading/listening (pattern loading/building knowledge base)
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