Well, as regular readers of this blog already know, I have been actively developing a career as a motivational speaker.
I have been going at this from a lot of different angles, but my goal that I have had from the start is still the same: I want to somehow share the experiences I had both in going from an amateur to a professional player, and what it was like to work in the environment of professional performance (major culture shock). I also wanted to offer a little insight on the management and leadership techniques of the great conductors.
So a different approach popped into my head this morning, one that made it impossible to go back to sleep. I realized that what really made these conductors great was not their own individual musical ability, which was often mediocre. What made them great conductors was their ability to stand in front of an orchestra and inspire the players to be superstars, both individually and collectively.
Now I know you might say to that, well duh, the players of a major symphony orchestra are already superstars, so how hard could that be?
Well yes, that is a good point, but what I also noticed about working with these top drawer conductors was that they could take a basic freelance band, a choir of amateur singers, or even a youth orchestra, and get the exact same superstar response. It wasn’t just a lot of cheerleading enthusiasm. It was the creation-- in others-- of a higher state of mental focus and belief in oneself. It was so fascinating to watch, and they did it with so little effort, that I just had to figure out what it was they were doing.
So anyway, I have analyzed this up and down and left and right, and I’ve come to a new level of consciousness. Instead of analyzing it and discussing it, I think the best way to explain it to people is to just stand up and do it.
So I am offering a new keynote address package, and it is titled “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Superstar.” (I’m very pleased to report that googling this phrase gets zero responses, which means I am the first. YAY.)
Funny thing, when I was a kid I always had this vision of standing up in front of a crowd and conducting an exciting event. I realize now, I don’t need the orchestra. I can just go to the audience directly, and conduct their energy.
I have some great stories to share about discovering my own inner superstar... those of you who have read Real Men Don’t Rehearse have heard them already. But I’m going to reframe them. I’m starting to understand now how I managed to pull it off, that is, how I managed, as a largely self-taught kid from a farm in Ohio, to play in the most famous orchestra in the world. It was not about being better. Instead, it was about not repressing or restraining the superstar energy that every single one of us is born with. This is what the the other members and the culture of a major Symphony Orchestra was about, and this is what those great conductors did.
There was this constant cognitive dissonance that I always faced in the basement Symphony Hall: here were all these people that, by most definitions, were superstars, and yet... all you saw in these people off stage was a deep sense of humility. They knew they were just human beings, but they had to access something beyond the normal when the concert started at eight o’clock. It was a truly wonderful thing to watch that transformation occur night after night. And at last, I can finally present it in such a way that people can take that energy and make it happen in other environments.
I’m ready to be the kickoff keynote speaker for your next event. Operators are standing by.
© Justin Locke
Comments