What is your goal really?
As musicians, what are our goals? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Is it technical mastery? Is it to perform bucket-list repertoire? Is it to win a specific job?
For an orchestra, what are its goals? Is our goal to be error-free? Is it to be absolutely together? Is it perfect execution of an interpretation for an entire run of performance?
We spend the majority of our training and professional lives practicing toward goals. We are guided to first do A and then do B. We reach milestones that tell us we are making progress.
We focus on tangible goals like quality of execution, minimizing mistakes, consistency of performance. And we rarely go beyond that.
Of course, it's great to have tangible goals to push us to become better at our craft. But, why do we do our work beyond those goals?
If you think about it, we enjoy our work the most in the company of others - whether it is the musicians sharing the stage with us or the audiences listening to us.
It would be wise for us to ask who we are doing the work for? How are our tangible goals connected to those people?
If we are doing our work for our audiences, why? What are we offering them?
If we are doing our work for our fellow musicians, why? What are we offering them?
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Let's take another form of entertainment - my favorite: movies.
Why do you go watch a movie? Perhaps you want something that makes you laugh, or cry. Maybe you want to feel profoundly moved or inspired by a true story. Perhaps you want to feel smart by trying to solve the mystery. Maybe you want to feel seen and belonging because the movie is about your story.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with the movie, but you just want to spend time with the person you go with.
Many people seek out entertainment experiences because they are searching for feelings. They long for these feelings, and they are satisfied when the experience provides them with what they want.
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Now, let's bring it back to our work:
Why do people come to our concerts? Why would they want to watch us perform live? What are they looking for that they can't get from listening to a recording?
It all boils down to: What is it that we are providing them?
Could that be the ultimate goal of our tangible goals? If we are providing them a feeling or an experience they seek, then how do our tangible goals help us achieve that?
We can take it further and ask why what is it that our colleagues want from us? Is it loyalty, accountability, inspiration, or motivation? How do our own tangible goals help us move toward that goal?
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If the intangible feelings and experiences are really our goals, why don't we reiterate that to ourselves every day?
We focus on the minute details and get tunnel vision: what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong. We focus on avoiding mistakes and achieving accuracy in our performance. This is partly because it is easy to measure and track those things.
Musicians don't frequently get pep talks before concerts about what are the feelings we hope to elicit from our audiences or how our work transforms their lives.
As conductors, we don't often frame our rehearsal techniques around those same feelings and experiences. We are taught to give direct instruction like louder, softer, longer, shorter. It doesn't have to only be that. We can add frames to our instructions around feelings like "softer here; we are working toward a surprise" or "longer here; our aim is to create textural disorientation."
We forget that sometimes it's not about how perfect things are. We forget that our tangible goals of performance are a means to an end. That end is achieving a feeling, a transformation, an experience for the people whom our work is for. We forget to see the big picture and we don't get reminded enough of it.
When we frame our tangible goals around a feeling or experience, we also begin to see that there is more than one way to achieve it. And that is fertile space for creativity at the individual level. This is a nice side benefit we can tap into.
I learned that one of NASA's mindsets is to think of plans as something that they will deviate from. Their focus was on achieving the mission, not executing the plan. Preparation and strategy were all framed around what they were going to do when they must deviate in order to ultimately achieve the mission.
Like NASA, we can stay focused on our ultimate mission - that feeling, that transformation, and that experience for the people in the room.
In order to do that, we need to be clear about what that goal really is, who it serves, and how it serves them.
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