So Percussion Musician

“As a member of So Percussion, I am well aware of the struggles of the student musician leaving the “nest” of the university educational system.  Most of what I learned on how to develop a career in the music field came from trial and error and first-hand experience.  After speaking as a guest in Astrid’s class at Yale University, it …

Top 10 Tips Time Management Tips for Music Entrepreneurs

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This year, one of my biggest discoveries was Quadrant 2 time management, the strategy that has you focusing on what is really important to you as opposed to what is urgent, and realigning your time to honor and commit to Quadrant 2 activities each week (for more on this, see tips 2 and 3 below). Q2 time management is helping …

Creating Success in a DIY World: 4 YSM Music Entrepreneurs Share Their Insights

One of the highlights of my semester is when I invite recent alumni from the Yale School of Music to speak to our students about how they created their career success.  My students are consistently impressed and amazed that musicians who are a mere 5-8 years ahead of them are already successfully wending their way through the world of music.  …

Emotional Intelligence for Today’s Leaders Part II: Self-Management

Once you have developed better self-awareness, there is a second skill in developing personal competence:  self-management.

Self-management is the ability to express the appropriate emotions at the appropriate time. Self-management is about slowing yourself down so that you can check any inappropriate behaviors and formulate the most appropriate response to the challenging situation.

Self-management strategies fall into two categories: actions to take in the moment so that you do not act on your emotions inappropriately and long-term actions that help you to improve your response to emotionally charged situations.

Let’s continue with our example of the email from a collaborator with whom you have been working closely. This individual makes a lot of demands about how a performance is supposed to run and her latest email lays out yet another requirement just when you thought that everything had been agreed upon.

If your first thought in receiving this email is to send back a nasty email or pick up the phone to yell at your collaborator, here are some alternatives that can help to slow you down and manage your emotions more effectively.

Emotional Intelligence for Today’s Leaders Part I: Self-Awareness

Lately, there has been a lot of press about the importance of emotional intelligence for successful entrepreneurs and leaders.

So what is emotional intelligence and why should leaders cultivate this skill?  

Emotional Intelligence (know as “EQ”, as opposed to “IQ”) is the ability to recognize and control your emotions and then pick up on the emotions of those with whom you are interacting in order to influence and work effectively with them. It’s the ability to express the appropriate emotions at the appropriate time.

This psychological model was introduced in 1990 by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer and popularized by science writer Daniel Goleman in his groundbreaking work, Emotional Intelligence (1995).  Emotional Intelligence has been called ” a revolutionary, paradigm-shattering idea” (Harvard Business Review) since it is strongly correlated with success.

Having high EQ is the way to get buy-in from the people with whom you are dealing and get them to listen, be engaged and inspired to follow your lead. Research has shown that having high EQ is a better indicator of success than having a high IQ.  That is why it is such an important leadership skill  The great thing about EQ is that it is a skill set that you can develop to make you a more effective leader. Let’s take a closer look.

EQ involves four underlying sets of skills, two having to do with your own emotions and two having to do with the emotions of those around you:

Conflict Management for Emotionally Intelligent Musicians: How to Run a Conflict Meeting

In my last post on how to prepare for a conflict meeting, we took a look at how the members of a string quartet could prepare for a brewing ensemble conflict stemming from a perception that one of the members of the quartet was not fully committed to the ensemble and was engaging in behaviors that undermined the rehearsal process, threatened …

Conflict Resolution for Emotionally-Intelligent Musicians: How To Prepare for a Conflict Meeting

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Working successfully with other musicians in an ensemble or another collaborative project involves not only an exquisite blend of musical styles and skills but also a high degree of emotional intelligence to manage the relationships with your fellow musicians. Inevitably, when creative people come together, there will be varying ideas on how to approach the music as well as how …

Artistic Director, Tapestry Opera

Astrid is able to command control of a room of extremely diverse professionals and impart extremely useful tools, with hard resources and anecdotal guides. We laughed, oohed, raised our eyebrows, dug in, and stayed alert through fairly dense material thanks to Astrid’s charm and skill. — Michael M., Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Time Management for Musicians: 4 Strategies To Help You Power Through Time

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Musicians need a lot of help with time management since they have so much going on and they have to manage multiple professional activities, not to mention all that goes on in their personal lives!  Last time, I introduced Steven Covey’s model of Quadrant II Time Management which helps musicians achieve their goals by focusing on what is really important.  This …