My first post on the SPIRE of career planning explained how to embrace a positive mindset around your career planning and then conduct a personal assessment of your purpose, values, passions, and strengths. In this post, we will explore how to incorporate those elements to set meaningful career goals and create an action plan. The result will help you to …
The SPIRE of Career Planning: How to Build Happiness and Optimism into Your Career Part 1
Career planning may feel daunting so here is something that can help to make the process feel fulfilling and motivating, build resilience and lead to greater optimism: The SPIRE model of happiness. Let’s explore the SPIRE of Career Planning! Career Planning is a great way to clarify what you want to achieve professionally and how to get there. My method …
Strengths and Happiness Part 2: The SPIRE of Strengths
How do you feel when you are doing something that you are really good at and that you love? Probably pretty terrific! That’s because you are using your strengths: the talents that energize you. Research from positive psychology demonstrates that identifying and using your strengths enhances your capacity for greater well-being and happiness. Strengths connect closely to Tal Ben-Shahar’s research-based …
Strengths and Happiness Part I: How Strengths Help You Live Your Purpose
What are you good at? What energizes you? What motivates you to achieve your big goals? Welcome to strengths! Strengths are a major component of positive psychology, the science of what makes life worth living. The strengths-based approach of positive psychology helps individuals to identify and focus on the positive aspects of their lives. In fact, research demonstrates that identifying …
The Innovation Process in the Time of COVID: Entrepreneurial Projects at the Yale School of Music
What a year this has been! With the COVID pandemic raging, our lives pivoted online, including my graduate seminar at the Yale School of Music entitled Collaboration, Creativity and Innovation. The focus of this year’s class was how to ensure the place of classical music at a time when COVID has shut down the performing arts sector. Our learning vehicle …
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Write Your Life Purpose Statement: Four Steps to Fulfillment and Direction in Your Life and Career
In our last blog post, we explored how students at Yale University tapped into their passion and purpose in order to ignite their search for a creative career. A great way to ignite that search is to write a Life Purpose Statement. The Importance of A Life Purpose Statement Purpose is key to creative success and fulfillment. Your purpose is …
How to Jumpstart Your Creative Success: Take the Creative Success Assessment
I am passionate about empowering creative success! In fact, my mission is to help creative people achieve success so that the world is teeming with creativity. Why? Because I believe that when we put our passions and talents to work in the service of spreading creativity throughout the world, we are making the world a better place. The goal of …
Creativity for Music Entrepreneurs: Leave Time for Incubation
Have you ever found yourself grappling with a challenging problem and then leaving your desk in disgust and frustration, only to find the answer when you wake up the next morning or when you are out for a nice walk? Welcome to incubation, one of the magical elements of the creativity process, where you work hard on a problem, give …
How Music Entrepreneurs Develop and Use Strengths: 5 Steps to Make the Most of Your Strengths
I am a huge fan of helping musicians and artists work with their strengths. That’s why I incorporate strengths work into my curriculum at the Yale School of Music as well as in many of my guest lectures at conservatories and arts leadership programs. What we do is discover and then learn how to develop strengths. That’s what we …
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Collaborative Artistic Leadership: 3 Tips on Leveraging Strengths to Enhance the Power of Your Team
Recently, I conducted a leadership training at Ensemble Connect, the wonderful fellowship program at Carnegie Hall that prepares young professional classical musicians for careers that combine excellence in performing with teaching, community advocacy, entrepreneurship and leadership. Our session focused on helping the Fellows develop an authentic leadership style in team settings, using strengths and communication styles. The Fellows particularly enjoyed discovering their strengths …