Posts
By Zelda Sheldon
What does your version of the artist’s dream life look like?
Maybe you have a dream to write songs that move people to take action, volunteer or donate to a cause like reducing poverty, saving an endangered species or the entire planet.
Maybe your dream is to hear your music played on radio or television, or being sung in a church.
Maybe you dream of saying goodbye that day job so you can be a full time songwriter living off your royalties and music sales. Maybe you want to be a touring singer songwriter selling CDs wherever you go and making a decent living?
Or seeing your song rise to the top of the Billboard charts…or standing on the Grammy Awards stage holding your trophy and you giving your thank you speech. Or maybe you want to write a song to perform at a friend’s wedding…or whatever...
The big question is 'What’s it going to take for me to start to live my version of the artist’s dream'?
First step - visualise it. One of the best and brightest in the biz Penny Dionne - a super song plugger in Nashville Tennessee suggests we need all the help we can get to inspire us towards our dreams.
She suggests we design a vision board or map that consists of pictures of what our artist’s dream life looks like. I thought this sounded like fun way to spend a few hours so I did what Penny suggested a couple of years ago.
Yes it was a lot of fun finding all the images and symbols of my artists dream. But what I did not expect was how this crazy idea works has wonders for me and my creative life. When I coach clients I show them my vision for my artist’s dream life, which I have on my computer desktop.
It’s colourful, loaded with awesome symbols and personal meaning and it gets me excited every time I see it - which is many times a day. It pops up when I start up my computer and somehow it is these images in my vision map that magnetise and propel me to take daily action.
This vision map acts like my secret personal champion for my dreams and gets me doing what I know I need to be doing.
For example, one particularly strong symbol for me on my vision map is an image I found of one of my songwriting heroes Diane Warren. When I see the image of Diane Warren sitting at her keyboard in her songwriting studio in LA as she says she does 6 days a week - 12 hours a day it compels me to stop procrastinating and start writing a song. I know on any given week I need to write 72 hours to match Ms Warren's effort.
Another image I have is of artists I dream of singing my songs. OK, yes I know Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry are extreme long shots but here’s the thing… they remind me that any old song is not going to work for these artists…they and their managers only want a special kind of song… a hit song - a song that does all the right things stylistically, structurally, melodically and lyrically.
So what these famous singer images do for me is remind me what I'm going for, and that I need to work on my craft and study what songs these hit artists are singing and keep practicing till my songs are in the same hit song camp.
The faces of the famous hit artists on my vision map keep reminding me to do just that each day.
I used these tools to design my vision map: Powerpoint, google search, google images and word art to create a gorgeous multi layered masterpiece of what my dreams look like. Then I saved it to my computer desktop as a wallpaper. You may want to use it as a screen saver too.
Have fun visualising and bringing your dreams to life.
Visit Penny Dionne's website to find her book and other resources http://www.pennydionne.com
