Excellence

Final post in a series that starts here

Self-actualisation is the 'bingo!' of human experience. It's it is when we are feeling most fully ourselves, immersed in meaningful activity that makes a positive contribution to the universe and not only draws on what we are best at, but helps us get even better at it. It's living in that sweet spot where pleasure, challenge and meaning come together.

As such, I confess, it is the type of human need I have been most nervous about writing about. What if I write a fatuous post? I have been wondering; what if I find nothing to say that isn't self-evident and gushing?

Because it is something of a responsibility to feel that other people's peak experiences are in your hands. As choir directors, we mostly deal with this responsibility by not thinking about it too hard and getting on with planning the detail. But every so often, we need to think about this stuff to check that we're fulfilling our obligations to those whose experiences are in our hands.

Sixth post in a series that starts here

I first noticed cognitive needs when I was rehearsing a choir and as soon as we finished singing a passage, all the singers dived into little huddles of intense conversation. I drew breath to restore order to the proceedings, and then realised that, at that moment, there was nothing I could say that would matter to them more than their current endeavour of checking notes with each other.

That's where I learned that sometimes the most efficient learning activity in a rehearsal is to let people get on with what they are doing. If the singers are focused and intent on solving their own problems, interrupting them will just slow things down.

Well, it's only 3 years since I last blogged about watching Jim Henry work with a top-notch British chorus, and 4 years since I wrote about a Cottontown coaching session at a BABS convention. But I don't get bored of this stuff: it is always fabulous to watch people who are good at what they do being helped to get better by people who are *really* good at what they do.

As I noted last time I watched Jim Henry coaching, the how is more striking than the what. The techniques are simple, and Jim has no compunction about staying with a single technique and/or coaching focus for an extended period of time. Indeed, when I asked a friend what I'd missed in the first part of the session (I was late as I needed to hear the Telfordaires premiere an arrangement they had commissioned from me for the 40th anniversary convention), she said, 'He told them to sing in tune'. Which is actually also a fair summary of the hour I saw. Of course, the point is, anyone can tell you to sing in tune - it's the coaches who can make that actually happen you want to pay attention to.

Harrogate's beautifully restored Royal HallLast weekend saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers celebrate their 40th anniversary at an extraordinary convention in Harrogate. It was always set up to be an extraordinary occasion, what with an eye-watering 46 choruses signing up to compete on the Saturday, and a total of 7 international quartet champions visiting for the weekend.

It became more extraordinary than you would ever have imagined, though, on Friday night when a lightning strike took out the electricity supply to the auditorium and in a truly heroic effort from the BABS team and the convention centre staff, all performances were relocated to the newly-refurbished Royal Hall at the other end of the centre in time to start Saturday's contest only 10 minutes late. It was all rather astonishing.

Frustration is the enemy of progress.

If you enjoy irony, you will be pleased to know that immediately after I wrote that first sentence, my laptop froze and stopped responding for five minutes. I had the presence of mind to remain patient, though if I had been writing on pretty much any other subject, I may not have done.

That feeling of being thwarted by the universe is one that periodically visits anyone who tries to get stuff done. It is an unpleasant experience: you feel all snarled up, putting in the effort but failing to get the results you feel those efforts deserve. You feel disempowered and outraged. It’s not just that you feel stuck, you feel that is unreasonable to be stuck.

When I started thinking about this post, I imagined it was going to be a critique of a rather irritating article I had seen about ‘things that creatives do differently’. And I’m still irritated by it, to the extent that I’m not going to give it the compliment of linking to it. It was full of contradictory statements: creatives like to daydream, creatives are very observant; creatives like solitude, creatives like to seek out new experiences. They don’t do all of those at the same time, though, do they? If you’re day-dreaming, you’re not noticing what’s about you; if you’re alone and quiet, you’re not seeking out new experiences.

So if the idea was to learn from ‘creatives’ how to be more like them, it was no help at all. And really, I didn’t see what was so very ‘different’ about most of them. Most of the statements you could replace the word ‘creatives’ with ‘people’ and they would still ring true. I’m sure the research they were reporting on did genuinely find creative people doing all these things, but I’m not sure that tells us very much about creativity.

This article first appeared on Tom Metzger’s blog Owning The Stage back in January 2009. I am republishing it here because that site is currently offline - temporarily I hope, but in the meantime I’ll put this here so I can refer back to it, as I do periodically. I have left in the references to several of Tom’s posts as it was the dialogue between the two blogs that led this one to be written; should Owning The Stage come back on line, I’ll come back and add the appropriate links!

A ‘flow’ state is one where you are completely immersed in an activity, losing all sense of self-consciousness, with action and awareness completely merged. It’s what athletes mean when they say they are ‘in the zone’. We should care about it because it relates both to high levels of personal satisfaction in what we do and to the development of high-level skills. Happiness and expertise go hand in hand, it seems.

In my recent post on the arranger's super-ego, I had a nice self-indulgent time trying to work out where that intuitive sense comes from that tells you whether or not an arrangement is good enough to release. At the end of that post, I was just happening across the logical next question - what are the urges of the arranger's Id that the super-ego needs to keep in check?

The thing about the Id in Freudian theory (which I have already said I am dubious about, but if we're using his terms, we should probably pay at least some attention to his definitions) is that it is a source of creativity as well as chaos. It's not just a matter of rampant appetite and sexual voracity held back by the thin veneer of civilisation. Human culture has long seen the forces of creation as in many ways akin to those of destruction, and both in some ways at odds with principles of order. The Id's pleasure-seeking energies are primary motivators for everything we do.