The secret is making space for a little bit of nothing
On the surface, arts administration doesn’t seem like a sexy job. You don’t get to be up on stage blowing the heck out of a saxophone, wowing museum-goers with your canvases of light and color, or nurturing young artists through your creative teaching style.
Instead, you’re hidden in the back office, pushing papers, making calls, developing relationships, and crunching the numbers. This is all the unsexy work that’s needed to allow all the artists you support to do their beautiful creativity.
Obviously, this is essential work, without which art schools, museums, and cultural centers could not function. However, what it often entails is a day filled with tasks that can feel very far removed from the love of creativity that brought you to the arts in the first place.
Many arts admins are highly creative people who are often artists in their own right. You feel called to a life of creative magic, but instead you experience a grind: constant meetings, deadlines, financial pressures, and challenges coming from staff, audiences, funders, students, and parents.
Because of the demanding work environment and its seeming disconnection from the “real” artistry on display on stage or in the studio, time spent in the back office can seem to afford little opportunity for genuine creativity. This leaves many arts administrators burnt out.
What if it were possible to restore the sense of creative magic that brought you to the arts in the first place and to bring it into your daily activities as an arts administrator?
What if your spreadsheet became a canvas, your telephone a musical instrument, and your boardroom your teaching studio?
What if this creativity was genuine and life-giving for yourself and those you support?
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring this possibility in a number of posts and videos. Here’s the first insight I’ll share with you:
Restoring that creative magic — what I call “Soulforce” — is absolutely possible. But it requires something paradoxical: a little bit of nothing.
Here’s a story to explain what I mean, plus some action steps you can immediately implement the next time you step into the office.
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I recently taught a workshop on what I call “The Magic Pause” to a group of musicians. The Magic Pause is my formulation of the core of the Alexander Technique. It’s the simplest, quickest, most effective way of finding freedom and ease in moments when you’d normally get tight and tense with effort.
Essentially, the Magic Pause is just that — a pause, and nothing more. Its “magic” comes from the way it so successfully interrupts tension patterns in the body.
Being a pause, it can’t be something that’s forced or made to happen. And herein lies its effectiveness, since muscular tension is invariably the result of forcing or making something happen.
A simple pause, strategically timed, calms the nervous system during the critical moment when you’d normally resort to “over-efforting,” contorting your body, and tensing up with the effort of trying hard.
The result is an unexpected level of ease that carries over into the rest of the activity, bringing a new-found experience of comfort, agility, and creative flow.
At one point in this workshop, I was helping a trombonist apply the Magic Pause to a tricky passage he was playing. After he first played his piece, I asked him what he noticed and he told me his body tightened just as he played the most challenging part of the passage.
I then instructed him to play the notes that led up to that part, then allow a nice, long pause, and then only to continue playing the passage when he noticed his body relax a little.
He did this — and the results were stunning.
His music had a completely new, haunting quality. His sound became more resonant, and the flow of his music became richer and more full of life. He also reported feeling much more relaxed while playing it.
I wasn’t the only one to appreciate this shift in his playing. Other participants volunteered their own sense of awe, and how they were moved by his music.
This was truly a moment of creative magic!
The lesson?
As soon as he released the tension that was blocking it, his Soulforce came shining through his music. All it took was a little bit of nothing.
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What worked for this trombonist will also work for you, even during the most mundane administrative tasks.
Here’s how.
- To apply the Magic Pause, you first need to discern your “critical moment.” This is the moment when your body gets tighter than you’d like. Examples: when you get up to speak in front of others, when you take hold of your computer mouse, when you get up from your chair.
- Once you’ve found your critical moment, you then allow a nice, long pause just before you begin your task. Example: it’s your turn to speak in the meeting, and instead of rushing into it, you pause for about 2–3 seconds and then get up.
- Then you continue with your task and see what you notice. What effect did this pause have on your subsequent performance? Did it change how you felt and functioned, how others received you?
The Magic Pause is a deep study and so there’s a lot more to it than I can easily share in this blog post, but it is so practical and powerful that you may notice a sizable shift even just applying what you’ve read in this post.
And I hope you do apply it! Doing so opens a space in what can sometimes otherwise be an unending series of stressful tasks linked by bouts of rushing from one place to another.
This stressful dynamic is a big part of what leads to burnout. Interrupting it with many Magic Pauses during the day opens the possibility of many elements of creative magic:
- Comfort, freedom, and fluidity of movement
- Poise and resilience
- New creative ideas and energy
- Improved relationships (who likes interacting with stressed, tense people?)
- Greater productivity with less feeling of effort
- A renewed sense of connection with a larger purpose
In short, by applying the Magic Pause to your daily activities, you get to enjoy the very same sense of creative magic that all the artists you support!
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Want to restore a sense of creative magic among your admin staff and teaching artists? Bring me into your arts organization to give them an experience of the Magic Pause or my other Soulforce offerings.
Contact me at [email protected] to schedule a free consultation.
