As a young musician, life for me wasn’t always easy. I had an overactive imagination, I often had difficulty expressing myself and I didn’t really seem to fit in.
I always knew I had a lot to offer, but I still spent my teens and a good chunk of my 20’s working dead end jobs that burned me out and made me miserable. I didn’t really understand what else I could do.
The constant friction and discomfort I experienced made it difficult for me to fully accept myself or anyone else for that matter. I was full of anger and resentment, which only made my problems worse. Again, I just didn’t know what else to do and I felt trapped in a life that I wasn’t really built for.
I’ve always been driven to try and remove that sense of constant discomfort, so at an early age I started reading self-improvement books and trying to learn as much as I could to help make things better.
Eventually I ended up going to a week long seminar on personality profiling that totally flipped my lid. I always thought that personality profiling was pretty much about labeling behavior. I didn’t really see the value in it. I just knew that the guys who were putting on the seminar were awesome and I trusted them to give me my money’s worth.
It ended up changing the way I think about everything and ultimately led me to pursuing it as my primary area of study and an integral part of my career.
I just couldn’t believe how valuable and important this all was and how little most people knew about it.
One of the most significant things I learned was that many of our traits are actually hard-wired into us. There are actual neurological reasons for why our personality is the way it is. Profiling is not about labeling, it’s actually about understanding our brains at a much deeper level.
Not only that, but we’re even pre-determined to have certain in-born talents that most people don’t have and certain things that other people do well that will drain us and cause us friction and stress.
Most of us go around our whole lives thinking that other people are more like us than they actually are. This causes all kinds of problems. Unless we really understand this we end up treating other people in a way that’s like asking a square peg to go through a round hole.
On the flip side, if we don’t really understand ourselves then we’ll spend our own lives doing things we’re not suited for because other people will treat us as though we’re more like them and think we should do things like they would.
In short, we may end up with parents who don’t understand us, jobs that slowly drain the life out of us and our music careers, and friends who give us advice that won’t work.
That just plain sucks. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way for the rest of our lives.
Understanding personality at a deep level has done more to remove stress and friction and to increase my capacity to love others and be happy than anything I’ve ever learned.
So to bring it home, here are some of the benefits of learning and understanding personality for musicians:
- It will give you the confidence and insight to start living a life that’s suited for YOU.
- it will give you valuable insights into things like marketing, songwriting and performance, so you understand what will work for YOU instead of bashing your head against the wall wondering why a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t get you results.
- it will help you understand and develop your natural strengths at a level that few people do, so you can shine doing what you love and spend less time doing what drains you.
- It will bring you inner peace and allow you to understand and accept yourself and others at a level you never have before.
Join the discussion One Comment