Using self-awareness to further your music career
According to the dictionary, self-awareness is a “conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.” Essentially, it’s an understanding of what you want in your life, and understanding your own psychology so that you can achieve your ambitions. Within the music industry, this practice is extremely important. It allows you to find motivations to work hard and find ways to connect with people on an emotional level. Therefore in this article, we shall be discussing the importance of self-awareness, and how it can further your music career.
Regardless of your role within the music industry, your success is totally dependent on your motivation, and your ability to work with others. For example, you will want to be able to coordinate efficiently with artist managers, influencers and record labels. Although it’s not a skill that can be taught, there are a few things that you can ask yourself in order to improve your self-awareness within the music industry.
What are your strengths?
Are you a great music producer? Mixing engineer? Mastering engineer? Songwriter? Whatever your strengths, it’s worth going all-in on them. Spend more time on your strengths so that you have a higher chance of becoming successful within that field.
How do you deal with criticism?
If you take every piece of negative feedback personally, you’ll get extremely stressed and lose a lot of motivation throughout your career. Therefore, it’s best to understand your personal psychology so that you can reverse engineer yourself to handle criticism a lot better.
What inspires you?
Is it travelling? Exploring nature? Going to a festival? Spending time with friends and family? Whatever inspires you, do more of it. As cliche as that sounds, you’ll naturally have more inspiration if you’re spending more time doing what you love.
What are your weaknesses?
Finally, understanding your weaknesses is absolutely crucial to improving your self-awareness. If you aren’t great at a certain task, there’s no point spending loads of time doing it. Instead, it’s a better use of your time to focus on your strengths so that you excel in them. Achieving self-awareness is not something that will happen in the timeframe of a couple of days or weeks. Instead, it often takes months or years. However, the earlier that you begin working on your own self-awareness, the sooner you’ll become a lot more self-aware within the music industry.
Whether you are 15 years old or 50, it is never too late to begin improving your mindset and mentality in preparation for success. Although many people seem to think it’s the right option, being an entrepreneur and going your own route often isn’t the most productive use of your time (for some people). Instead, certain individuals may benefit from working in an organization. For example, it’s better to be the number 2 at Spinnin Records than the number 1 at a terrible label which never got off the ground. Self-awareness allows somebody to recognize their strengths, weaknesses, and how they interact with others. It allows them to explore their own personality so that they are able to further themselves within the music industry, and any other lines of work that they may wish to pursue in the future. Accept your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. That’s the key to success.