Have a Plan

This weekend I attended a performance "boot camp" hosted by Tom Jackson, performance coach to the stars. He jokes that people have called him a cross between Tim Robbins and Ozzy Osbourne. I was thoroughly inspired.

He reminded us that nothing happens without work. He spoke to the delusional side of those of us with unfulfilled goals who say to ourselves, once I get my big break, then I'll do the preparation for my big show in front of thousands of people, or whatever that dream might be. He offered the sound advice that unless we have done that work already, the chances of our break falling from a silver lined cloud are about as likely as Jon Gosselin returning to Kate on the back of a beautiful white wedding stallion. I'm paraphrasing of course.

The weekend had its high moments, and its low ones. Watching Tom take a performance from totally ordinary to really cool with a few small changes was clearly toward the top. The lower end was a toss up between the pre-packaged honey buns and the guy who lost me when he made fun of Jon Mayer. Don't get me wrong, he's a brilliant vocal coach if you can just get past his product pushing and name dropping.

Back to the good stuff. Don't wait for somebody else to make your dreams happen. You have to take it step by step. There are no shortcuts. OK, very few. If you build your strategy around shortcuts though, you will fail. Then you will probably blame someone else.

What do I do now? Start building the plan for my show. If you want specifics, you can check out Tom's website, onstagesuccess.com. He twitters, blogs, facebooks, yea he's a pretty hip dude. Not to mention that this guy started World Vision, which has raised astronomical amounts of money for charity, and tour support for the artists who share the information at their concerts.

I also plan to begin sharing opportunities to support Holt International at my performances. They are an international adoption agency that I connected with over the weekend and will be talking more about in the future.

Honestly, I came away from the weekend feeling pretty good about where I am now. I also came away with better defined goals, and a plan for some things I have to work on. Like what to say to my audience, whittling down the "goulash" of music to really point to the most interesting parts so that audiences "get it," and mainly just doing that thing that may be the hardest thing in my life to do... plan. You could apply what we learned this weekend to just about anything you wanted to do.

Have a plan, work the plan, repeat.