Fast Forward

You know how sometimes, you’ll be watching a movie, it’ll get to a really interesting part, and then – boom – they jump ahead five years and you’re left thinking “uhhh, what just happened?”

Yeah, this post is kind of like that.

After my first three posts – which I was actually pretty happy with! – everyday life took over and I quickly lost that new-found motivation to keep at it. Or maybe I just didn’t have anything particularly pressing to say. But having recently read a book all about the power of writing things down, I feel that it’s important to get back into the blogging swing of things – so here goes!

The past ten months have been busy and interesting, to say the least. My voice lessons have been going really well, and for a while I was learning in leaps and bounds – now it’s more like fits and spurts, but it’s still a lot of fun. I feel like I keep hitting plateaus, then breaking through a barrier and making more progress – whenever I start to get discouraged, I just remind  myself that it hasn’t been that long since I started studying! When I think of how much progress I made over the course of just 9 months, that bolsters me and gives me the confidence I need to keep going.

Last year, right around the time I was just beginning voice lessons, I was also doing a lot of soul-searching, career-wise. I was extremely unhappy in my current job role, and being overworked on top of that only added fuel to the fire of my desire to find my true calling. I had several visits with a career coach, took the inevitable batch of evaluations and tests, did a lot of self-analysis and online research, and prayed constantly for inspiration and guidance. In the end, I decided that working in the events world was the best path for me – it tied into my theater background, it was interesting, fast-paced, and fun, and it was something I felt I’d be good at.

Of course, I had no idea how I was going to break into the field, and right on the heels of this decision, I started to feel that my true calling was music, so that only made things more confusing. But I do believe in the power of prayer, and that God/the universe/whatever you want to call it guides you and puts you on the path to the right experiences for your own personal growth. Honestly, what happened next felt like nothing short of divine intervention.

The group my team is a part of at work suddenly went through an unexpected and radical re-organization, and my own team – which had previously been focused on global business reporting and sales programs – was suddenly a global events team. Overnight, I went from spreadsheets, PowerPoint reports, programming and reporting (YAWN) to planning internal events for our management teams at the highest levels in our company, in such exotic locations as Milan, Madrid, and Maui. I truly can’t ascribe this amazing, timely, perfect happening to anything other than God’s plan.

Side note: Now, look, this isn’t meant to be a religious blog, and I know not everyone who reads it will believe what I believe. I’m totally fine with that – but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to edit out my own beliefs in the telling of my story. It’s MY story, after all.

So fast forward to today: I’ve been in my new event planning role for 6 months, and it is crazy-super-busy, stressful, amazingly fast-paced, and I’m on a huge learning curve – but I love it!! It’s really energized me and given me new hope that I can last in the corporate world for a while longer – years instead of months (or days!). Rather than going through the exhausting, emotionally draining and time-consuming work of trying to break into the field by finding an entry-level position with a new company, I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to learn this new field while staying at a company where I feel comfortable, and where I’ve already invested nearly six years of my life and career, working with people I know and like. What a gift!

Oh, and all my hard work, long hours, and dedication in my previous role finally paid off big-time this past year with not one, but TWO promotions and raises! So I finally feel appreciated, like I’m getting the recognition and respect I deserve, I enjoy my work, and the increase in my salary is helping me to fund my next plan: The Great Escape. Stay tuned for more on that.

In the end, I think I’m going to look back on this past year as a huge turning point in my life. Just one year ago, I was miserable in my job, felt overworked and underpaid and unappreciated, hadn’t yet (re)discovered singing, had never been to an opera or the ballet (I’ve since seen three), didn’t know some of the most amazing people and resources that are in my life today…the difference between then and now is pretty darn amazing. This past year really was all about moving forward, FAST. And reflecting on that has just made me even more excited to see what else is in store.

Introduction - Part Two

So I started on the quest to find a new career – the RIGHT career. I read books like Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur and Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love. I started stumbling across and subscribing to blogs such as The Art of Non-Conformity, whose author travels and blogs his way around the world as his career, and Man Vs. Debt, written by a guy who decided with his wife to sell all their belongings, pay off $18,000 in consumer debt, and move to Australia with their daughter. I researched and found a career coach, started taking various personality and skills assessments, asked friends and family to provide me with descriptions of myself, pestered people for ideas of what to be, read through page after page of the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

In the midst of this process, I began to realize that I really missed music – I played violin for 15 years, but hadn’t played much over the past decade, and wanted to get back into it. I even thought I might be able to incorporate it as a small income stream, possibly playing with a quartet for weddings and such. So I looked around online and found a company that was a bit like a matchmaking service for music students and teachers. I put in my information, background and availability, selected “violin” and submitted my request for a teacher. Almost on a whim, I thought, I wonder if they do voice? I have always loved to sing, and had been cantoring with a small church group for over a year. So I submitted a request for a voice teacher as well, just to see what would happen.

Lo and behold, a few days later I got word of a match with a voice teacher named Angela. When we got together for my 30-minute introductory lesson, we spoke a bit about why I wanted voice lessons, and she put me through some paces to see what my range was like, how easily I could follow direction, that sort of thing. I told her point-blank, “Look, let's be clear. I’m not deluding myself that I would make a career out of singing - that's not why I'm here. I just really like singing, and I cantor for my church, and I want to learn how to do it correctly, and also increase my range, because it’s very limited right now.” We agreed that I would let her know whether or not I wanted to start taking lessons with her (although I already knew that I did). It was a lovely half hour and we said cheerful good-byes, and then I started driving home. I hadn’t even gotten to the end of her block when I suddenly found myself crying. I had no idea why – other than that I knew this was RIGHT.

And so, this brings us to today and why I’ve started this blog. I’ve been taking lessons for just under three months, and I am LOVING them. It still feels exactly right, and I'm learning very quickly. Angela has been really impressed with my progress – for the first few lessons, she kept asking me, “And you’re SURE you haven’t taken voice lessons before now??” because I was able to make adjustments and do new things so quickly and easily. Lord knows I'm no prodigy! But I think my background in music, paired with a bit of inherent ability and a lot of hard work, is allowing me to progress faster than your average beginner. About 6 weeks into taking lessons, Angela told me that, even though it was probably way too early to be making this kind of assessment, she really thought that I had the makings of a professional singer. I told her she was crazy, but secretly I was thrilled to have a longstanding daydream of mine unexpectedly brought out into the light.

So I continue with my lessons, working hard during the week at practicing what I've learned and relishing the hour each Sunday that I spend solely on myself in my lesson. I absolutely love that, at 33, I'm just finding my voice. It's an exciting process of discovery, finding things I never knew were there, and allowing myself to daydream more openly and out loud, sharing things that I've never spoken about to anyone before. And suddenly, the notion of a career in music doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea after all.

Introduction - Part One

Well, here I am, just starting to record the beginning of my adventures. I have a feeling it'll take a while to get through all this background, so I'll be breaking this introductory posting up into two separate entries.

I’ve never really known what I wanted to be when I grow up. Heading into college, I thought I might want to be either a psychologist or a lawyer – so I took Intro to Psychology and Criminal Justice 101. For reasons which still elude me, I decided to go with Psychology and declared my major after that first semester.

It didn’t take long to figure out that I didn’t want to by a psychologist, but I found my studies interesting and didn’t know what else to consider, so I kept my major. Midway through my junior year, a turning point in my life occurred – I saw an ad in the school paper for auditions for singers for an upcoming theatre show, and I thought, what the hell. So I auditioned and landed a part, and worked on every theatre show after that until I graduated.

The summer before my senior year, I decided to do a business concentration – which basically just meant taking a bunch of business classes that were too few to be considered a minor – to cover my ass when I got out of school. I was thinking of going into management consulting, so just before my final semester, I went to my favorite business teacher and asked his advice for what I should do – go into theatre, or go into consulting. His answer was immediate – go do theatre while you can! Before you have a family, settle down, and get weighed down with other obligations, follow your heart and do theatre.

So I did – I got a theatre apprenticeship, moved to Philadelphia, and worked in professional theatre for six years. At first, I concentrated on what I considered to be the fun stuff – production work such as backstage run crew, stage management, running sound boards, etc. But ultimately, the extremely low pay and the freelance nature of the work had me broke and stressed out, so I moved into theatre administration.

Fast forward those six years – after bouncing around a few different jobs with varying degrees of unhappiness and dissatisfaction – but always with that same pitiful salary – I got laid off ten days before Christmas 2005, with an 8-month-old at home and a husband who was also in theatre (read: broke). It was the final straw – I decided I was done with this starving artist crap. I reworked my résumé, put it up on Monster.com, and miraculously got a call from a recruiter at a large global software company headquartered nearby. I landed the temp job, scored a permanent one a couple of months later, and have been working there ever since.

This job has been a huge blessing in our lives, make no mistake about that. It provided me with steady work and excellent pay – from the start, I was making twice as much as I had made in my previous arts administration position. And since then I’ve been promoted and gotten raises. This job helped us get back on our feet financially, get out of arrears with our student loans, improve our credit, save up for and purchase our own home, and have a second child. But after accomplishing all that, I felt that it had played its role in my life, and I started feeling more than ready to move on.

The question was, move on to what?