Your Big Picture Vision

There’s a scene I’ve always loved in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Alice is lost in the Tulgey Wood and encounters the Cheshire Cat.

She asks:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

To which the cat replies:

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice begins to answer:

“I don’t much care where–“

And the Cheshire Cat interrupts her to say:

“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”

Have you found yourself sometimes feeling like you’re going nowhere in music? Or perhaps you’re not progressing as fast as you hoped? Maybe you keep changing direction, leaping from project to project, idea to idea, trying to move forwards but somehow never quite getting anywhere?

In just a few minutes, you can change the trajectory of your entire musical future.

Using a powerful exercise I’m about to share, you can permanently gain greater clarity, confidence, and success in your musical life. What we’re going to do is to set your “Big Picture Vision”.

Before we go any further though, I know some readers may hear the word “vision” and immediately start to tune out! I get it. I’m a scientist by background, highly analytical, very pragmatic. It was only through a gradual process over the years and putting these things to the test myself that I realised that something as seemingly airy-fairy as “setting a vision” could have highly practical outcomes.

As Dr. Stephen Covey once famously put it, you need to “begin with the end in mind”.

So this exercise is all about getting clear, getting detailed, and getting excited about exactly where it is you want to go in music.

Another disclaimer: This is not about career success. Or maybe for you, it is. But this is something for every musician, whether you’re just starting out, or deep into your journey, whether you play music as a hobby, you’re trying to make it a career, or you’re already a seasoned pro.

Every single musician has a unique Big Picture Vision. This is 100% about you and the things you truly care about.

The Big Picture Vision is one of the first things we have all new members at Musical U do, and if you’re a member yourself then you will almost certainly have done this before. Whether you’ve done this exercise or something like it before, I want to encourage you to take the time as you read this chapter now to do it afresh. Because this isn’t a one-time thing, it’s worth doing regularly to keep your musical life on the best path forward.

You’ll find that your Big Picture Vision is amazing for staying motivated. Especially if music isn’t your career, it’s likely you find that your motivation and passion for learning music can wax and wane. Even with all the best intentions, sometimes you wake up and you’re just not in the mood for practising your instrument today!

But the one thing which never really wavers is your Big Picture Vision, because that literally encapsulates what it is you’re most passionate about. Once you have it clearly defined, it can be a touchstone you can keep coming back to any time you’re not motivated to practice. You can read through your Big Picture Vision and remind yourself “Oh yeah! This is what I want and this is why I’m putting in the effort. This is what’s going to be possible for me and where I want to get to.”

It’s an incredible way to just kickstart your motivation again and again. Whatever might be going on this day, this week, this month, that Big Picture Vision statement can continually re-spark that passion for you.

Another powerful thing about your Big Picture Vision is that it can act as a kind of shield for you. We live in the golden age of YouTube, and while that is an incredible boon, it’s also the source of endless “shiny object syndrome” and “squirrels to chase.”

It’s so easy to let what is a really good thing (our passion) turn into scatterbrained enthusiasm in any and every direction. Those shiny objects and squirrels can become the biggest barrier preventing us from actually making real progress.

So I love the Big Picture Vision for providing a shield against those kinds of distractions, by acting as a filter. You can simply ask yourself “is this actually aligned with where I want to go? Am I chasing down a rabbit hole just because I’m kind of addicted to the YouTube roulette? Or is this genuinely helping lead me down the path I want to be following?”

Once you’re clear on that “North Star”, it becomes a lot easier to stay focused, and rule out things that are going to be a distraction, or pure entertainment which won’t actually move you forwards.

Can you see how impactful this could be for you? I encourage you to actually take a few minutes and do the exercise now, as you read on.

The Big Picture Vision Exercise

The Big Picture Vision exercise begins with a simple question:

_________________________________________________________

Imagine yourself 5 years from now.

And for a moment we’re just going to suspend all disbelief,

and imagine that everything has gone perfectly in your musical life.

No barriers, no struggles, no failures, no frustrations.

Everything has just magically clicked into place for you.

What does that musical life look like?

_________________________________________________________

Now you might immediately have answers and ideas popping into your head, or you might not.

Maybe you just have a few words or one particular goal you’ve been thinking about.

I want you to try to stay in that space of “anything’s possible, and everything’s gone perfectly.” Because your brain is going to want to immediately jump to “How would I do that? Could I really accomplish that? I’m not sure I have what it takes”, and so on.

We want to totally sidestep that analytical brain and any “voice of self-doubt”, and capture the truest, ideal future vision. After that we can worry about all the practicalities of maximising your odds of actually getting there. For now, let’s just get 100% clear on the dream destination.

I’d also encourage you to shrug off any concerns about commitment. I know that for myself, I immediately flinch away from the idea of committing to one particular thing I’m aiming for, especially on a 5-year timescale. So don’t worry that this is set in stone. It can and likely will change along the way. But you’re going to find that taking the time to set a clear destination does wonders for your progress, even if it gets adjusted and updated periodically. In fact I’d encourage you to repeat this exercise at least once a year, if not once a quarter.

Grab a pen and paper or something you can type on now, and start writing down anything that comes to mind.

Then, once you have an initial answer to that first question, let’s add richness and depth to your vision.

You can explore the various skills of musicality we covered in the previous chapter:

• Do you want to play melodies by ear? Or chords?
• Do you want to improvise?
• How about transcribing music you hear?
• Do you want to be writing songs or composing music yourself?
• Are there particular pitch or rhythm skills you want to hone?
• Are there other ways of expressing yourself that you’ve dreamed of mastering?
• How about instrument skills? Are there things you want to be able to do on your current primary instrument? Have you wanted to take up a second, or even a third instrument? Is singing something you want to develop and add to your skillset?
• How about theory? Are there areas of music theory that you know you’d love to understand inside-out? Or maybe the whole area of theory is currently a mystery to you but you’re keen to peek under the hood? Maybe you’ve studied the theory already but in future you want to start applying it to great effect in your musical activities?

Speaking of activities…

• What will you be doing with all these new skills and understanding? Do you want to be performing regularly? And if so, what kinds of gigs?
• Is collaboration something you’re excited about? Maybe with a partner, or a group, or joining a band, orchestra or choir?
• Is it important to you to make money or build a career around music?
• Are there particular creative projects you’ve always hoped to one day pursue in music?
• How is music appreciation part of your musical life? How are you discovering new music? Are there genres or types of music you’re eager to explore more? Is there one you’re keen to go deep on and specialise in?
• Are you listening to music live, on recordings, or in other contexts?

Finally, let’s step back a bit…

• What overall kind of musicality do you dream of having?
• What does your daily and weekly musical life look like?
• How is it going to feel when those things become real? Is there a sense of joy? Of excitement? Are you feeling empowered and enjoying a new confidence?
• Has your identity as a musician changed? Has the way you think about your musical abilities shifted?
• Do you have a different relationship with music? Is there a sense of triumph, of satisfaction, of pride—and of ongoing wonder and curiosity about what you’re capable of?

Okay, let me check in :) How are you getting on? Is your Big Picture Vision starting to take shape? Are you starting to feel excited?

Depending on your personality and how much of this kind of thing you’ve done before, you might love this and find it comes easily—or it might feel like hard work!

Be patient with yourself and give yourself the opportunity to daydream a little. Remember we’re capturing the ideal. We’re not judging ourselves or the ideas or trying to assess how realistic they are. That’s not the exercise. So let those kinds of thoughts just drift away, and focus on the dreaming, the imagining, the idealised future.

Once you’ve thought through all of these questions, you’ve hopefully written something that’s at least a few lines, possibly a few paragraphs, or even a few pages.

I’m hoping that as you went through this you were able to shake off that voice of self doubt, or any self-conscious hesitation, and you wrote down what truly excites and motivates you.

Reading back through your Big Picture Vision, you’ll know you did this right if it makes you smile. If you start to feel excitement welling up inside. If it helps put you immediately back into that mental space of “anything’s possible” and “my future musical life could be amazing“.

Next Steps

So what now?

There are two next steps I recommend.

The first is that you want to review this regularly. Reading through it should make you feel good and reignite your enthusiasm and passion—and the value of that is not to be underestimated, because motivation is an essential factor in any musical progress.

Reading through your Big Picture Vision will also help keep you on track towards actually accomplishing it, because as soon as you have this clear in your mind, a lot of the decision-making and uncertainty that can crop up in your musical journey becomes dramatically simpler. Things which before seemed hard to figure out will suddenly be crystal clear to you—because they either align with your Big Picture Vision or they don’t. Don’t just shove this in a drawer and forget about it. Make it a habit to review it, whether that’s once a week or at the start of every music practice session.

After all, once Alice knew where she wanted to go, the Cheshire Cat could point her in the right direction.

The second thing to do next is to start taking action to move yourself towards your Big Picture Vision.

There’s value in the vision itself, but clearly it’s going to have even more impact if you actually use it as the basis of goal-setting and planning. We have a unique framework for this inside Musical U, to help you set truly effective goals and the step-by-step plans that will get you there—because it’s easy to do goal-setting and planning wrong and cause yourself a lot of strife! You’ll find this provided in the Additional Resources. Having a proven system can make it much more likely you’ll actually get to that Big Picture Vision.

Whatever goal-setting and planning process you choose to use, be sure that your Big Picture Vision now serves as your “North Star” that guides it all.

Do that, and you will find a greater sense of clarity, purpose and confidence in your musical life, and you’ll start to see the tangible benefits and results that come from being 100% clear on your Big Picture Vision—and where exactly you’re going in music.

8 Tips For Big Picture Vision Success

The Big Picture Vision exercise has been a core part of the Musical U membership program since 2015, so we’ve had the chance to learn a lot about what makes it work well, or not.

There are eight tips I’d like to share with you. These can be used to make your first Big Picture Vision even more effective, or to “turbo-boost” an existing Big Picture Vision if you’ve done the exercise before.

Tip 1: Written is best.

It’s likely that just reading through the exercise description above started to spark ideas for you, and hopefully you took the additional step of actually grabbing a pen or keyboard and starting to write.

One great way to do it, especially if you have some resistance to writing, is to do “stream of consciousness” writing—meaning you try to fully shut off your “inner editor”, you don’t worry about grammar or punctuation or re-wording things, you just write whatever comes to mind and keep going.

You can always come back later and edit it to perfection. For now just try to capture as much as possible of what you’re inspired about.

It’s powerful to make it as vivid and descriptive as possible, and to frame it positively in the present tense. So for example, rather than “I don’t want to be nervous when performing” you could write something more like “I’m performing regularly at the coffee shop down the road, seeing all the smiling faces in the audience, feeling enthusiasm and confidence as I share the music I love with new people who are excited to hear it.”

In whatever way you’d like to, write it down. As long as it’s only in your head, it will always be a bit fuzzy and far less effective. As soon as you start writing it down it will become both clearer and more real to you, starting to stoke your belief that it could all be possible for you.

Tip 2: Emotional and analytical

In working with members and Next Level coaching clients on their Big Picture Vision it’s become clear that people tend to fall into one of two categories:

1. Primarily analytical
2. Primarily emotional

Specifically, some people will produce a very emotional, romantic, inspiring description of the kind of musician they want to be, while others will produce something more like a checklist of skills and abilities.

Neither is better or worse. They are both vital components of a powerful Big Picture Vision.

The tip is that whichever you tend to do by default, make a conscious effort to fill in the other side. It may be a bit uncomfortable, but hopefully you can see that if your Big Picture Vision is only one side or the other, you’ll be missing out on a lot of its power and potential for you.

Tip 3: Make it a living document

Doing the exercise for the first time is a huge leap forwards for most musicians, but your Big Picture Vision isn’t a “one and done” kind of thing. It’s something to keep coming back to and keep front of mind.

I would encourage you to feel free to edit it as often as you want. It probably will stay mostly the same because it’s meant to capture your true yearning, that true destination you’ve always known inside you were aiming for. But at the same time, we’re constantly learning and it is a journey. Things are going to change, priorities are going to shift, and you’re going to make progress towards that vision.

So just like an aeroplane on autopilot has a fixed destination but is constantly making small adjustments (or sometimes large ones!) along the way, it’s perfectly okay to update your Big Picture Vision, and even rethink things if something big shifts for you. Let it be a living document.

Tip 4: Keep it front of mind

As mentioned above, if you write this and then shove it in a drawer and never think about it again, it won’t do you a great deal of good.

Instead, find a way to keep it continually front-of-mind.

Many Musical U members have their Big Picture Vision printed out and stuck on the wall in their music practice area. Inside the members website we show your Big Picture Vision right there on your dashboard.

Figure out where you can put it that means you’ll often spot it and be reminded of what it’s all about for you. That way you will regularly get an automatic motivation boost (as well as a reminder to revisit it and re-evaluate when appropriate).

Tip 5: Shoot for the moon

One of my favourite quotes is from the godfather of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale:

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

There’s a lot that can be said about goal-setting, but it’s important to understand that the Big Picture Vision exercise is not about setting goals! It’s about defining your vision, which will motivate, inspire, and guide you (with plenty of realistic goals to be set and achieved along the way).

There’s a time and a place for “SMART” goals and being realistic, and of course the last thing we want to do is set ourselves up for disappointment. But if you allow your Big Picture Vision to be more about the spirit of your musical ambition than about “goal-setting and planning” you will have far more success in your musical life.

So set your ambitions high. Shoot for the moon. That will drive you forwards more effectively, it will motivate you more effectively, and it will help make sure that you reach your fullest potential.

Tip 6: Don’t be afraid to share it

There are varying opinions on whether you should tell people about ambitious goals or not, and I’m very conscious that not every musician has supportive, encouraging peers around them like musicians inside Musical U do.

So I can understand that you might feel very hesitant to share your newly-written Big Picture Vision with anybody.

But again, remember that this isn’t about setting a goal and telling everybody you’re going to accomplish it by a certain date. It’s about getting crystal-clear about why you do music, and the kind of musician you dream of becoming.

So if you do have a “safe space” where no-one will tear you down, criticise or discourage you, like we’ve cultivated among our membership community, I would strongly encourage you to be brave and share your Big Picture Vision.

You might be surprised at the support and encouragement you receive, and that will only help you stay focused and motivated in pursuing that vision over time.

Tip 7: Be ruthless

This may sound funny—but I would advise you to be as ruthless as you can about pursuing your Big Picture Vision.

It comes back to that “shiny object syndrome” danger. Once you’re clear on that “North Star”, really trust it and be ruthless about what does not fit it.

A lot of us come to music learning with a lot of baggage as to what we “should” do, and how music learning is “meant” to go, and what practice “should” look like.

You can use your Big Picture Vision as a filter and just be very ruthless about it. “Nope, that’s not for me. That seems interesting but I’m not going to go in that direction, because it’s not aligned with where I’m trying to get to.”

This applies both to external “distractions” and external “shoulds”. In Chapter 6: Superlearning we’ll be going deeper on this idea of truly taking ownership and responsibility for designing your own practice, and your own learning journey as a whole.

Again, the key point is that it’s really empowering to have your concrete definition of your ideal destination in mind. That way you always know what matters to you, and that all the other stuff can safely wait (or be ignored entirely).

Tip 8: Ask for help

If there’s one secret to our success at Musical U it’s that we’ve always put a huge emphasis on providing personal support and guidance.

So whether you’re pursuing your Big Picture Vision with our help or not, I would be remiss if I didn’t throw in this last tip, which is to encourage you to (please!) ask for help when you need it.

If you’re struggling to define a good, clear, motivating Big Picture Vision, get together with a musical friend and talk about it with them. If you’re having trouble figuring out what resources or approaches are aligned with your vision and which aren’t, get a second opinion. If you find your motivation waning and your Big Picture Vision doesn’t seem to be re-stoking your fire the way it’s meant to, get some help digging into what might be missing.

Our team and community particularly love helping with this kind of thing, but even outside of Musical U, please don’t be shy about asking for help when you need it!