Music Teacher's Helper Blog

The other day I was walking my dogs in the park and I decided to sit down for a while and just listen to my audio book while my dogs played. I had a long list of things I should have been doing for my business, but all I really wanted to do was sit there and hang out. I had a sudden realization, or a memory really, about the real reason I chose to become a private music teacher. I wanted freedom! Before this, I worked 40 hours a week on the night shift at a women’s shelter. While it had it’s fulfilling moments at times, I hated all of the time I spent there and I hated the stress. When I started teaching private lessons, I had this dream that I would only teach the amount of students necessary to pay my bills and have a little extra to save and have fun with. It was truly like that for the first year. I woke up and went to yoga, read, cooked, then it was off to teach some lessons! Well, being the type A, ambitious person that I am, I came up with ways to make more work for myself. I told myself that this was an investment in time so that one day I would get back to the leasurly life I had originally planned. For 4 years I spent most of my extra time coming up with marketing ideas to get new students, developing products, newsletters, networking, hiring teachers, etc. Now I sit here with a  long list of new ideas, beating myself up for not having them all conquered immediately. As I was sitting at the park, I remembered the reason why I chose this path. I wanted flexibility. So do you know what I did? I let my to-do list slip away for an entire week and just did what I wanted to during my non-teaching hours, because I can! Think about all those people with 9-5 office jobs who can’t just drop everything for a week. Now I know that there may be some readers on MTH who work for schools and are not totally independent. If you work for the school system then you are for sure busy and probably unable to take off. If it is a goal to be independent only, you can simply take this as a reminder for when you are working hard to get and keep all those private students.

The to-do list is now here in front of me. I gave myself the time to get refreshed and I am ready to be a workaholic again, at least until the next time I need to relax.

I am telling you all this, because when I meet most entrepreneurs, I find that they too were drawn to the independent path so that they could “create their own hours” and “have time to be with family and friends” or even so they would have more time for their music! What seems to happen, is that entrepreneurs I find are very motivated people in their work. They tend to keep coming up with new ways to keep their businesses going, and that is great and what makes them successful! But I also think it is important to allow yourselves the time to relax when that time is calling you. The website will be there next week, the business card orders, and whatever other projects you are working on.

Hope this inspires you to take a break if you need one. I’ve had mine, and now it’s time to record a new podcast episode (item number 3 on my list