Fine-tuning Your Personality

Some of you know that I am a trained classical musician (I play the horn).  While coaching is my full-time profession most of the year, I have been spending the past 24 winters in Florida performing with an opera company (sure beats being in Chicago in February!).

It takes some time to get my "chops" back into shape every year and to a point where I feel comfortable playing with my colleagues, most of whom are full-time musicians.

One thing I have not done a lot of lately is playing with a tuner.  A tuner tells you how flat or sharp (low or high) your pitch is - which is very important when playing and blending with others.

After feeling a little frustrated with my playing and not knowing why, I sat down with my tuner the other day. I was more than a little surprised when certain notes that usually came out of my horn very sharp were now quite flat.

The complete opposite of what they used to be. wtf??

It took some patience and work with my air, lips, and ears to re-learn how to adjust my pitch and rewrite my muscle memory with these particular notes.

This exercise in pitch adjustment and creating new memories for my muscles made me think:  How often do we "tune" our personality in this manner?  How often do we just sail through life thinking we're fine and all is good - when in reality we may be way out of tune with what is going on around us?

It can be quite a smack in the face once we "hear" that our intonation could be much, much better - and that our muscle memory is not working in our favor anymore.

Fine-tune your personality

Giving our personality a good "tuning" can help how we choose to move through life:  with angst or ease, with reactiveness or responsiveness, with emotion or logic.

All of these things are choices. And when it comes to making new choices in any area of your life, the first step is ALWAYS awareness. Because:

If you don't know what's going with how you are currently choosing to move through life, you're not going to know that doing something different may be a better choice.

In other words, if you don't know, you don't know.  Ignorance is bliss!

This is where enlisting the help of a coach, therapist, or spiritual advisor can be quite beneficial.  They are third-party observers and "call out" what they are seeing, which helps with that first step of awareness.

When you do become aware, it's like seeing that tuner that is showing that you are flat, very very VERY flat... and this can be a bit shocking.

My clients are sometimes unsettled when I call out their personality habits.  After that initial call-out, it is usually enough for them to leave the session with the action step of just noticing when they are doing that habit or having that unproductive thought.

And they DO notice.  Once you see something, you can't un-see it.

But now, there is a choice point after noticing your current patterns of thinking and behaving: What do you want to do differently now, if anything?

Together I work with my clients on creating a new "muscle memories" for them to get back in tune.  Being more in tune helps not only with their inner world but also with how they move through their environment - and how they communicate with others.

What if...

I have many friends who are accomplished musicians, playing in the top orchestras all over the world.  They still work with their tuners every single day to stay on top of their game and in tip-top shape.

What if every person on earth worked on their personality every single day the way musicians do with their tuners?  If they took the time to listen to the details instead of cruising through life unaware?

What if the entire population were less reactive and more responsive, more at ease and less filled with angst, and moving through the world with a good balance of emotion and logic?

That sounds like a pretty sweet place to live.

If you are interested in learning how to "fine-tune" your personality with a third-party observer (me!), please join my waitlist here.