3 Signs You're Sabotaging Your Music Career

Let me ask you a Question, are you a victim or a professional musician?  If you are reading this post, you are or working on becoming a professional musician.  Let's act like the professionals that we are and stop sabotaging our own careers.  Here are three signs that you are sabotaging your success.  

1. USING YOUR LACK OF MONEY AS A SELLING POINT. 

This is one of the most common mistakes musicians make when contacting a music professional. You want the aid of an expert, but you begin your sentence with a variation of all of your money issues. The most common begins with “I am a struggling artist without money.”  If you are working with a music industry professional, chances are that person has also chosen the love of music over an amazing financial return. You should not be placing the burden of your financial responsibility on the person or business you want to help you. The only signal this sends is that you’re not yet ready.

Flip It: Instead of leading with your money issues, make a list of how you could bring in income and start with that as your selling point. 

2. YOU FOCUS YOUR ENERGY ON WHAT YOU CAN'T DO.

Now you are truly in a state of complete victimhood. If you keep repeating all the ways you can’t do something, guess what, you won’t. The very person you are asking for help, has overcome obstacle and challenges that seem impossible, but they took it on with resilience and grit. Ask yourself, "how can I beat this?" How can I get to the other side? Those Questions have always led to the greatest successes.

Flip It: Look at your number one challenge right now. Make a list of 20 ways you can overcome it and then start with the one that most excites you.

3. YOU TRY TO START FROM THE TOP AND IGNORE THE FOUNDATION BUILT. 

You look at musicians who are already famous and think all you need to do is mimic their success Radiohead style. This may work if you started exactly where they started and built from there. But, you don't start exactly where they started, you try to do exactly what a musician is doing at the height of their success. It is successful for these musicians because in some cases they’ve spent 20 years building up to this level. Very few musicians make it on the first release. Twenty years of hard work, you want to accomplish in few months or few years.  It’s fantastic to look at success stories and use that as a model, but don’t forget to look at where it all began and see if that model matches your philosophy.

Flip It: Stop comparing yourself. Identify YOUR greatest strengths and then determine how to develop them to help take you to the next level.