Posts Tagged ‘Action Items’

« Older Entries

Free Webinar: Live from CoOPERAtive Program, Saturday July 7th

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

I am really jazzed for the opportunity to teach another seminar this Saturday at Laura Brooks Rice’s program at Westminster Choir College, The CoOPERAtive Program. We will have a large group of some fantastic young singers and expect a good crowd to join in online!

    Business of Singing Seminar

    10:30 am – 1:00 pm EASTERN time
    Saturday July 7th, 2012

Laura was wise to open this up for FREE. Email bill@velvetsinger.com to reserve a spot and I will email you the seminar materials (slides, preparation assignment, etc.). Then at 10:30 am EST, click this link:

Business of Singing Seminar

CoOperative Program 2012
10:30 – 1:00 pm EST, Saturday July 7th

“The Greatest Hits”
Getting the Most Out of Your Plans

This seminar will utilize what I have found to be the greatest exercises and discussion topics to help initiate a new vision and optimism for your career. The goal for our time together is simple: to help you bring the same level of instinct, polish and joy to “the business side” of what you do as you naturally bring to your singing.

  • The Two Halves of the “Business of Singing”: Process vs. Tools. We will hit both the process (what, why, when) and the tools (how) during this session.
  • Artistic Business Planning 101. Why you need one, what goes in it, when do you revisit it, what do you do with it?
  • Approaching Your Business Plan from the Top-Down. What are the most basic elements of your story at this point? How can you make that story compelling and interesting to other people? How can we make this tap into your creative and fun side?
  • Business Plan Take 1. We will take some time during the session to get started creating your strengths & weaknesses list, goals, artistic interests and 1,5,10-year ambitions. Remember to bring your computers! This is when we will tie in your pre-seminar preparation.
  • Action Items. After going on that journey, jot down a few “action items” that require follow-up after the session. I will ask you to pick one action item and read it to the group.
  • Sharing Your Business Plan. You will identify three contacts to share your business plan with, and make a plan for when, what to share, and the specific reason why you are sharing with this person. I will also ask that you email me your results in a week’s time.
  • Resume Formatting. How to use MS Word to format a really nice-looking resume! Review the most common pitfalls I see and show you a better way.
  • Singer Resources. We will flip through a list of the most important technologies and web sites that each singer should know about and know how to use.
  • Velvet Singer 3.0 Sneak Peak / Feedback. I have been hard at work on a new version of my software, and I am excited to show some things off and get your take.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Seminars | No Comments »

Integrating EEP After Longy – A Goals-Centered Approach

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
    Preparation for Longy EEP Seminar

    A few thoughts before the EEP morning seminar.


Longy School of Music‘s Experiential Education Program is the picture of collaboration. We had a condensed 90-minute session, but it did not take long for this group to begin sharing. Kudos to Dr. Judith Hill Bose and this class for bringing their energy and intelligence to earnestly consider how EEP will play a role in their lives going forward.

“Turning what the students have learned from this project into goals and action items for their future is really important – and I like Bill’s thoughtful and systematic way of going through the goal setting process and learning how to make priorities. It is important for young artists to encounter lots of ways to think about things.”

– Dr. Judith Hill Bose, Director of Education Studies at Longy School of Music.

As I wrote in my blog post from February titled “Longy’s Experiential Education Program”:

Many students choose to tie in a service aspect to their projects. This is a great way to generate an audience and seems like a very natural transition to post-graduate life, where many musicians go on to serve the community professionally and semi-professionally.

I was blown away by the creativity and drive behind the projects: one singer worked with an elementary school group and was already contracted to return to this same school after EEP, a collaborative pianist created an avant-garde vocal recital to be performed in bars and restaurants, a young conductor built off of his previous work with vocal ensembles in working in the community. Service, execution and creativity. This class should be a model for other schools around the county.

Our discussion focused around four questions supported by discussion, small break-out groups, slides and workbook exercises:

1) What new experiences did EEP bring you?

  • List three new business skills / experiences
  • List three new performance / presentational experiences

2) What did you learn?

  • Entrepreneurship strengths / weaknesses, indicating which you discovered through EEP
  • Professional Values checklist, indicating which you discovered through EEP
  • List three key take-aways / lessons learned

3) How would you like this make you different?

  • 5-year plan, broken into six sections (performance, teaching, artistic development, collaboration, financial, life/family)

4) What are you going to do differently?

  • Priorities, indicating which you emphasized during EEP
  • Goals for the next year
  • Action items for the next month

I tried out our new Values checklist for the first time and found that it really fostered an interesting conversation. Most, if not all, arrived at unique lists of their top five values. There were some favorites such as “Improvement” and “Learning,” yet even in these cases, each student derived different connotation and meaning from these words. For example, for one student valued “Improvement” in the context of their instrument performance whereas another saw “Improvement” as a value to pass on to others through teaching.

      Creativity abounds in Cambridge, even on the transit signs. Creativity is a "treasure," to be sure.

This was also my first full seminar with instrumentalists and I was delighted to have Dr. Hill’s support in putting together a meaningful session, and appreciative that these students were able to jump into such deep, structured thinking. Bravo Longy EEP!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Seminars | No Comments »

At Longy, E-Workbook and Conversation Flows

Monday, March 21st, 2011
    Preparation for Longy Seminar

    A few thoughts before the seminar.


Each Wednesday afternoon, Longy School of Music‘s Chair of Vocal and Keyboard Studies, Brian Moll gathers a talented group of singers and collaborative pianists together. Of the many seminars I have given, this group was one of the most diverse in their experience, interests and backgrounds that I had ever worked with.

I think that diversity of perspectives, combined with a highly-supportive environment created just the right recipe for what was, I believe, my best seminar to date. So much of the impact of these seminars is determined before I even walk in the door. The academic season, the interpersonal climate or even the timing of the event during the day play huge roles.

I was also delighted to have several distinguished guests participate in the seminar: Brian Moll, Karyl Ryczek and Sarah Bellott.

“It was excellent! All that Bill is offering is so helpful – especially the direction to let life teach you to act!”

– Brian Moll, Chair of Vocal and Keyboard Studies at Longy School of Music.

“The seminar is well-organized, well-presented and offers optima organizational information for the performer / artists. Terrific!”

– Karyl Ryczek, Conservatory Chair of Instrumental Studies at Longy School of Music.

    Sarah Bellott on Longy Seminar

    A message from Sarah Bellott, Student Services Coordinator at Boston University School of Music. Sarah and I had met at the NETMCDO conference in January in NYC. She is a very intelligent, energetic and creative counselor; we were all fortunate to have her insights.


Our new E-Workbook may have also shaped this dialogue to be just a bit more focused that normal. Students downloaded and began tinkering with the workbook before the session. In addition to saving time, perhaps this pre-install helps prepare the participants, giving the session some context.

I also reviewed resumes before the session, which helped us jump right in to deeper conversations. My feedback and edits seemed to be very valuable for the singers and pianists alike. We were able to review some patterns that I noticed, such as alignment issues, too many fonts, too many font sizes, too creative with colors and lines, significant experiences not highlighted well, multiple page resumes, and wasted space with wordy section headers.

Several students had such genuine interest and earnest curiosity about my approach that we continue follow-up conversations over phone and email even now, weeks following the seminar. Longy School of Music is a gem and I am excited to continue work with them in the years to come!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Seminars | 5 Comments »

Longy’s Experiential Education Program

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

The Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass offers something very unique to their students — the Experiential Education Program requires all conservatory students to create a music project and carry it out through live performance. It is like what we called in engineering school, a “laboratory.” It is not enough to think about the project or to write about the project, you actually have to get out there and do it.

“Experiential Education is a vital component of Longy’s Conservatory curriculum, designed to prepare student-musicians for an increasingly diverse and complex world, to prepare them – in the words of our mission statement – ‘to make a difference in the world.’

Required of all students, this two-semester course includes interactive presentations, discussions, and readings. Students strengthen their communication skills and understanding of audience education, public advocacy for music and the arts, and entrepreneurship. They are challenged to think more broadly about music, its role in society, their career options, and the best use of their skills.”

– from Longy.edu

Many students choose to tie in a service aspect to their projects. This is a great way to generate an audience and seems like a very natural transition to post-graduate life, where many musicians go on to serve the community professionally and semi-professionally. I have found singing for children to be personally rewarding, artistically enriching and lucrative. By way of example, I had the good fortune to perform with Opera for the Young, the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Opera in the Neighborhoods program, and through the Chicago Symphony’s Kraft Family Series.

Serving children, the elderly, poor or imprisoned is an experience I certainly wish I had been challenged to pursue during school as they do at Longy. How vivid of a memory and how empowering would it be for the students to create, promote and perform a concert at a jail in Boston? Look out Johnny Cash! That is not to mention the actual, tangible impact that these concerts will make in enriching the Cambridge and greater-Boston communities.

I am trilled to be working with singers and non-singers at Longy this March through the EEP courses! I definitely think I can contribute and am excited for the opportunity to expand my game.

I will tailor the material to address the needs of the project team (rather than the individual singer) while each team is in the midst of executing their projects. Teams will have made some strides in planning and researching, but potentially not quite solidified anything tangible and deliverable.

We will focus the session on project management: techniques, tools and skills. We will extract lessons learned from the first half of their EEP project, give them some time for a “reality check” and help them plan what they would like to do differently going forward. It would be a shot in the arm, to help get the teams re-energized and focused.

I will customize my new e-workbook to cover some of these principles:

  • Entrepreneurship strengths / weaknesses checklist
  • Visualization / discussion of the ideal project workflow
  • Reality check and personal tendencies
  • Project risks assessment
  • Project priorities
  • Project goals
  • Project action items
  • Project accountability

I am thrilled to help support these many worthwhile and service-oriented projects. See you in Boston!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Seminars | No Comments »

Video Action Items at MSM

Friday, January 21st, 2011

“Bill Bennett led a wonderful session to help MSM vocalists identify their goals and map a course toward achieving them. Velvet Singer is an impressive, powerful tool to organize time efficiently and to prepare for career success.”

– Edward Klorman, director of Manhattan School of Music’s Center for Music Entrepreneurship

I stepped up the intensity of the “action item” proclamations at my recent seminar at MSM. This was the first seminar at which I recorded video, rather than audio as in previous seminars.

The result: video definitely fires up a new part of the brain! I am definitely going to use this again.

These performers at MSM certainly rose to the challenge. At the culmination of the seminar, I asked if any students would like to volunteer to do a short video recording. They got a bit nervous, but everyone in the group stepped forward to participate.

Most everyone included a touch of humor or levity to their delivery. Some made the entire room, myself included, erupt into laughter. This was different than the audio action items at previous seminars which tended to come out a bit dry.

My strategy is to do anything possible to make a memory out of the experience. Performing in front of their peers and in front of the camera seemed to do just that. It is difficult to make a seminar on the business of singing anything other than dry, so I was delighted to close the workshop with some laughs and some firm commitments.

The videos came out great! I used my new iPhone 4 and a really slick iPhone-to-tripod attachment called The Glif.

Because The Glif was back-ordered, I picked up the attachment from the designer’s studio in Greenwich Village. I was able to meet with Tom Gerhardt and learn a bit about their fantastic entrepreneurial project. Tom and his partner used Kickstarter to raise the funds to launch this amazing product to the mainstream. According to theglif.com:

… We decided to put the Glif’s fate into the hands of the masses and begin a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money required to make it a reality. Kickstarter is a platform that connects creators with people who are interested in helping them out. Our contributors on Kickstarter pledged money towards our goal with no guarantee that we would ever be successful. They took a leap of faith, backed our project, and $137,417 and 5273 backers later here we are. The Glif is a full-fledged crowd-funded product.

If you need to do any video recording for applications, you can certainly get by with the iPhone, The Glif, a tripod, and a good digital voice recorder. The audio on the iPhone won’t be good enough quality for an application, so you will have to dub in your own audio track.

I let these participants know that I will be emailing each of them their individual video clips two weeks, one month, two months, six months and one year from the date of the seminar. My hope is that they will remember the fun they had in making the video and then feel a good positive sense of accountability to the group.

Ultimately, my job is to help inspire an entrepreneurial attitude. The granular skills they pick up and my specific approach (working from priorities -> goals -> action items) may fade or become less relevant over time. But helping to shape attitudes has staying power.

I greatly enjoyed working with these positive and intelligent singers at MSM and I look forward to following up with them.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Seminars | 17 Comments »

Angela Beeching at The Juilliard Store

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

I was fortunate enough to catch Angela Myles Beeching’s “mini-seminar” at The Juilliard Store last week. Casey Molino Dunn helped arrange the event through his PR firm, Octave Performing Arts.

It was a nice time to reunite with some singer-friends from Juilliard, newer friends from the Classical Singer Convention 2010 and to learn a few new ways of approaching things from a real career services pioneer.

In the seminar, Angela encouraged us to define a vision of where we would like to be in about five years. We were challenged to think of both life / family / location as well as our professional careers. As some folks shared around the room, Angela encouraged us to dig deeper, to “unpack” the vision from being either too vague or too unrealistic.

Part of the challenge is to have a clear understanding of where you are in your journey. She called this the “frank assessment.” I try to encourage similar thinking through some of the exercises in my seminar workbooks, such as the Entrepreneurship Strengths and Weaknesses checklist. I think the Questionnaire also gets to this same point, but from a slightly more granular, skills focus.

I was very encouraged that she worked from this wider perspective (vision, goals) toward helping each of us define a specific and concrete to do list. I call these “Action Items” in my seminars, but the idea is the exact same — in order to make strides, you have to create a list of things that are tangible and specific enough, such that you can cross them off the list when they are complete.

I don’t want to give away too much else of what she offered. To get the rest, you’ll have to visit her website or hire her to come present at your school!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

« Older Entries