This Valentine’s Day, I took my wife, Ashley, to the orchestra. Much better than trying to fight for a reservation at a Boston restaurant. Sitting in the audience, listening to these professionals in perfect harmony, brought me back to my days in the band.
I wasn’t good, it was mandatory, and I played the trombone. I desperately wanted to quit. We couldn’t have backpacks in school, so I walked through the halls lugging my trombone in my right hand and books under my left armpit. This made me a perfect target for a bully or two to come up behind me and smack the books out from under me.
Anyways, I digress. I wanted to quit, so I politely told my band instructor I would no longer like to play the trombone. He refused my polite request, so I subsequently and intentionally played poorly in the next band practice.
The result was complete disharmony. You could tell some punk (me) was sabotaging things. My instructor might not have known exactly who was doing it, but he knew it was coming from the brass section.
Watching the professionals in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I was impressed by how in sync they were. Hands of different musicians moving at the exact same rhythm on their stringed instruments. The result was perfect harmony and beautiful music.
Your life is a lot like a band. Different types of instruments all coming together to make music. When it’s good, the result is beautiful. But if you have a little 6th-grade monster blaring into his trombone to rebel, the result is disharmony.
In life, you have things that need to be in place for you to experience harmony: sleep, nutrition, relationships, career, and exercise habits. When these things are in place, you experience harmony, but when one little thing is off, the music sounds bad.
The next year, I was finally able to quit the band, and I’m sure they sounded better for it. But unlike me leaving the band, you cannot opt out of the self-care habits that make the music of your life. You either do them or you don’t. When you don’t, you have disharmony in the form of emotional pain.
I recently polled my strength training support group, asking people if and why they struggled with putting themselves first. Well over half said that they always or almost always put other people’s needs in front of theirs. The result was an inner dialogue that sounded like this:
“You need to apply yourself more. You’re just being lazy.”
“I don’t have time for taking care of myself.”
“I see all the unfinished things that need to be done around the house that I feel should be done first.”
This dialogue went hand in hand with negative emotions like guilt, annoyance, sadness, low confidence, feeling overwhelmed, anxiety, stress, feeling powerless, and depression. Because they were missing something in their self-care routine, their music was off.
It doesn’t matter if the strings and brass are playing perfectly if the woodwinds and percussion are off. The result is bad music. It doesn’t matter if your career is perfect, but you have no time for your family or exercise. The result is emotional turmoil.
Remember, you can’t quit the band that is life. If you ignore it, the music gets worse and worse and worse. So think about what needs improvement. Can you divert any energy away from non-necessities to put into your self-care routine?
The next time you feel like that metaphorical 6th grader is playing off-key, rebelling against your own well-being, remember that you are actually the conductor too. You decide what deserves your attention. Ignoring that “6th-grader” isn’t going to make the disharmony go away, it will only get louder. One small tweak this week makes the music better. Another one next week does the same. If you can keep this up, you’re going to be in a great position to make beautiful music.
