The Ultimate Superpower For Your Music Career Success

What do you think the ultimate superpower you could develop for your music career is? The one that would pretty much guarantee you success?

Maybe you think it's virtuoso technique on your instrument.

Maybe it's songwriting… being able to tap into the zeitgeist and write songs that really resonate with people and inspire them.

Or maybe you think it’s singing. Or being a captivating performer. Or connecting with your fans on social media.

Maybe you’re thinking outside the box and think it’s time management and productivity so you can get everything done that you need to.

Or even marketing, so you can actually find an audience in the first place and make a sustainable income from your music.

These are all important skills to develop, but the ultimate superpower is none of these.

When we have dreams or goals and we want to go to the next level in our lives, our career, our health, or our relationships, there's almost always some discomfort involved because we have to take massive action.

Many people avoid taking action because they don't know how to feel discomfort.

When you boil it all down, the worst thing that can happen to us is a feeling. Even if someone dies. It's the feeling of what we're telling ourselves about their death that's so uncomfortable. It's something that's happening internally in our body and our brain rather than something that's happening outside in the world to us.

This is where many people get shut down.

We don't feel our feelings. We avoid them. We try to make them go away. We stuff them down. We distract ourselves. We think by doing this, we won't have to feel those uncomfortable feelings. But it actually backfires and makes things far worse.

Think of all the addictive or dysfunctional or compulsive or neurotic behaviours that people develop in order to avoid feeling their feelings: overeating, alcoholism, taking drugs, compulsive sex, watching porn, any form of escapism. In extreme cases, people even commit suicide to avoid feeling their feelings.

Christian Mickelsen says all of our fears are really fears of feelings.

But when we develop the capacity to feel an emotion, to allow it to just be with us, to not have the expectation that it has to hurry up and go away, to not make it bad or wrong for us to feel it, but to just let that emotion be with us, it will process and digest. It might come back and you might have to practice it over and over with a particular situation, but it will dissipate eventually.

If you can do this consistently, it becomes this superpower, because you begin to trust yourself to feel anything: “I can feel anything. I can feel self-conscious, embarrassed, vulnerable, exposed, humiliated, incompetent, shame, guilt, regret.”

If we could really trust ourselves to feel all of these things, we would take a lot more risks and take the actions we need to move us towards our dreams and goals.

We often talk about certain foods being an acquired taste.

Do you remember trying coffee for the first time when you were a kid? You probably didn't like it because it tasted really bitter. Or it could have beer or chilli. None of these are particularly pleasant tasting when you think about it. There's some discomfort involved in eating them.

But over time you've acquired the taste for them through repeated exposure and now you have them regularly. It's the unique nature of each of those foods that make us come back to them again and again. They're unlike anything else.

You could look at emotions the same way. Different emotions are like different flavours in your life. Some of them are pleasant, like ice cream or pizza. Some of them are more of an acquired taste, like spicy food. For example, feelings of loss are uncomfortable. But as you process that feeling, you understand that it's natural to be sad when you lose a loved one and that it's OK for your body to feel that. It's a natural part of life and you can come to peace with it. It's part of the bittersweet nature of life.

If you can develop the ability to feel anything, that's the ultimate superpower. That's where dreams are born because you become unstoppable. You don't avoid taking the actions you need to to achieve your dreams, because you know that if something goes wrong, you know you can handle whatever feeling comes up as a result of that, whether that's self-consciousness, humiliation, shame, regret, or disappointment, and it won't shut you down.

The way you develop the ability to feel anything is to do emotional self-regulation.

Emotional self-regulation is where you intentionally generate the internal state you want to feel. You're generating safety in your own emotions and your own nervous system instead of depending on other people to do it for you, or trying to make the negative or unpleasant emotions go away.

This allows you to take radical responsibility for your emotional and mental state. This is really the hallmark of maturity.

This may be the highest leverage skill you can learn because it permeates every aspect of your life.

There are lots of different self-regulation practices around: meditation, the Peace Process, tapping (EFT), Havening, the MIR method.

Emotional self-regulation works by getting you out of the cognitive loop that's spinning narratives and generating anxiety.

A simple way to get out of your mind is to get into your body by focusing on your breathing. You can try 4-7-8 breathing. Inhale through your nose for a count of 4, hold it in for a count of 7, and then exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. This gets you out of your head and more in touch with your body and your senses. The more we occupy our senses, the more we are pulled into the present moment rather than worrying about the future or feeling guilt or regret about the past.

If you're not taking massive action around something you really want in your life, the first step is to ask yourself: What are you not willing to let yourself feel? What feeling are you trying to avoid?

And then you might look into one of these emotional regulation technologies that I mentioned so that you've got a tool that lets you feel that feeling and process it so you can move forward.

When you do this, when you develop this superpower, your self-esteem will skyrocket because you realise you have the ability to regulate your own emotions without needing your partner, your family, your friends, your boss, your co-workers, or the government to do it for you.

And you also realise that you don't need to engage in compulsive or neurotic behaviours to avoid the feeling or distract yourself from it. You'll know that even though you can't control a particular situation, you can control your response. You'll feel confident to move ahead and take massive action and you'll become unstoppable.