Today is Tuesday, June 23rd, and in this twenty-fifth episode I’d like to share with you some reflections on the style you choose when presenting yourselves.
Yes — what do you say about yourselves when, for example, someone interviews you?
Or when you begin a conference in front of a group of people who are seeing you for the first time?
Or when you have to write your curriculum in a more discursive form?
Where do you start?
What criterion do you use to put in order the information that defines you?
What do you choose to put “on display” when you need to motivate someone to notice you?
Just to make myself clear: sometimes I begin by saying my name, and immediately afterwards what work I do.
At other times, in more informal situations, after saying my name, I immediately ask the participants to tell me theirs.
At other times again, if there is a piano, I have sometimes “sung” a welcome song.
There are situations in which I place my teaching experience in the foreground, and others in which I foreground my “clinical work”.
Sometimes I say how many years I have been working, or how old I am, and so on.
I think we have all found ourselves in situations of this kind.
But have you ever reflected on why, in that moment, in that place, with those people, for that occasion — or in that particular curriculum — you chose to highlight one characteristic of yourself rather than another?
But the questions do not end here!
Of course not, because throughout this whole process we use that word, that adjective, that verb.
Regardless of what we narrate about ourselves, the medium that spontaneously comes to us is precisely the word.
And what if we, as a professional category — we who make music therapy our work, we who, at every breath, find ourselves with terms such as “non-verbal language”, “sonic dialogue”, and “amodal attunement” in our mouths — what if we decided that it would not be so strange, at conference tables, in project CVs, in radio interviews, in podcasts and tutorials, to give up words?
Let us be clear.
I am not nostalgically hoping that all humanity will give up the advantages of words as an elegant, effective, and above all shared code for communication between human beings.
But I still do not understand why, as soon as we leave the clinical context, where we are virtuosos of the non-verbal, we suddenly cling to words with an almost disarming obsessiveness.
Mmm…
Curious, isn’t it?
I’ll stop here.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, June 30th, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.