Creating your ownpath as a happy musician with guest Jennet Ingle

Michelle Lynne: Welcome back to The Fearless Artist Podcast. My name is Michelle Lynn, and today I am thrilled to have Jennet Ingle come on from The Happiest Musician. Welcome, Jennet.

Jennet Ingle: Thank you so much, Michelle. I’m psyched to be here.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I am thrilled to have you as well. I discovered you just, I think, a month or two ago by stumbling upon your podcast Crushing Classical, and there you had such a beautiful interview that captivated me, talking about music reaching new audiences and how sometimes we’re going to have to step out of our traditional genre to reach new audiences. And are we okay with letting go of that? It was with Chad Lawson, and I was just so touched by that episode. I had to reach out actually to both of you to thank you for your work and thank you for what you’re doing. And, um, I’ve been reading your book The Happiest Musician, and I love what you speak about, what you coach musicians on. So I’ll let you introduce yourself, and then we’ll jump in.

Jennet Ingle: Hi, um, well, everybody, I’m Jennet Ingle, and honestly, I think I am the happiest musician. I graduated from conservatory assuming, as everyone else did, that I was, you know, promptly going to find my way into a principal job in a major orchestra, which would pay my entire salary plus benefits and, like, take care of me until I retired. That was the plan that I was taught to aspire to. And it turns out it’s very hard to land a principal oboe job in an orchestra that will pay your full-time salary plus benefits. And I never actually did that. And for a long time I was like, “Oh man, look at me, a complete failure,” because I have not won one of these, I don’t know, 10 possible jobs that I have been led to think of as the definition of success. And meanwhile, here I am teaching all of these students and running this reed business and playing principal oboe in a whole bunch of small orchestras and freelancing around and getting to play concertos and solos and failing because I don’t have that one job that gives me a paycheck every other week. And at some point I realized that, no, actually, the orchestra job that I had sought, even had I gotten it, could not possibly give me all of the things that I wanted. All of the artistic fulfillment that I was getting from my teaching jobs, from helping people online, from working with actual humans, from getting to solo. Any one job, any one paycheck job can’t provide me all of the things that I can actually provide for myself. And I realized that I had a career. And in fact, I had a spectacular career that I really was loving. And by leaning into this idea of the portfolio career — the career that is made up of a little bit of this and a little bit of that, all things that are within my control to start and stop and turn up the heat on and shove to a back burner — I realized that I was doing it. I was having my career and I was having a really joyful and happy life.

Michelle Lynne: I’m so deeply touched by what you’re sharing because it resonates so much with me. There’s so much to unpack with what you said. Yes, success is taught to be one direction as a classical musician. I am currently on faculty teaching entrepreneurship to classical musicians, and we present them with the career options, and they just say, “Well, you know, I just want to go play in an orchestra.” I get that probably 90 percent of the response — just going to play in an orchestra. So in your book, you unpack a little bit about why that might not be as fulfilling. As you were just explaining, can you expand on that?

Jennet Ingle: Oh yeah, of course. Because when you are in an orchestra, if you are in a full-time orchestra, you are sitting next to the same exact people every day, all the time, for your entire career. You are playing a concert every single week that you did not choose the music for. You are playing for a conductor that… you almost certainly did not choose, and you have no control over that relationship. It is exclusively top-down. You know, I love playing in the orchestra. I do. I love working with 80 other people on the stage and having this swoosh of sound and this energetic connection with the audience. It’s wonderful. And even as principal oboe, I have no agency in any of that. I sit down, and I have a plan for how I’m going to play my solo, but if the conductor’s plan is different, I’m going to do it his way. It is not a democracy, actually. I can have my little intimate, nuance-y, phrase-y moments with the principal clarinet, with the principal cello. It’s all lovely, but it’s all very little. On the whole, I don’t have control over when I show up for rehearsal, what repertoire I’m playing, how full the house is, how many people actually come to hear our orchestra play, what mix of male composers and female composers we do… there’s no actual control. It’s just me going to work. So right there is a tremendous limitation as far as I’m concerned. I’m a creative person. I want more than that. And the other thing is that a single paycheck job feels very secure as long as those paychecks keep coming. But this economic environment that we live in is not so reliable for the arts. I’m old enough to remember the housing market crash in 2008 where — not immediately, but over the course of the next few years — all of the people who had lost money in the stock market (not me so much, but the rich people who were the donors to the orchestras) stopped donating to the orchestras. Because they were like, “Oh, my 401k!” And because they weren’t donating, all of a sudden, all of our work got cut. And, you know, every two or three years in a union orchestra, we renegotiate our union contracts. And sometimes we get raises, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes they cut services, sometimes they cut weeks. I’m also old enough to remember the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Honestly, my husband and I — freelance musicians with small side businesses — were completely fine. It was shocking to have all of the performances go away, but once the dust settled, we were pretty much okay.

And my colleagues who had achieved those one paycheck jobs in the Met, in Indianapolis (maybe? I can’t remember), Nashville for sure, they just stopped paying. They’re like, “Oh, we’ll just go on furlough for a year.” And if you’re a person who was accustomed to getting a couple of thousand dollars a week, what are you going to do? Yeah. What are you going to do? No one is prepared to have their entire source of income go away just like that. And you know, while we don’t expect a global two-year shutdown to happen again anytime soon, we know it can. We now know it can. And I find that my portfolio career made up of a whole bunch of different things that I can control is so much more stable, so much more artistically fulfilling, so much more flexible than anything I could have had if my original plan had come to fruition.

Michelle Lynne: It’s so interesting how you’re framing the portfolio career, because one of the pushbacks I hear is that, you know, freelance work is unstable, and here you’re saying the opposite. Actually, you have control. So you can choose what you put your time and energy into, your effort. You can choose what goes on the back burner. You can pursue projects that are creatively fulfilling. It’s giving you, it sounds like, a lot of control and freedom as well. What was the turning point for you where you realized, actually, I do have the career that I want, and I don’t need to believe this lie of the one path to success?

Jennet Ingle: I think it was not so much a turning point as a gradual realization. But I can point to a turning point in 2019, like before the pandemic, before anything was happening. I was, you know, playing in a principal oboe job here, another one over here, and I had a section position over in this orchestra. So, three different orchestras whose contracts I was balancing. And I was a freelancer. So every week was filled in with work from one source or another, because, you know, if you’re a good player and you’ve been in town long enough, paying your dues, you get called for things. So I was working all the time as a performer, and I had 18 or 20 students, and I had my reed business, and I was doing solo recitals every time I could, like all sorts of things that I was doing, all sorts of projects that I was putting in place. And I remember being with my orchestra, my main orchestra, playing Brahms’ First Symphony, which is, you know, of those sort of warhorse symphonies that we play over and over again (maybe too much), it’s my favorite one. I do really love it. And I love my colleagues in this group. And I was enjoying the conductor, and we’re in the fourth movement, and everything is momentuming toward the end of the piece, and all of a sudden this voice in my head said, “What is even the point?” And that’s not something that I’m accustomed to hearing, like a voice in words in my head saying such dire things. So, I interrogated that after I left the stage and realized I was just so tired. I was so burned out. And the thing that I was able to point to as, you know, the problem right now was this 18-student situation. You know, I had adjunct positions at Andrews University, Valparaiso University, St. Mary’s College. I was teaching all over the place. I had students coming to my house. So every afternoon after school, when another kind of parent might have been spending time with their child, my child was watching television while I spent my time in my oboe studio with other people’s kids. Yeah, and it just wasn’t working for me anymore. And, you know, 18 students a week is not an insubstantial amount of income, but I had the flexibility because of all of the other things that I was doing to say, no, I need to make a change. So, you know, a month later, it was May. I graduated a bunch of them, and I fired all the rest of them. Nope, I’m not doing this anymore. Love you guys, but this must stop. And so I stopped cold turkey, you know, from a couple thousand dollars a month of teaching work to just not having that anymore. And it felt easy enough to lean a little more into my reed business, to lean a little more into the performing and make up the difference. I had the flexibility because I already had a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of income streams in my portfolio career. So the money always comes from somewhere, and I was able to make my schedule be what I needed it to be.

Michelle Lynne: That’s an amazing story to have that huge shift. I actually have a very similar story. I quit teaching piano in September 2022. And it’s what you were saying. I think I had 25, 30 students, the doorbell ringing every 30 minutes. And I mean, even hearing you talk about it, I get this pit in my stomach because it was just not for me. And I love those kids so much, and so it was so hard to let go. And of course, teaching income was stability. During the lockdown, I was just teaching online, and I could still earn my income. But there came a point where I was like, I’m not meant for this. This isn’t, you know… and I think there’s something in you that’s like, no, no, I can do it all because, like, I’m pretty good at it. Like, okay, I wouldn’t call myself a pedagogue, but I can encourage kids. I can inspire. We had recitals, we had exams, like, there were lots of great things happening. So it’s like we’re constantly making these decisions of pursuing an ideal career, what you’re talking about, coming back to that freedom and the creativity and fulfillment. You constantly have to make these kind of turns and shifts and say, where do I actually feel like I’m called? So, letting go of your students and then you leaned more into the performing work. I wanted to ask you, what do you think musicians need to embrace this mindset of building a portfolio career and understanding that we always explain it as a table that has four legs? So you’re actually giving yourself more stability rather than the typical world saying freelance work is so dangerous?

Jennet Ingle: I mean, the money has to come from somewhere, right? Like we all need money to live on, and we need to work for that money. If you are in a position where… for a long time, I was not in a position where performing alone could pay all of my bills. And really, that’s a lot of pressure to put on your performing career, right?

If your definition of freelancing is literally just sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring and hoping that you can have a gig next weekend, the weekend after, and the weekend after that, I would agree that that’s not very stable and not very safe because the economy goes in cycles. The season goes in cycles. I don’t know about a pianist, but for an orchestral musician, the summer is dead. There’s nothing going on for a lot of the time unless you go to a music festival, and those don’t pay all that well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, performing should certainly be one leg of your table, but it should probably not be the only leg. Because even if your definition of diversified income is, “Oh, I have four different orchestras I work with,” if you get sick and can’t show up, if 2008 happens again and suddenly the orchestras are pulling back and cutting weeks, suddenly it’s not so secure. And there’s an inherent cap in your income if your portfolio is all about performance. The inherent cap is that there’s literally only one Saturday night per week, and there is a finite number of places you can be at the same time. So there are only so many services you can perform, even if you are a robot who never gets sick or tired. In addition to performing, something else… For me, teaching does light me up. I love it. It’s a different kind of energy than performing. It’s a different kind of creativity from performing. I’m completely out of that model of teaching junior high and high school kids that show up at my house every Tuesday at 4:15, but I am not done teaching. Instead, I teach groups of people. I teach online. And I teach specific topics for a finite amount of time, and I sell admission to those. But teaching, on the whole, gives you an additional level of stability, gives you control over that income, right? You can raise your rates. You can bring in one more student. You can choose to do groups rather than individual students, and suddenly that’s taking care of a lot of things.

For me, my reed business has been a tremendously valuable source of stability. That’s a thing that an oboist can do that maybe a pianist can’t do, but what can a pianist do? I don’t know. Do you tune pianos? Is there some other product that you can sell? I know pianists who have written method books and pedagogy and sell books like that and go off doing presentations about their method books and their pedagogy. What are some other things that you could entrepreneurially do to bring in money and be creatively inspired doing it? And what if your portfolio of activities had some things in it that weren’t even musical, weren’t even creatively inspiring?

Michelle Lynne: I like that you’re saying everything that’s so great. Yes, please continue. Non-musical income streams. Is that allowed as a musician? Doesn’t it mean you’re not serious?

Jennet Ingle: Well, you can do whatever you want. Two obvious choices would be a side job that does not sap you creatively but simply pays you money. Like a bartending job, a waitering job. Something where you can go to it, and you can be invested in it while you’re there, and you can make your money or your tips or whatever, and then you can leave and never think about it again. Is that a thing you can certainly do? Something that actually does inspire your creativity and keeps you engaged, like, lets you enjoy it and maybe rise up the ranks. I know people who are website designers, programmers, copywriters, marketers, or social media experts and work for other people doing those things, which also builds their skills for building their own careers, which also are fun and exciting for them. And they begin to be able to charge more and more. I know people who do virtual assistant work, and they have a great time doing it. It’s a steady paycheck because they’re working for somebody else. And they can keep rising up their own, I was going to say corporate ladder, but that’s not quite right, their own career ladder within that realm. And it doesn’t take away from your musicianship. People in my professional orchestra have day jobs doing things that they love. And does it mean they have to sometimes turn down daytime orchestra services? Yeah, but life’s full of choices.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. My vocal coach always talked to me about artistic cross-training. So I think when we have another income stream that inspires us or gives us another skill, as you’re saying… it’s funny that you’re mentioning all these things because I currently have a team that I’ve built. My content creator is a singer. My virtual assistant is also a singer. I have a PR and marketing girl who’s a fantastic flautist. I’m hiring musicians all around me to do a lot of different skills that I have been doing myself until the point I realized I can’t do everything anymore. I need to stop trying to be everything all the time and start hiring people to do things for me. And they’re doing it better than I am. It gives me more time and energy to focus on what I really want to do, which is actually this podcast and coaching our musicians at The Fearless Artist. And I’m learning about how to stay in my lane and stay in my zone of genius and not give in to this idea that you have to be everything all the time. And it provides people opportunities because I think the girls love doing my social media. It’s fun for them. They’re learning about the industry, and they’re learning about being, you know, freelance musicians and what it’s going to take because they’re currently still in their studies. They’re learning what it’s going to be like for them in four years rather than having the shock of the bubble popping and then flailing, trying to figure things out like I was 10 years ago.

Jennet Ingle: Yeah, exactly. It delights me that in my own business, I’m able to hire a virtual assistant, a bunch of reedmaking staff who help me with cane processing and rewinding. I hire a shipper. I’ve got somebody who edits my podcast. I love being able to pay for these things.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. Shout out to my podcast producer because he’s amazing. He handles all of this. Yeah. It’s amazing, right? You just send this off, and then it’s handled for you. And I love that. So something I really admire about you is your hustle mentality. I read this in your book and also in one of your podcast episodes, that when you are invited somewhere to a new city, you start contacting people and you’re saying, “Okay, what else can we drum up?” I’d love for you to share more about that.

Jennet Ingle: Yeah. I have an example from just earlier this summer. I have a little mastermind group that I’ve been meeting with weekly since the pandemic, and I’ll be happy to talk more about that later, but that’s a side conversation. We had scheduled an in-person retreat in Arizona… in Sedona because, you know, it’s so witchy and girly and excellent… at the beginning of June. So, I’m like, okay, fantastic. We’re going to go do this. It’s going to be wonderful. I’m looking at flights, it’s going to be, you know, $400-$500. I’m like, okay, well, this is fine. I can afford it, but I wonder what else I could do. I wonder if there are oboists in Arizona. And it turns out there are.

So, I extended my trip and found a collaborator who had a teaching studio in Phoenix, and she was delighted to partner with me. So we decided to make an event called the Arizona Oboe Experience. And it hadn’t existed before. We just made it. We sold it for, like, not very much, I think $59 a ticket. And it was less for students, even less for her own students. And we maybe did a five-hour day. We did a master class. We did a little reedmaking session. We did another master class. We did a little mini performance. It was like the oboe aspect of it — the teaching, reedmaking, and performing part — was just plain fun for me. Right? That’s all in my zone of genius. It’s all in my zone of excellence, at least. Right? I can play the oboe. I can talk about the oboe all day. But also, I got to meet all of these new oboists, all of these new people who became friends. And when I was presenting at the double reed conference later in August, a whole bunch of them came up and talked to me because now we know each other. My point is, by extending my stay a little bit in a place I was already going to be, and by reaching out and making a connection with a human being that I already knew because we had corresponded about oboe reeds during the pandemic, we were able to create an event that 20 oboists came to.

Michelle Lynne: Amazing.

Jennet Ingle: It was four hours of good, clean fun, educational for them, exhilarating for me and for my co-teacher. It paid for my flight and my stay, and I still got to have my wonderful mastermind retreat up in Sedona, but it was paid for.

Michelle Lynne: Incredible. I mean, this is just so smart, and most musicians don’t think like this. Can you talk a little bit about what are the limiting beliefs? Why wouldn’t someone even try to step out in this if they felt overwhelmed at the idea of organizing something? “Oh, it’s just easier. I’ll just pay the 500 bucks for the flight. I don’t want to deal with all of that stuff.” What is that underlying fear, and how can you start to overcome that?

Jennet Ingle: I mean, there’s a huge fear of, like, “Who do I think I am? Who am I to do this? Like, how dare I step into an oboe community where I don’t know anybody except for this one co-teacher that I had corresponded with? Who do I think I am to try to sell tickets to me, basically? I’m not famous. This isn’t a thing that I can do. This is just for the famous people. I could do it if I had a big job. If I had a big job, people would come.”

Michelle Lynne: Oh, these little voices are so mean.

Jennet Ingle: Right? They’re so mean. “I’m too young for this. I’m too old for this. No one’s going to show up for me. I’m 50.” We have all of these voices. If you’re a person who has something to say, even if it’s just something that you have to say to your students and you know that you have stepped into that genius from time to time when you were working with some little kid, I bet there are other little kids who could benefit from that. If you, in your own practice, have come up with a way to work on a passage that no one ever taught you, but you figured it out, other people could benefit from that. My message to you is: Who are you to keep your genius to yourself if you could share it? And $59 or $29 or $19, any amount of money, is not too much for someone to spend to hear your genius.

Michelle Lynne: So it takes a lot of inner knowing that what you have to say is valuable. You’re there to create something really interesting, collaborative with your fellow teacher. The Arizona Oboe Experience. I love that. It takes a little bit of gutsiness to come up with some snazzy words, maybe, to bring people in. But, I mean, 20 seats, so that’s a great success. And I’m sure it was organized quite quickly as well.

Jennet Ingle: Yeah, it came together with two emails and a Zoom call, and then we just slapped up a sales page and made it happen.

Now, is there a fairly large amount of infrastructure behind the scenes that went into that? Sure. I’ve been in business for years, and I have an email list and an audience, and I worked with someone who already had an existing studio and an existing network of oboists that she knew.

Actually, one of my favorite things about this — I love that people came and paid money and came to hear me… It was actually incredibly validating for me that this little YouTube channel that I started eight years ago had developed me enough of an audience that people were like, “Oh, Jennet, I wonder what she’s going to say about the oboe.” But it was lovely that when I got there, maybe five or six — a solid quarter or third of the audience — said something to me like, “Oh, I’m so glad to be here. It’s great to hear you speak, but I’m just so glad to be supporting Maya, my co-teacher.” And it was just so lovely to see because she’s quite a bit younger than I am, but it was so great to see what a community and what a network she had built up in the area. And for me to be able to leverage that and for her to be able to leverage my audience simultaneously, it felt like a win-win for both of us. I got to do an event that was fun. She got to raise her credibility in the area by doing an event, by bringing me in, by having a room full of excited oboists.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. And if we talk about creating skills that complement our musical strengths, I mean, that’s exactly what you need to know how to do as a musician. How to organize events, how to get people together in a room, building your email list. I didn’t know you started on YouTube. I’d love to hear more about that, but you’re right. I think a lot of the things we do with The Fearless Artist, we’re trying to convince people to get started in building this audience and that there are people out there who care. There are 20 oboe players who would love to come hear you teach, and you inspired them. You gave them a lot of motivation. They probably heard you say something that Maya had already said, but because you said it, they’re now suddenly going to go do it. So it’s just like there are win-wins happening all over the place. And that is what a collaboration is supposed to be, that we create something bigger together than us individually.

Jennet Ingle: Yes, yes, exactly that. I mean, that’s exactly what you and I are doing right now. I’m talking to your podcast audience, who probably isn’t following The Five Minute Reedmaker over on YouTube.

Michelle Lynne: They should be. They will be after this episode.

Jennet Ingle: Exactly, because what you want to know is more about oboe reeds.

Michelle Lynne: They’ll be following Crushing Classical, though, because that is an excellent podcast.

Jennet Ingle: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, that’s, of course, the more obvious collaboration. But by making this collaboration happen, it’s boosting both of our careers. And, you know, this is the case for my podcast as well. Every time I do something, the guest who I’m speaking to has an audience who tunes in, the audience that I already have tunes in, and everyone wins. The guest gets more visibility, I get a little bit more visibility, and we all grow in this world. And my end goal, I think, is for more musicians and creative people to be not only thriving in the world and in their portfolio careers and their creative careers, but also to be seen to be thriving. Because the more visibly musicians and creatives are thriving in the world and are doing well, the more possible it becomes for the next generation of people, for the current generation of people, to step into that same level of growth and thriving.

Michelle Lynne: It’s so beautiful. Without vision, the people perish. It’s one of my favorite verses. Like, we need to give people an example of what’s possible.

And for me, I mean, way before I started The Fearless Artist, I was watching motivational women speakers, women preachers, women taking authority and leadership and talking about entrepreneurship and saying, “Oh, these are powerful women who have voices and big audiences.” That’s so motivational and inspiring to me. I never saw it coming into my life so strongly as it has, but knowing that it’s possible is what makes you realize you could step into that too. And with the whole starving artist thing, I mean, for me, it feels like if I could get rid of one thing in my life, there’s one thing that I could do — it’s eliminate the starving artist mentality. And I teach my students at the beginning of class, we say, “We’re not starving, we’re thriving.” And I make them say it out loud, and everybody kind of rolls their eyes. And I’m like, “You’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, you’re going to look yourself in the mirror, and you’re going to say, ‘I’m not starving, I’m thriving.’ And I look for opportunities, and I make things happen. And I have the keys to my career, and nobody else gets to tell me who I am or what I have the possibility of doing.”

Because you’re right. If we don’t know what’s even possible, we’re not going to try to go for that.

Jennet Ingle: Yes.

Michelle Lynne: I wanted to ask you what inspired you to write your book? I mean, I’m sure you’ve had a big career, so you’ve seen a lot of problems in the industry that you’ve been talking about today already. But what was that motivation that you said, “I need to get this down in writing?”

Jennet Ingle: It is that midway through our pandemic lockdown, I was joyfully leading a bunch of oboe group programs on Zoom. I was in a coaching program that was helping me to grow personally and in my career. I was having the time of my life, connecting with humans across the globe on Zoom. I was performing on Zoom. All of these things were happening. And I looked around me in my real-life life, and all of my friends who were musicians were not seemingly in that same joyful space. People were mourning the loss of their steady one-paycheck orchestra that wasn’t paying them. People were worried about when performing would ever start back up again. People were in this panic of scarcity and anxiety. And I realized that’s been the musicians that I’ve seen for years, even when things were going great. Everyone’s a little bit of like, “Oh my gosh, when is the next gig? Why did that person get that gig and not me?” And the book came out of that. I want to share that a fulfilled artistic life that also pays your bills is possible and that you can be a happy musician.

Michelle Lynne: It’s so, so great that you’re sharing this. I want to thank you because, during the pandemic, I had the exact same thought. There are two types of people. There’s the negative fear, complaining… there were people saying we will never have live performances ever again. I mean, I remember hearing that, and I thought, “Guys, this is ridiculous. Like, how can you even believe this?” And it was just this fear kind of in the air. And then on the other side, there were people looking for, “Okay, what’s possible now?” My co-founder Deanna was also saying, “You know, we need to look for what we can actually start to do with what’s in front of us and not just sit around waiting for the phone to ring.” Of course, no one’s calling because we’re all trapped in our homes. I was also performing on Zoom.

One of the most beautiful stories is my grandmother was in a dementia facility for five years before the pandemic, and not once did I ever think that I could call her on FaceTime and play for her. And thanks to the pandemic, I phoned, I think, two or three times the nursing home. They got me the nursing home’s iPad. They brought me to my grandmother’s room, and I performed for her. I’m emotional remembering it because I thought, “Wow, I could have been doing this for the last five years, and I had no idea.” We just didn’t think. So, when doors close, then you realize what’s actually possible in front of you. That was always such a striking moment for me. I thought, “Wow, it’s been staring me in the face, and I didn’t even realize.” So, just keep encouraging musicians to look for what’s possible.

I know you have coaching as well. Can you talk a little bit about what you work on with your clients and some transformations that you’ve seen?

Jennet Ingle: I mean, I am always in it to get musicians paid more and to get musicians more spaciousness in their lives and find their way to whatever thriving and whatever success means for them. So, I worked with a flute player at one point who was teaching, I don’t even know, 30, 35 students a week and was undercharging so severely that she was in a barely subsistence living situation and wasn’t feeling any respect from the parents of the students she was teaching. She loved her students, but she was miserable doing the work that she was doing because it was too much. It was not enough money. It was not working at all. And she was terrified to make a change because, like, if I raise my rates, what happens if they leave? If I stand up for myself and demand the respect that I actually deserve, that my policies state I am entitled to — if I tell you, “You cannot reschedule a lesson at the snap of a finger,” they will leave, and then they won’t love me anymore. Look, I’m putting all sorts of words into her mouth, but she was not happy, and she was afraid to make changes. And we transformed that studio. We made it so she was able to condense people into groups some of the week so that she got her time back. We made it so she could raise her rates by 50 percent, I would say, overall. Some people did leave, but she was making more money on the other side of it, and the people that left were not the people she had wanted to keep. With the additional time and the additional money and the additional spaciousness she had, she was able to start a whole new arm of her business that is making her even more happy. I think so often people are just like, “Okay, well, this is the thing that I do. I’ve got this job and this job, and I’m just sort of running along day and day and day and day.” Even to pause and think about, “How would I like this to be? How could this be better? What is my dream?”

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Jennet Ingle: That’s a conversation that people don’t have with themselves. I think a lot of coaching, for me anyway, is just asking. So, how would you like this to go? What would you like to have happen here? If you could have a dream Tuesday instead of the Tuesday that’s actually on your schedule, what would your dream Tuesday feel like? It’s amazing how hard it is sometimes for people to dare to name it, but once you name it, we can work towards it. And that’s what I do.

Michelle Lynne: That is so beautiful. And I think with naming what you actually want, you have to also believe that it’s possible. And maybe that’s why some musicians get stuck because they’ve never even considered. And that ties into what we were saying about giving people vision and showing what is possible. And that’s such a beautiful part of your work. I know in chapter six of your book, you’re talking about building a solo career. You have a great set of questions about what does your ideal gig look like? What kind of audience is in the room? Who do you want around you? Who are you playing with? I think these types of questions are excellent to get us in the mindset of, you know, what’s the ideal career? We have a question that we like to ask in The Fearless Artist: The phone rings. It’s your ideal gig. Who is it? What’s the rep? And people get so scared, you know, and the default answer is, of course, soloing at the Berlin Phil. Fine, if that’s your answer, fine. But I actually dig a little bit, and I make people say, “No, what’s the venue? Where’s the city? What’s your hotel room? Are you getting driven there?” Like, let’s talk about it. Let’s imagine what it would like to be possible and just kind of think bigger. And that’s always a really exciting question to get people thinking.

Jennet Ingle: It is, because once you start thinking about it, then you begin to realize — or at least I always begin to realize — like, huh, maybe it doesn’t have to be the Berlin Philharmonic calling. Maybe I could just ask to get driven to my next gig. I find often if I let myself dream, I say things to myself like, “Oh, you know, when I really make it, when I’m really successful, I can do yoga outdoors on my porch every day.” And then I’m like, “Dummy, you could just walk out there and do yoga right now. You have a mat. You have a porch.” Like, this is not a thing you have to wait for.

Michelle Lynne: I love that.

Jennet Ingle: If what you want is to play the Strauss concerto in front of 500 people, let’s brainstorm where you can put 500 people and brainstorm yourself a gig. Let’s make it happen. This is possible. It’s possible in your community right now, I bet.

Michelle Lynne: Yes, 100 percent. This is so great. I love teaching people how to think in possibility, and I love that you’re such a great example of this. Thank you. This is such a fulfilling conversation. I so resonate with so much of what you’ve shared. I want to let everyone know that they can download the first chapter of your book The Happiest Musician when they go to your website, and it’s JennetIngle.com. We’ll put that in the show notes. How can we follow you? How can people keep in touch with you?

Jennet Ingle: Hmm. I mean, if you are an oboist, it might be worth glancing at The 5 Minute Reedmaker on YouTube, but assuming that you are not, you can follow me at Crushing Classical, which is wherever you get your podcasts. I am on Instagram at JennetIngle, although I barely show up there. Although you and I met there in the DMs.

Michelle Lynne: That’s true, but I DMed you after I found your podcast. Podcast first.

Jennet Ingle: Interesting. And I mean, everything I do is up at JennetIngle.com.

Michelle Lynne: Perfect. We’d like to finish our episodes with one practical action point. So do you have something that you can give our audience?

Jennet Ingle: I mean, I think this follows from a lot of things we’ve already talked about, but the thing I want to say is just get curious. Anytime you are dragging yourself to a gig, a lesson, the next thing that is on your calendar, and you are feeling “uhhhh” about it, ask yourself why. Ask yourself, “What is it about this that I don’t like?” And ask yourself, “How could it be better?” Because almost for sure, there is a change you can make, whether that is a tweak to your own mindset around reframing the thing you have to do, whether that is quitting that thing you have to do, whether it is firing that one student, whether it is rethinking the way you schedule your days so your energy is right. Get curious.

Michelle Lynne: These are deep questions. I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here.

To everybody listening, please leave us a review and screenshot this podcast. Share it on your stories on Instagram. We’ll reshare everybody. And, Jennet, really, thank you so much. This has been wonderful to hear your wisdom.

Jennet Ingle: Michelle, thank you so much for having me.