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Vic Hyland the Guitar Guru

Because I have spent my working life doing something that I was told I would not be able to do, it has given me a singularly subversive way of looking at societies grip on us.

From the days of leaving school where I was told that it was inconceivable that I could make a living from playing the guitar eventually being sent to a careers office that told me the same thing and then sent me to interviews with a number of banks i finally ended up with the job which I absolutely hated.

After a couple of years I changed my to a shipping clerk so that I was near to home and could send more time on studying and playing music; then came my big break.

The company that I was working for had to make some redundancies ans as I was on the union negotiating committee I had a chance to know early on what was on the cards. This gave me chance to plan ahead and when the opportunity came I took voluntary redundancy and set up with the help of the enterprise allowance scheme as a pro musician and teacher.

Over the next few years we had a recession and the banks laid lots of people of and every time I read a series of redundancies in the papers I had to smile and think to myself, 'Get a proper job in a bank!' God how my times had I heard that being preceded by 'You cant make a living playing the guitar there are not enough jobs for that!'

Fortunately things have changed so much now, thank goodness but we may have gone too far with people studying for almost anything. However what do you do with a degree in underwater basket weaving?

Perhaps we need some form of balance here and perhaps we need to model those who have succeeded. For me I frequently have people asking me about making a career from music and my answer is always the same, You must at least try something have a go at being a musician. Give it your best shot because if you do not, life will take it away from you and the last thing that you want is the regret that you never tried.

Remember that you will not on your death bed think that you should have spent more days in the office you will instead be thinking about all the things that you did not go places that you did not see and people you did not meet.

My advice to prospective professional musician is to look at the various areas of music that are required and are possible The problem is that our goals are only taken from our own experience of life and sometimes it maybe better to go to someone's else's experiences and model them.

For me my experience has always involved teaching to bring in the money but for someone else it might not do. My advice here is that you should go and learn what you can about these people and in NLP terms model them

So what do we do here well in a nut shell
Firstly NLP has a presupposition which is if one person can do something anyone can learn it and although there may be obvious exceptions such as certain sporting body types such as a weight lifter may not be easy for a lean long distance runner type to achieve this is essentially true.

Another presupposition is that experience has a structure so find out the internal code and you can transfer it to yourself.
To do this you need to break down what the person does into chunks like learning a piece of music and start doing it.
People are natural modellers and children are the best Remember that we managed to internalise grammar and syntax before we went to school

The early modelling done by Richard Bandler started by watching videos and reading transcriptions of therapy and hypnosis sessions by Satir Bateson and Erickson
so we can start by reading in-depth interviews watching videos or better still with reference to leaning how to make money find someone who is doing it and go and see them.
Find out what their beliefs systems are regarding what they do ask them how they see themselves how they feel about their work and what they hear others say about them
Find out how they put that into practice how do they establish their work ask them to demonstrate to you how they do things
Watch very carefully
Then go home and copy them do things as they do it copy their tonality walk and become them
This is how a child does do it the same as if you were playing being them
There is a great story of the great business man a and salesman Victor Kiam the man who liked the shaver Remington so much that he bought the company
He was an average salesman but he watched the best salesman in the company that he worked for at the time do his thing and he noticed that this man walked like James Stewart
Victor had just failed to get an interview with a company so he decided to go back and walking like James Stewart and ask for an appointment . This he did and got the appointment the interview and then the sale.

This change of body language changed him and he became the most successful salesman in the company.
This was a basic modelling technique so imagine what can be done by you if you model all aspects of someone's success

Music is found in the silence between the notes

I was very fortunate to have had a most inspired guitar teacher named Allan Billanie He was a true inspiration to me and many others of whom he taught.

I would say that it was his ability to create memorable imagines that were infused with emotion that made him so special.

The opening quotation probably came from the great Andre Segovia but Allan said something to me that was in the same vein and was even more evocative and perhaps more Zen in its profoundness. Whilst I was learning a piece once he looked at me and said ‘Remember that music is not the notes they are only the brown paper bags that the music is in’ this idea that music was an ethereal force that was infused in the notes was mind blowing to me at the time and along with the other things that I learnt whilst studying with him gave me a very deep understanding of expression.

So let us look at how we can use music to relax us. Instead of intellectualising the music let us be connected to the feeling of the music, connect with the spaces feel the essence with the spirit of the piece or should I say peace.

Let the music take you somewhere and just let the journey guide you wherever you wish. Let the troubles and thoughts of the day disappear for a while. Perhaps let the music take you to feelings of happiness as this releases endorphins that heals us and makes us feel good and happy and connected.

We also know that when we are relaxed we produce brain waves that are better for us giving us ideas from our unconscious minds.

Another interesting aspect in the performance of music is that it is different in every performance that is the true nature of music it is an energy that is constantly changing like every thing in the universe.

Many of our problems are cause by trying to hold on to something as it is and not allowing it to change or even helping the change to happen perhaps coaxing it a little to go in the way that you would wish.

I have often observed that when we stick our flag in the ground and profess that this ground is ours, or this is ‘the way things are’ etc we then have something to defend. Perhaps the course of the guerrilla fighter is the best, being able to be flexible with life’s problems.

With the performance of music let every performance be different do not compare it with what came before let go and free yourself from the anxiety and like wise if you are letting the music set you free by helping you relax imagine the notes of the music floating away taking your problems with them and bringing with the new notes the answers that will take root in your subconscious and bare fruit as ideas in the coming days.

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