Navigating Change

Question

I feel like everything is changing all around me, all the time. Each time I feel like I’m getting on a roll, the sands shift beneath me. People I used to count on to hire me are moving on or retiring. Companies are closing or cutting performances everywhere I look. How do I manage to survive in this crazy, unpredictable, shrinking environment for classical arts?

Barbara Massury:

This is about how to safeguard your roots in an unstable, shifting world. In periods of structural instability, the most disorienting pressures are often institutional rather than personal. As gatekeepers change and cultures fracture, the established frameworks of our work can dissolve, interrupting the long-term conversations we maintain with our audiences, with peers, co-workers and colleagues, with organizations important to us and with systems.

The core challenge in situations like these is not to control this chaos, but to determine how to safeguard our foundational roots when the surrounding structures change. Navigating such transitions presents significant hurdles—from the loss of familiar processes to the emotional toll of professional displacement—yet these challenges are precisely what test the strength of our core principles.

A critical reframe is separating “brick-and-mortar” from “flesh-and-bone” as we rarely mourn a brand itself; rather, we mourn the ecosystem of people – the trust, the culture, the collaboration, the quality and the standards that made good work possible. While institutions are vessels, their “organizational soul” is shaped by those who work in them and who lead them, and this can shift rapidly.

What helps? Defining “the permanent.”

It helps to turn to our unique proposition as a fundamental stance to overcome the friction ofchange:

• What remains true to me even when the structure changes?
• What am I truly committed to?
• What must be preserved under all circumstances?
• What feels real, important, and in sync with my purpose and with who I am?

Ultimately, safeguarding your roots is not about resisting change. It is a refusal to outsource your identity and peace of mind to temporary structures and systems, especially when those structures fail us. And this brings us back to the important topic of “agency” vs. control. We need agency and it is not meant as an illusion of control. True agency is the discernment required to understand where you have impact and how to operate effectively within those boundaries.

Read the full publication here: https://www.csmusic.net/content/one-question-two-answers-navigating-change/