I’m preparing for an audition later this week.
Actually, I’m NOT preparing. I haven’t been coaching, or even really practicing very much. I have been too busy teaching, traveling, and doing various other projects to spend much time thinking about this audition. I’m singing rep I know and have sung many times. I am just going to do it when the time comes, and I know it will be good.
I shock myself with my own pragmatism!
My new nonchalance around auditioning — and even just performing in general — feels weird. More and more, when it’s time to sing, I just — sing. In the early years of my career, I spent so much time preparing for every opportunity! I coached, I studied, I did research. When preparing a new role now, I still do all of those things, but it takes me less time and mental energy to feel “ready.” Once I have learned and performed a piece, it takes me less effort to refresh it for the next time. Somewhere along the way, the preparation stopped being something I do and became something I am. The language coaching, the stagecraft, the character work — these things have been metabolized into my flesh, and I can trust that they come with me wherever I go, and inform any repertoire I set my sights on.
This is all good news right? In my artistic maturity, I’m getting to performance-ready more quickly. I have mental energy and free time in my calendar to live a more balanced life. So, why is this ease of preparation coinciding with a period of my career when singing work is getting harder to come by? It’s an ironic — and frustrating — coincidence that work opportunity seems to be inversely proportional to preparedness!
In one of our weekly chats, I mentioned my frustrations to Barbara, my friend and Crescendo Leadership co-founder. She immediately saw a correlation in her own coaching work.
“I see this phenomenon in a gazillion places, lots of different fields, and across many career paths — it’s constant,” she said. And then she added: “Mainly mid-career.”
Sigh.
I’m not sure if I feel better or worse to know that mid-career high performers in many fields encounter this same injustice: by the time we have genuinely earned our expertise, the market seems to have lost interest!
I am nevertheless grateful for my knowledge and artistic maturity, and I know it makes me an asset. My gut tells me that I will need to use all that energy that I’m saving in preparation to bolster my persistence and keep the faith against strong headwinds. There is still work to be done — on stage and off.
Barbara’s Take —
Understanding and dealing with a paradox
There’s this common belief that more experience leads to more opportunity. In reality, it’s often more complex and that complexity becomes the central thread of professional growth and a huge source of strength in itself.
As people advance, they gain expertise, judgment, and clarity about what they do and about who they are. Yet these strengths don’t always match what organizations seek at a given moment. Sometimes experience is prized; other times, employers favor flexibility, lower cost, or candidates they can more easily shape.
This tension reveals a deeper truth: the path of growth is not a straight line where capability and opportunity rise together. Instead, it is a dynamic system where external demand shifts independently of internal development. The result is this very familiar paradox that Mary Elizabeth was describing. Just as professionals become more capable, they may face fewer or less obvious opportunities. I see this a lot in my work. Often it is a mid-career phenomenon and it is a very hard to deal with constructively for lots of people.
The sense of ease that lies in professional maturity
Here is where professional maturity comes in. It is the recognition – and acceptance – that mastery and opportunity don’t always align—and it is the ability to remain grounded while using this understanding to your advantage: to fundamentally trust your own experience, your knowledge, your know-how and your milage.
That trust in yourself becomes the throughline that carries you forward, independent of shifting external signals. It creates a steadiness that external validation cannot provide.
The result is what you experience: You move forward with greater ease, grounded in what you already carry, relying on it – and you are able to visibly portray this to the outside. That sense of ease—earned through experience and hard work over the years—is not just a byproduct of growth, it is the most important value that comes with and from experience. And it can be a wellspring of additional opportunities, fresh ideas, and unexpected pathways.
Image by Annette from Pixabay
