If you want to reach a bigger audience, connect from the stage like you’ve always known is possible, and get as big as you want, well, I’ve got a story for you…
Who Is Aaron Bergbusch?
Recently, I connected with my audience in a way I’d somehow always known was possible but had virtually forgotten.
And when the show ended, at first I didn’t know how to handle it. People coming up to me, hugging me, the moment still in their eyes. I’d been swept up too, hardly aware of time.
I’d done everything as I’d planned, leaving nothing out, going for it. And I made an impact.
At last.
My vision had finally come true. I got a feeling like a warm glow all over… I’d just lived my dream.
I’d long known that the key to turning things around was to make fans every time I played. This night I proved I’d arrived.
I made real fans and suddenly I knew I could take my music dream as big as I wanted…
That’s what’s happening NOW. And I want to take you along for the ride, because I know you can do this too.
I know how hard it is to learn this stuff. I know what it is to be an artist. It’s very personal. You don’t want to be told. You’re gonna find your own way…
Maybe.
And then again, maybe you’re losing connection to your music dream…
Are you making the kind of progress in your music career like you always thought you would…?
I wasn’t.
I took the long way. In fact, I sabotaged my music career my entire life. I never understood what was going on, until I just got tired of spinning my wheels.
It all started out great…
I joined a rock cover band in Germany while on a student exchange. And once home, all I wanted to do was get back on stage so I could tour and see all those people again that I’d known and loved and have the adventure continue.
…and then things started to go downhill…
I found myself back in Canada having to get on with my life. My parents told me I needed to get a real job. That the life of a musician is terrible. Having to tour everywhere all the time. That no one would ever want to marry a musician. That there’s no money in it. That I needed to get a University degree.
I actually listened to them… half the time.
First I went to University and studied Geography.
But after that was over, I did a 180 and went to music school and followed it up with a Hail Mary move to Toronto, Canada’s largest city, to make it big.
But SURPRISE! my demo didn’t get me anywhere 🙁 Soon I ran out of money and ended up working as a clerk at a bank.
So I got outta there and went back to University and studied City Planning for 3 years and followed that up by getting a planning job.
But it wasn’t long before the job became repetitive and anti-creative. I saw my whole life stretching before me. I realized I didn’t want my boss’s job or her boss’s job or his boss’s job either.
I found myself up all night writing songs and recording demos instead, until I was *beat*. One night my body just shut down and I couldn’t move enough to get into bed. To make a long story short, after a year I quit, and tried again to make it in music.
So I worked at it. I spent months and months trying to think up a great band name, getting photos done, trying to record the perfect demo, trying to make the perfect press kit, until I suddenly realized I’d quit a job it took me 3 years to get, I’d told everybody I was going to be a rockstar, but I still hadn’t even played a real gig.
How could I pretend to be a musician, how could I believe I was going to have a future in music, when I’d never even played a real gig?
And so I got a band together and set up a gig for my BIG LAUNCH. I invited everyone I knew. Family members traveled to be there. My new girlfriend was there. More than 30 friends showed up in the downtown eastside of Vancouver on a Tuesday night.
The band and I had practiced 6 or 7 times, my amp was grounded wrong and the mic shocked my lip all through the first song.
Musically, in terms of tightness, we sucked. Midway through the playlist I found myself just wanting to get to the end. I wasn’t present at all. I was a deer in the headlights.
And it was a disaster, and it happened in front of everyone I knew.
I was crushed.
Clearly I was a failure. Clearly I had no business believing in my music dream.
What did I think I was going to achieve with this one gig? But the damage was done.
I lay in bed and literally writhed for 3 days, horrified at the shame of it all. In fact, it affected me for years to come.
After that disaster, I ended up working full-time as a University Administrator and let myself believe in that for awhile.
But ultimately that kind of work turned me angry. My new girlfriend thought it might be better if I quit. So I did, and had another go at music.
For some reason I kept thinking I would need tens of thousands of dollars to get anywhere in the music business…
…to pay for an album, publicity, a tour, a video and all that.
So I decided to try and make it big in penny stocks. Instead of doing music, I spent forever on stock boards, trying to learn when to buy and when to sell.
In the end, I lost thousands of dollars. Somehow I didn’t respect the money I’d been making. Somehow it was all or nothing. My world was even smaller than before.
I took another full-time job I hated. In desperation, I used the money to record a studio album, get artwork done and print 1000 CDs.
After the album was done, I played around town a bit and sold a few CDs, but by this time, music had become like a duty. I’d put myself up to it again and again – along the way I felt like I’d sacrificed all sorts of other opportunities – and now it was like I had to music.
Music had wrecked my life.
It was around that time that my wife got offered a job 4000 km away in Ottawa, Ontario.
…I had no reason to stay…
In 15 years I’d given myself every opportunity to succeed in music and I hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Sure I had some stories. I had an album. I had a little bit of stage experience. But I didn’t really have any fans. I was no closer.
You’d think I’d have given up by now. I just couldn’t understand it. At this point I’d become a real cynical bastard.
What was it all supposed to be about? I’d been so passionate, I’d wanted to be so passionate but it was all dissipated into nothingness…
After moving across the country, it was time to figure out what I was going to do with myself once and for all.
If I was ever going to get anywhere, if I was ever going to be able to actually move forward with anything, I had to understand what was going on!
I became 100% conscious of the fact that I’d become a cynical bastard. I didn’t want to be a cynical bastard. I didn’t want to feel confused and tired all the time, seeing all the conflicts in everything, all the reasons why not. I remembered the spirit I once had, and I wanted to be a positive source of energy. I wanted to inspire people.
And the more I thought about it, slowly but surely, I gained a sense that my music dream was bound up in who I was. At my core. And that the only way forward was to accept that.
To accept who I was or forever stay a cynical bastard. My dream was never gonna die. There was no other choice.
At that point, I not only had to pursue it, I had to know why.
Slowly but surely, a feeling of certainty came from within, where it had always been, and surprise, it was bound up in music. I grabbed a hold of it.
I began to notice all my feelings and thoughts associated with music, and it wasn’t pretty. Feelings and thoughts of guilt, shame, ridicule, fear and a whole lot of self-judgement about being a musician, and even a human being, that had turned into beliefs and habits.
They’d become so ingrained, I’d never have even recognized that they were really the repeating voices of old and long-dead criticisms, expectations, guilt-trips, you name it, all this stuff from the past that wasn’t even actually happening in the now, except as it lived on in my head.
This wasn’t who I was, it just seemed that way. It’s what I had agreed to think. It’s what I had allowed myself to think. What others would have me think. What I had been trained to think. I had been trained to doubt, second-guess, feel shame and guilt, and pretty much sabotage my music dream all along. It was powerful stuff.
And then I had an inspiration.
A music career was something I was supposed to want. Something I was supposed to feel good about. So what did the best moment of my life feel like… ?
I remembered again the amazing feeling of connection I’d had when I’d taken the leap and quit my planning job years before and I decided to relive that feeling. Only this time, it would be in the context of a gig, a gig in my mind, not unlike that gig that had failed so miserably.
There I was sitting on a bluff at Ottawa’s Remic Rapids spontaneously reliving and magnifying this best feeling that I knew, imagining it in the context of being on stage, in front of a large audience.
I was playing a gig, knowing that this was the one and only opportunity I would have to be with that audience, knowing I would never see that audience again, recognizing each person’s innocent, hopeful, dreaming self. I wanted to know who everyone was. Free of judgement, free of self-consciousness, free of fear, full of genuine interest, support, love.
The feeling of that best moment built up in my mind and washed over me until it was remarkable, almost overwhelming.
And I felt something inside me change… I was back.
I eventually put two and two together and realized that this was precisely what music was about for me. That this experience, was also what it had been like when I’d been in the band those many years ago as an exchange student in Germany.
This feeling, experience, awareness, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, of connection, this was why it had become my dream in the first place!
Connecting with my audience was all I ever really wanted anyway.
That was the whole point all along. That was at the core of the dream. That was how it all started. Wanting to share. To connect with people I once knew and loved and a bigger audience. An ever bigger audience.
What a revelation. Seems so obvious now. It wasn’t primarily to be impressive in a ‘I will wow you’ kind of way (however much I thought that’s what I needed to do). It was more about being impressive in a sharing sort of way.
Like those guys who get up on stage, just the one guy, with the one instrument, and then he takes over the entire room. It’s a vulnerability sort of. An openness. No BS getting in the way.
It had long been clear to me that you can’t be self-conscious and have a good stage experience. As an audience member, it’s exactly what you don’t want in the performer. You can’t help but notice it. It gets in the way. You just want the performer to do their thing, absolutely, without restriction. To put their attention on the audience instead of on themself. That’s the performer’s job. That’s when the performer is actually giving something.
Self-consciousness ain’t no fun for no one.
It’s the most common thing in the world. At its core, self-consciousness is really self-judgment and it’s bound up in fear. If you think about it, guilt, shame, worry, doubt, second-guessing, these too boil down to fear of judgement. Suddenly it became clear that in order to get what I wanted, if I was going to love my audience, if I was going to have fans, I had to give it all up.
But it was the insight that I didn’t have to prove anything, that there is nothing I have to prove, that was the trigger for a spontaneous obliteration of every negative or limiting thought I’d ever had around music. The recognition that the motivation of having something to prove was actually a form of fear. The fear that I will have seemed to have wasted my life. The insight that I didn’t need to justify all of the tradeoffs I had made in the name of my music career that had limited virtually every other aspect of my life.
All of the jobs I’d quit, all of the money and time I felt I needed to reserve instead of traveling to see people I loved but for whom I wanted one day to play music for, all of the opportunities in other areas that I’d let fade.
All of the career progress and earnings I’d forgone, every relationship I’d let die because I couldn’t possibly be a rockstar and also have a family or even a girlfriend, every broken outcome that had resulted from the decisions I felt I’d had to make to retain the potential to become a rockstar. Basically, I didn’t need to justify never having lived life to the fullest somehow in my own mind, by succeeding in music. At last I was free to love myself. To love everyone. To love everything.
And then I had 3 or 4 days or more of the best moments I’d ever had.
No limits. Sharing all the way. It was mystical. It was transcendent.
This was the whole point. This was the reason. All the reasons ‘why not’ were of no consequence. They were vaporized. This was the only reason to do anything. This was why I was alive. This was being itself. This was doing itself.
Performing for one or for thousands – the same. This was bigger than music. Music was a means to this end. This is what I’d always been going for.
I no longer needed to see my entire path laid out in front of me in order to take the next step. I could get everything I wanted every step of the way. And I already had everything I needed to take the next step.
Suddenly I could see clearly. I could see why some things worked and why other things did not. I went to open mics. I prepared. I observed. A few weeks later I booked a gig.
When the day of the gig came, admittedly, I struggled to keep my mind in the right place. But I overcame it. And then I had the best gig I’d ever had.
I connected with the audience in a way that I’d somehow always known was possible, but had virtually forgotten. I made real fans and suddenly I knew I could take my music dream as big as I wanted.
I learned a process and a series of insights that changed the game for me, and as a result, now I’m sharing that same process with you.
It’s time for you to have the best gig you’ve ever had. You feeling the success you’ve always wanted, you connecting with your audience, and you knowing your efforts are meaningful and are building something magical.
To explore how I can help you, connect with me at aaron@musiciansbreakthrough.com
and/or sign up below.
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