The goal of your Guest Speaker Workshop is to ensure you offer experiential exercises that songwriters can try and walk away having experienced & learned something new in their songwriting craft and / or having deepened their ability to write songs that move their souls (and hopefully others).
Since we are a “Conscious” songwriting retreat, there are at least two ends of the spectrum we approach the workshops from… and you can fall anywhere within the spectrum that you’ve found works best for you:
One is to help songwriters deepen their listening to creativity / inner genius / Spirit / God so that they allow the creativity to flow and engage their analytical / judgmental minds separately (e.g. I teach a specific Alignment Meditation for this). In other words, this approach aims to help them open up the creative flow while transcending the analytical / judgmental mind by sharing whatever practices and ways of thinking you’ve found helpful and believe will help them. It’s important to build in enough time to have them try the practices you share while giving them time to work on something, and giving them time to share about the experience during the exercise(s). Perhaps even sharing what they created.
Another way is to show them a more analytical approach like Song Mapping / Planning (e.g. where you plan out the main message you want to say the Chorus, verses and bridge ahead of time and then write the song based on the mapping).
Of course, you can choose one or even combine the two approaches above in your workshops in whatever way seems best.
My greatest suggestion would be to ask God / Spirit / Source how to best structure the workshop, given that’s what I do and it always works well. Of course, do what works best for you!
Whether you make your workshop a collaborative experience where individuals write together in groups, one big group or everyone writes individually is completely up to you, as we use all these styles throughout the retreat.
Ultimately, if participants spend time during your workshop actually working on writing songs in ways you show them based on your experience, then they’re receiving great value… and that’s priceless!
Click the button below to see what past Guest Speaker Workshops were about:
