Music Can Permeate a Business Meeting

Music interrupted our business meeting.Every hour of every day of every week, there are thousands of business meetings happening - many on laptops with one inch tall colleagues and grinding through shared screens and the private chats. We move from appointment to appointment and click through data and charts. Dry and pressured and important, these meetings go by and cloud our day with more to dos and to don’ts, keeping us relationally challenged.Visible Music College has our annual strategic planning retreat every November on a weekend and we invite leaders from four cities to come to a retreat type setting to consider Visible’s path forward and work through issues of higher education, music industry, and attracting teenagers to a serious college music program. This year was no different in mission but we were interrupted by the “My Visible” theme of the day and connecting our main mission in leadership to the actual students and…not surprisingly in the end, actual music.We have one trustee who is a professional musician and business guy. He travels with a speaker and plays music for his livelihood and writes songs and makes records and does music. Eliot shared his gift at the front end of the meeting and changed the room. Although the weather contributed by being very nice, there were people dialed in for hours on a screen and the meeting started late due to relational gathering (and protocols), so when we launched into the content of guiding a music school, it was with music. We talked ministry with a beginning of ministry.The guitar resonated in the room unlike videos and speeches. We were moved (and directed and invited) to sing by Eliot and we did. Human beings singing at a business meeting to set the tone for what we really love about the only independent accredited Christian music college we know of in the world. The hard pressed work was paused. The screens and lists were dimmed for a minute. The endowments and program developments were set aside as music permeated the room. We were reset for thinking, dreaming, and hoping.Music permeates our soul and makes a way in a meeting when present. Music is important.#kensteorts