Heathy Practice – Achieving your Goals for a Healthy Creative Career

Working in the performing arts is physically and psychologically demanding. There is a high risk of encountering health problems but proven techniques and strategies can help you keep well and achieve your creative goals. BAPAM have years of experience working with artists and creators to maintain their best health. We want to share this knowledge through education and training, and ensure all performance professionals have the tools they need to keep well. With this in mind we are launching our new free training and peer support group Maintaining your Healthy Career.

Using our Healthy Practice Checklist, you will set achievable goals for your own health and embed them in your practice with support from your peer group and the expert facilitation of BAPAM GP and performance health expert, Dr Pippa Wheble. With more specialists joining us throughout the course to demonstrate wellbeing techniques, you will have the opportunity to learn about mindfulness, meditation, journaling and a range of other practices so you can test what works best for you.

Our Healthy Practice Checklist is used in our health mentoring sessions with Help Musicians creative award winners and with the Wide Days selected artists. Our Healthy Practice Diary gives further advice on developing health goals and maintaining them until healthy practice is part your of daily routine.

Following previous sessions (run as the Community Drop-in), our 800+ participants have used the Warwick Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale to measure a marked improvement in their wellbeing, particularly after 5 weeks.

We are super excited that music rights organisation, PPL, has adopted and adapted our Healthy Practice Diary for use with their own staff this year, and it has also been included in our contribution to the Falmouth University Music Business MA. We are so pleased that it is proving helpful to the wider industry. The checklist and diary are freely available to anyone who is interested. Please do let us know how you are using them, we’d love to hear your experience!

We all know that understanding health risks and genuinely changing your routine to include more healthy practice is by no means an easy thing to do. The literature on health promotion suggests that there are optimal times to make this change. Often transitions in working arrangements, planning for touring or any significant project, provide opportunities to plan for your health at the same time. Facilitated peer support is also effective at helping people develop and maintain goals.

Please do sign up to the next free course which starts on 3 May, and join us in the mission to reduce the levels of poor health in our industry.