Corporate Drumming: My Start

“How did you get started doing corporate team building drumming programs?”

This is a question I am often asked by my corporate clients.  

My answer is not only my story about getting started in the world of corporate team building, but also an example of how any of us can have life-changing "Aha!" moments when we find, and follow, a passion in our lives.

In the early 1980’s, I was teaching hand drumming classes and organizing percussion jam sessions, in addition to working as a performing and recording percussionist.  My approach to teaching percussion has always included the powerful, down-to-earth ways that group drumming builds community bonds and uplifts the participants that moved me so profoundly during my two years of living and drumming in Africa. 

One of my students, a lawyer, exclaimed after one group session, “This is the best stress release therapy that I’ve ever done!  We should do this in our office; we’re always so stressed out that we sometimes just don’t work effectively.”

Not stopping to wonder how I would do this, I said, “Let's do it!".

Later, I did wonder what I had gotten myself into!  I knew that I couldn’t just teach a drumming class or lead a "Drum Circle" type activity and truly serve this corporate group.  So, I talked with the student about exactly what his group needed.  He emphasized the importance of making it easy and fun for his colleagues to experience the community-building, stress releasing and energizing benefits that he had experienced in my class.

I then spent hours in the local library researching the corporate world (this was pre-Internet days!).  I bought several books about management styles, various types of corporate structures and the current corporate team-building models.  I also talked with several of my friends who worked in the corporate world about the nature and needs of this community.

Fortunately, I’ve been passionately interested in Cultural Anthropology and World Cultures since my early teens. I had long before recognized some fundamental principles that were common to all thriving communities, so I incorporated these into my planning, as well. Finally,  I also included insights I had during my years of worldwide drumming experiences about how different groups used drumming and rhythm to acknowledge and celebrate important events.

The time to do the drumming with the law group came... They loved it! The principles of the law firm loved it... I loved it!

I had an enormously powerful “Aha!” moment when I realized this was a completely new and unexpected way to bring the joy and the benefits of drumming to people who normally might never get to experience them... and get paid for it!

Over time, I have refined my corporate programs considerably, but the approach that I took when just getting started is based on a universal, fundamental truth that can be used by anyone to focus, empower and uplift their lives and their groups:

Creating powerfully positive Life Rhythms is a step-by-step journey that begins with passion for a particular activity, and for life... and then proceeds by building upon the fundamental principles of that activity to consistently create small successes that lead to the big breakthroughs... the huge, "Aha!" moments.

The crucial element in all this is the realization that we get good at what we repeat... repetition leads to consitency, whether in learning a percussion instrument or in all of life.  Therefore, it is very important to repeat only those activities that we want to get good at!

That is... we learn productive Life Skills to create and reinforce powerful Life Rhythms that help us to live the lives that we want to live!