Meet Cindy Sadler

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cindy Sadler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cindy, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My work ethic comes from my parents. They had strong values and led by example. They were flexible and open-minded about most things, but there were two unwavering standards in our household: a good education, and a strong work ethic.

We’re solidly middle-class and didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up. My dad was an accountant for the City of Austin and he stayed in that job his entire working life. He was extremely loyal, hard-working, and honest, and was very well-liked by his colleagues and bosses.

There’s not really a good title for what my mom did. Saying someone is a “homemaker” does not do justice to the work and the expertise of people — mostly women — like my mother. Director of Home and Family Services, perhaps? When we were little, Mom worked at home and sometimes typed dissertations for grad students for extra income, but her main job was managing the household, including accounting and repairs, raising three kids, facilitating my father’s ability to work a 9-to-5 job, and volunteering as the PTA president among countless other things. When we kids were a little bit older and all in school, she went to work at the University of Texas in the business school, where she began writing business histories and became a published author.

Education was extremely important to both my parents. They had both attended college, but never graduated, and the one thing they insisted on from my brothers and me was that we each got an undergraduate degree at the very least. They put all three of us through college. I will never forget hearing from them, on multiple occasions, “We don’t care what you do for a living as long as it’s honest work and it makes you happy.” And they put their money where their mouths were.

Whenever the question of careers came up, my parents repeated that, and they also often told us, “Anyone who does an honest day of work is worthy of the exact same respect. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or a ditch digger. If you’re working and trying to doing your best, you deserve respect.”

I am extremely grateful to have been blessed with these loving, supportive, hard-working parents and the wonderful example they set.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

My entire professional life has been in the arts — specifically, the niche art form of opera. It’s not what I set out to do, but once it found me and pulled me in, that was that. From graduation until the COVID lockdown, my primary focus was performance. I was never famous, but I had a very solid regional career (meaning, I worked all over the US in small, medium, and large opera houses, but I never worked regularly at the biggest international houses. I never made it to the Met).

There are many misconceptions about the lives of performers. Where opera is concerned, the public tends to believe that we all swan around in limos and throw things at our dressers when the caviar isn’t served at the right temperature, but the truth is that opera is an extremely expensive and competitive career, and very few performers have the luxury of behaving badly. I’m not going to say I haven’t been driven around in a limo a time or two (once I even had a bodyguard named Rocco and he was the absolute best) or been expensively wined and dined, but far more often I was cooking Ramen in my hotel coffeemaker and driving the economy rental car the company got for me. In Portland, they rented bicycles for the cast, and that was amazing.

The point is, most people, including aspiring opera singers, don’t realize that 99.9% of the professional artists out there either come from a privileged background that allows them to pursue a performance career without having the famous “day jobs”,. or they go through life developing multiple income streams, aka “side hustles.” And despite what society likes to tell you, this is not only 100% normal but it’s also 100% respectable and does not mean that you’re somehow less successful as an artist.

I am saying this as someone who was able, for a significant number of years, to support myself primarily from the income I made as a performer. But opera singing is a play-or-no-pay sport. If you get sick and can’t sing a performance, you don’t get paid, period. You’re a contract employee and have no benefits, no health insurance, and no 401K except that which you build for yourself. And so, I developed a series of income streams.

In the early days of the internet, when people with similar interests could suddenly connect with folks they’d never otherwise have met, I saw a need for resources for singers, who often had to travel from all over the country to big cities (mainly New York) for auditions, and needed places to stay, places to practice, coaching and pianists for auditions, information about audition spaces, and more. I started a free informational website that became a major resource for singers.

Because I compiled all that information, people thought I knew things, and they started asking me questions like I was the expert. Well, if I didn’t know the answer, I’d research it and use my connections, and then all of a sudden, I became the expert. For 25 years I had an advice column for singers in Classical Singer Magazine and wrote many articles for them. I started offering consultations for young singers trying to get into the business and eventually created a workshop which is running to this day. There are other such workshops now, but at the time, I was the only one doing them, and for a long, long time, the only working singer doing them. I wrote a book for aspiring singers. And I founded a summer training program for singers, Spotlight on Opera, which is also still running to this day. Thanks to Spotlight, I learned marketing, stage direction, and a lot about arts administration. I also took a couple of teaching jobs and for many years had a private voice studio.

During all this time, I was singing professionally., and was professionally managed. Right before COVID started, I began a Master’s degree in Arts Administration online. It’s something I had always planned on — when my singing career was over, I planned to transition to full-time arts management. COVID made that happen a lot sooner than I’d planned. Like every other performer on the planet. I lost all my singing work to the lockdown.

I consider myself a bridge. I’m really good at connecting people: to each other, to opportunities, cto the right next steps in their journey. During the lockdown, I held Zoom sessions for colleagues to encourage them and discuss what we could do to keep ourselves and our careers going. Since all the students and emerging professional singers had lost their gigs and summer performance opportunities too, I created a pay-what-you-can online summer program., which ended up attracting quite a number of high-level international singers, stage directors, and coaches who just wanted to help out. Only a handful of students were unable to pay anything or paid very little. Most people paid between several hundred dollars up to a couple of thousand and they got a lot of bang for their buck. I was very proud of that program, and of being able to pay all my faculty, every single one of whom was a volunteer and didn’t expect payment. We also took Spotlight on Opera online that year. We were one of the only summer programs that didn’t cancel. It taught me very important lessons about being able to pivot. and how to do so while offering value and integrity.

After the lockdown ended, I took a full-time job as a marketing manager at an opera company, and in fewer than three years was offered the Director of Marketing and Communications position at Tulsa Opera, where I currently am. Spotlight on Opera is still a very important part of my life and we have big plans a-brewin’.. And while I’ve pivoted away from much professional performance, recently I was hired to make my company debut at Orlando Opera, so there’s life in the ol’ vocal cords yet. I’m very excited to return to the stage.

Opera is my passion and my profession. I love advocating for the art form, educating emerging artists, and creating opportunities for others. The performing arts industry is still very much struggling to find its feet in the post-COVID world, and I am absolutely thrilled to be part of creating those solutions. One thing that hasn’t changed: I’m a Renaissance women who’s up for anything and everything. I guess you could call that my brand.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I don’t know if they were the most impactful, but if forced to choose only three important qualities, I’d choose curiosity, compassion, and courage.

Curiosity is a vital and often overlooked quality for any aspiring leader. You must be passionately curious about your chosen field. You have to have a deep drive to immerse yourself in rabbit hole after rabbit hole, finding fascination in tiny obscure details as well as in the big picture. You must constantly ask yourself “Why? What does that do? Is it working? Is there a better way? What happens if I …?” and a thousand other questions. You have to love research, learning, and figuring out how to put it all together in new ways. You have to be an explorer.

It’s also critical to approach people with curiosity, especially those who you are entrusted with leading. You must understand their values, their strengths and weaknesses, their burdens, their personalities, their motivations. You will never be sorry if you approach people and situations with questions before assumptions.

Compassion makes life worth living. Its absence makes the world miserable. You can be driven, practical, no-nonsense, high-achieving, and still strive to accomplish everything through a lens of compassion. Not only will you be a better human and a better leader, not only will everyone around you be happier, but you will all be more productive, more loyal, more efficient, and more fulfilled in your work and your life. Compassion is moral and it’s also good business.

Last but not least, it takes courage to put yourself and your dreams out in the world. It takes courage to be willing to fail, and you have to be willing to fail many times before you succeed. The world at large is very impatient and contemptuous of what it perceives as failure; it loves the illusion of instant success and talent over hard work. For me, the bottom line and what I teach to my students is this: only you get to define what success looks like for you and decide whether or not you’ve achieved it. Only you get to decide which of your dreams are worth pursuing. It takes courage to own those ideas and to quietly move on them, especially in the face of others who want to impose their definitions and judgements on you. But if you are acting on your dreams, no matter how slowly or how quietly, and no matter whether your dreams change halfway through the woods and you decide to take another path, the fact that you’re out there doing something counts as courage, and success. At least in my book.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am always open to collaborations from people with good souls and good ideas. Creativity and passion are what motivates me. If someone out there has a great idea about how to market opera, revolutionize the industry or arts education, or maybe something I never thought of but they think I’d be a good partner for, I’d love to hear from them. (That said, please don’t reach out to me to sell me something, ask for an audition, or try to get your libretto or composition heard. I can teach you how to go about doing that the right way, but I can’t make the connections for you.). You can reach me at [email protected].

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Headshot: Eric Joannes
Cindy as Baba the Turk in THE RAKE’S PROGRESS at the Princeton Festival, 2012. By David Newton Dunn.
The cast and faculty of Spotlight on Opera, 2020. By Eric Joannes.
The cast of Woman rehearses at Spotlight on Opera, 2023. Conceived and directed by Cindy Sadler. Photo courtesy of Spotlight on Opera.

Suggest a Story: BoldJourney is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems,
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
Resilience
Where does your optimism come from?

Optimism is the invisible ingredient that powers so much of the incredible progress in society

Confidence
Stories of Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

Learning from one another is what BoldJourney is all about. Below, we’ve shared stories and

Resilience
The Power of Persistence: Overcoming Haters and Doubters

Having hates is an inevitable part of any bold journey – everyone who has made