We recently connected with Phil Circle and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Phil, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
That’s a wonderful question.
I think people are generally of the belief that resilience comes from just being strong or unshakable or something. I’m sure we can find these traits in many resilient people. And I’m sure many resilient people would like us to believe it’s all that. But, I think it’s a far more complex question than a couple adjectives can answer. And when we understand the complexity of it, we can begin to understand that we all have resiliency in us. Sometimes life gifts it to us.
For me, I can attest that it started with something I had no choice in. I was born two months premature in 1966. I came out and stopped breathing. They threw for 18 days to keep me alive. So, I certainly came out fighting. I imagine it was all survival instincts. Nobody knows what babies are thinking. But also, probably as a result of being under developed, my genetic predispositions were all laid bare. I had allergic asthma from the start. After I got home, according to my family (I’m the youngest, so they like to remind me), I would scream all night trying to breath. Our father left when I was 8 months old and our mom remarried when I was two. I was adopted by our new dad. All of these things were out of my control and later led to my having resilience.
From where I recall, about age 4, I can remember dealing with asthma attacks. When you’re that young, you don’t understand the life and death element of things. You just know you want to breath. So you fight to do so. Keep in mind, we didn’t have medications for asthma at the time. You took cough syrup and sat in a steamed-up bathroom to try and loosen any congestion. So, this is one factor that taught me. I also didn’t like to sit still. I wanted to play like other kids. I took up soccer and ran a mile a day. Often this would put me in the hospital. That was depressing, but I would get out and do it again.
Another factor was being the youngest in a large family (6 kids) with two very active parents. My mom was a musician, writer and producer. So she also wasn’t available all the time. We were generally an active and dynamic group of siblings. There wasn’t much coddling going on and I was often left to my own devices. This isn’t a complaint. I actually liked that. It encouraged my creativity. But I also learned to fend for myself. We were a very fortunate family in many ways. One of them was how we all were inadvertently given these traits by our circumstances.
When I reached my teenage years, I had a remarkably good relationship with my dad. I was an especially rebellious kid and fought relentlessly with my mom. I was regularly in trouble at school and was nearly expelled. But in my junior year of high school, they found a great program for me with just 6-8 students in a classroom. I was able to dive deep with the teachers. You see, I was often just bored. I was so used to the dynamic household I lived in. For good and bad. After that, I thrived in school. While I didn’t realize it at the time, my screams for attention at my school of 4000 students, got noticed. Resilience.
As I finished up high school, I remember talking to my dad about the death of his first wife. He had two kids with her, my sister and brother, and had to bring home huge sums of money every week for his dying wife’s care. This is the man who lived through an abusive childhood in poverty during the Great Depression and then toured the world in the army during WWII. To follow that with his wife getting terminal cancer seemed impossible to survive. And he was a cheerful and popular guy.
“How did you manage it, Pops?” I asked him.
He said one word, “Mozart.”
He knew the hardships Mozart had endured while composing some of the most uplifting classical music ever written.
Awhile later, I overheard my dad saying to my oldest brother,
“It doesn’t occur to Phil that he can’t do something. You can’t teach that.”
Little did he know, you can. I learned it from watching him. I learned it from the teachers that believed in me when nobody else did. I learned it from the unforeseen circumstances in my life. I learned it from being given a simple choice, black and white, live or die, from my health issues.
When we let it, life teaches us how to be resilient.
After I nearly died from respiratory failure for the third time, I was filled with a sense of purpose. I didn’t know what my purpose was. I just felt strongly that I had one. And when we can anchor ourselves in that, we find our strength. We find our work ethic. We find our energy. We seek and find clarity, which is itself a form of power. All of these lead to resilience.
Lastly, when we give ourselves no outs, we win. How do we win? Keep moving forward. Let your life pull you to your destination. Trust your life. It’s a great teacher.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve talked a lot lately about my school, Phil Circle Music, and I want to touch on that. But I’m also going to share a little more about me as a musician, if that’s ok.
I’ve been a working musician for 35 years. One of the key things that’s kept my career alive through all the changes in the music industry during this time, has been belief in my value as an artist.
Before it was the norm, I was managing my own music career. I created a record label to make it look like I was legit. Now that label serves a few other artists. I take no money from them. It’s a service I provide as an extension of my music school. My school focuses on adults and I’ve found a method that really serves the individual artist’s needs. This has won me awards and fantastic reviews, for which I grateful.
All of this, to continue the theme of letting life teach us, came as a result of my seeing openings I could walk through. Instead of following the same path that everyone was routinely complaining about, I found my own.
Because I’ve always had widely varying musical tastes, I also write songs in a wide range of genres. I knew when I started out, in 1989, there was no label on the planet that would sign me. So I looked for ways to do it myself. It was more work. It was scary. It was often overwhelming. But I felt so strongly that music was the place I should be, that I would just keep looking for ways to make things happen.
When I was given a chance to teach music at a private school at a public housing complex in Chicago, I jumped at it. I didn’t know anything about teaching. They hired me out of desperation. But I promptly went about learning what I needed. I got my degree in music composition and performance. While in college, I was mentored by the founder of the music department. That opened doors. For all my core classes, I looked for connections to music. That opened windows. I performed relentlessly. That opened my skill sets.
Gradually, I began to be recognized for what I was doing. I used that to encourage others to do the same, especially my students. Nowadays, it’s a big part of my teaching method to work with the whole artist, the whole person. I want students to understand how deeply connected all the facets of their lives are with their art. There is no separation.
Through all this time, I’ve had multiple line-ups of bands backing me up, I’ve toured the country from behind the wheel of my Honda Civic, I’ve produced about 100 recorded original songs, and I continue to explore new musical ideas. Every day, I pick up my guitar with an open heart and start playing. Every day, I work my voice into new songs.
Music and life being inseparable, when we let either one follow the path of strongest instinct and recognize resistance as a point where change and growth happens, we keep growing.
I’m working with a studio band of top L.A. artists right now. We’re composing, arranging and recording for multiple outlets, including film. I’m continuing to write and perform on my own. And my schools in both Chicago and Los Angeles are adding mini classes to our curriculum. These are designed for small numbers of students and run for only 3-6 weeks, focusing on very specific areas of music training.
I’m always excited about my work. One of my top goals is to get everyone I coach to the point where they can feel the same way. Where they can enjoy music as much as I do. It’s a terrific way to live.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Since we’ve talked about resilience, let’s just put that one out front.
If I were to choose a couple more, I’d go with adaptability and self-awareness.
Adaptability includes creativity. Creativity and adaptability require self-awareness. All of these will propel you towards purpose and resilience.
How can we continue to improve on these? Well, they sort of speak for themselves, but let me add this one, big thing I haven’t mentioned yet.
We absolutely need to have people we can trust who will be there with us and for us, and for whom we can also offer support.
I’ve found myself repeating this little breakdown a lot lately. It applies to every area of life where people working and living together are involved. So unless you live off the grid in a shack in the mountains, in which case you’re not gonna see this, it applies to you.
Humans have these three basic stages of development. Dependence, independence, and interdependence. First, we’re dependent. Others care for us. Then we assert our independence and find our self-identity. That’s where a whole lot of people stop. But there’s one more stage that we need to embrace: Interdependence. We are all connected. I’ve found in so many ways, that when I’m helping others succeed or overcome or grow, I’m happier myself. Other peoples’ well being isn’t something we can give them. But our support in their journeys is easy to give. We just stand there next to them, walk alongside them, lift them up from the dirt, remind them they can do it. Cause and effect being what it is, we’ll receive the same.
Build your ecosystem of work and life and you’ll have that balance you’re looking for. People and purpose may lead you there.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
I’ve been in Los Angeles for 15 months. I knew a handful of people when I arrived. I had no money to speak of. My wife’s an actor with a bookkeeping business. I wanted to keep my school in Chicago open. When I arrived in August of 2022, I needed a hip replacement surgery right away.
All that.
But I’ve been doing what I know always works. I’ve been continuing to connect with people. I don’t meet them and go, “Hey, wanna take lessons?” or “Hire me to play a house concert!” I just begin to build the basic human bonds we all crave.
As a music coach, even if I had more money in my budget for advertising, musicians hate to be advertised to. So, my team of teachers in Chicago and L.A. just continue to connect with people one-on-one or through small gatherings, and the word spreads very naturally. This seems like the long way, but actual bonds of friendship or even just acquaintance, are far stronger than anything an ad can deliver. As a result, our students trust us. We all succeed.
That same trust can be extended by me. The studio band I’m working was put together by a producer that pulled us all together with a seemingly random day at the studio. It wasn’t an official paid session and none of us knew what we were there for. We hadn’t even met each other, except the drummer and me. But we all trusted this producer.
What happened felt magical. In two hours we’d written a great song with a wonderful message. Now we’re almost done with producing it. And we’re official. We’re being hired for all kinds of studio work and even have a live event coming up.
I keep learning to trust myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://philcircle.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/philcirclemusic
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/philcirclemusic
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/philcircle
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/philcircle
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@philcircle
Image Credits
Craig Cochrane Chris at GoGee Megan Corse
