sarah carter

Sarah and Noah can't decide where to park their car. Tanya has begun tapping into a whole new audience for mediation.

This podcast - Homebuying... 123 - How to go from Creditworthy to Mortgage Qualified - tackles important topics for the first-time homebuyer such as: 

• The importance of credit – how does it factor into securing a mortgage?
• What are the factors that influence credit scores? 
• Saving for a down payment – what are some strategies for success?
• Shopping for a mortgage - how to evaluate lender choices? 
• What are some common mistakes first time home buyers should avoid? 

... and much more!

Guests on the program are Sarah Carter - Stand By Me Home Program Manager / Financial Coach, Traceé Taylor - Program Supervisor for Kent & Sussex, and Laura Gendreaux - Director of Financial Empowerment.

Stand By Me® provides Delawareans with a Personal Financial Coach and a toolkit to navigate the challenges leading to personal financial security. The Delaware Financial Empowerment Partnership (DFEP) is a joint venture of the State of Delaware and the United Way of Delaware working together to combine resources and to create and implement an innovative package of financial empowerment services. We are joined by a coalition of non-profit organizations, corporations, foundations and educational institutions.

Subscribe to the podcast here! 

0:59 - Cellist Laura Usiskin on perfectionism and the ways we compare ourselves to others.

2:41 - Pianist and scholar, Mina Yang, gives some advice on being grateful and why you don’t have to do music professionally to find value in it.

3:43 - Violinist, conductor, and scholar, Sean Wang, talks about the importance of being yourself and finding your unique artistic identity.

6:05 - Sarah Carter is a cellist, medical doctor and a former child prodigy herself. Here, she talks about why there’s always enough time to grow and explore.

7:50 - And finally, violist Celia Hatton, on taking up space, speaking up, and fighting systematic bias and racism. 

Thank you to all of my guests and a special "thank you" to YOU, the "Is it Recess Yet?" community. I’m really grateful to you for listening and I look forward to 2021 with more guests and opportunities for us to grow together.

Subscribe to the podcast here!

2:34 - Sarah talks about her resentment upon realizing she hadn't had a childhood.

3:34 - What Sarah's classical music training taught her and the skills that serve her in positive ways, every day.

7:35 - How classical music in the way that Sarah experienced it is creative but in a very narrow way. She shares her experience of trying to improvise on the cello for the first time. "The thought of improvising was so terrifying to me that I burst into tears."

8:50 -Sarah and I talk about why our current creative experiments have to be away from music. "In order for me to explore creativity, it has to have nothing to do with the cello at this moment in my life."

9:23 - Why the "expertise" we have in classical music makes it so difficult to experiment within music. The importance of cultivating creative courage by lowering the stakes.

10:02 - Sarah talks about what she's learned through her writing practice about the barriers of perfectionism.

10:55 - Her "obsession" with putting herself in uncomfortable situations to grow her creativity.

12:13 - Sarah and I bond over our experiences around improvising and the existential crisis of not knowing how to do it.

13:11 - Mike Block String Camp and how hard and ultimately rewarding that was for me.

14:11 - How the training Sarah and I received did not ask us what we thought, what we felt, and what we wanted to make.

14:55 - The rigid, black and white definitions of success in classical music and how these are antithetical to creativity.

15:16 - The classical music culture's seeming resistance to discussions around vulnerability, burnout, mental health issues, self-loathing, loneliness. The tribalism and fixed beliefs of the classical music culture. Sarah's depression and how it was centered around her experiences of joylessness and burnout.

18:32 - The complicated assumptions that committing to a classical musician's life means you must love it unconditionally.

19:51 - The misconceptions people have about why a highly skilled classical musician would leave a seemingly effortless and blissful career.

21:30 - Sarah's relationship to music now and how for a long time, she couldn't listen to classical music.

25:15 - The complicated expectations of utter devotion to our instruments and the lifestyle of a successful classical musician, as well.

26:11 - How doing things that may seem to divert our attention from our instruments can allow us to perform better by allowing us to see ourselves as separate from our performing personas.

27:50 - "The primal, deeply imbedded feeling that perfection equaled worthiness is the biggest struggle of my life." Evolving beyond the debilitating fear of imperfection.

29:34 - "What if I had done other things?" Sarah's realization in college that all she'd ever done was play the cello.

30:14 - Letting go of the "vice grip" of having to be a classical musician and how this allowed Sarah room to intentionally choose her creative path.

31:33 - Sarah shares the gifts of living in a small town.

33:39 - Sarah and I talk about the crisis of "time" that we both felt as prodigies with an "expiration date" and I share my feelings of terror when I turned twenty and felt "over the hill."

36:11 - Sarah mentions her dogs! :)

Subscribe to the podcast here!

8:37 - How Sarah became serious about the cello as small child and how she was carried along by the enthusiasm and pressure from adults.

10:23 - Sarah shares how her feelings of worthiness were tied to her ability to perform "perfectly."

11:30 - "The tragedy of perfection" and the high stakes of performance. How missing a shift or playing out of tune made Sarah feel that "all was lost."

14:04 - How our ability to perform well or poorly gets conflated with one's sense of self. "If I play badly, it means I'm a bad person."

15:08 - The paralyzing effects of perfectionism. How perfectionism blocks creativity and artistry.

16:28 - How the deep depression that Sarah experienced at the peak of her musical career instigated a soul-searching and the beginning of her career shift towards medicine. How she realized that she was separate from the cello and that she was more than her abilities on the cello.

21:14 - How the very strong pull for her to do something that was"100% her decision" led to her journey to medical school. The realization that she'd been living a life that was someone else's dream.

23:45 - I share how my career felt like a "freight train" that I'd gotten on and couldn't get off of because the stakes felt too high to leave.

25:11 - The importance of taking a fully independent step away from the "freight train." The importance of doing something for oneself.

26:49 - The "classical music machine" and how it overwhelms talented young people and their families. The weight of responsibility felt by young performers.

28:25 - The experiences of young performers in technically demanding endeavors (i.e. classical music, golf, gymnastics, ice skating, etc.) and the intersections of exceptional young performers and the Asian diaspora. (See: IIRY 7 - Dr. Mina Yang).

31:30 - How the narrowness and perfection and worry and the very rigid idea of what a successful life in classical music could look like steered Sarah towards medicine, where she could be on the "front lines of humanity." The challenges of going into medicine as a second career.

34:00 - How medical school was also a very regimented path, like classical music. Her doubts about medicine and whether she'd made a good decision.

35:10 - How she let go of exceptionalism and perfectionism in medicine because medicine is "too messy." How she had to accept that she was in medicine not because she was aiming for perfect but because this is really what she wanted to do.

35:52 - How going to medical school was hard and the challenges of pivoting from a performing arts career into the sciences.

36:18 - The realization that she'd jumped from one machine (classical music) to another machine (medicine).

36:40 - Going through an early mid-life crisis in her twenties. (See: IIRY 3 - Dr. Jeanne Bamberger "Growing up Prodigies: The Mid-Life Crisis")

38:50 - Sarah's slow pivot towards medicine. The pushback she felt from the "close-knit" and "challenging" community of classical music and the pain of losing friends and community. How people were upset by her leaving music and how she lost friends.

41:52 - How the "grayness and unpredictability of humanity" is what keeps Sarah motivated in medicine. How a loss of control has freed her from the psychological hangups that she developed from growing up as a classical music prodigy.

44:29 - How medical training taught Sarah to be less perfectionistic and to embrace vulnerability.

46:59 - Why it's hard to leave a career in classical music behind: "If my depression had been 10% less severe, I would not have switched careers." The guilt and shame of leaving classical music behind in part because of all the resources, family sacrifices, and investment of time and money and energy.

48:09 - The bias against leaving a career in classical music, even if you are miserable and struggling and how this creates challenges for people who to want to change careers. How changing careers can feel "not okay" and "radical."

49:37 - Re-exploring what creativity looks like and how classical music is not that creative.

50:32 - How a career change broadened Sarah's perspectives on creativity and on her own identity.