It's another Micro Action Monday on Studio Class.

Hi divas. We're back with another Micro Action Monday. We are picking up this week where we left off with last week's episode. So if you haven't heard that one, go back and check it out. But I'm not going to read the advice letter request one more time, but I am just going to kind of quickly allude to it.

So these three weeks, these three episodes, we're talking about some prompts that came from an advice column in Antigravity, which is a New Orleans alt-weekly paper. The advice column is called Our Lady of Good Counsel. And this answer is coming from Danielle Nelson, who is a practicing therapist and licensed clinical social worker. And Danielle has some really wonderful thoughts in response to this request for advice that was about, you know, when friend groups kind of implode and that desire to hermit yourself and not put yourself out there and be vulnerable. And while it's not explicitly about music, there were just so many parallels in this to good communication in ensembles and our relationships with each other in musical groups that I couldn't help but using this as the basis, or the infrastructure, for a few of our Micro Action Monday episodes.

So I'm going to jump into the second part of Danielle's response. And here we go.

I'd like to gently push back on whether or not the implosions came out of nowhere, quote unquote. I'm not saying you missed red flags or caused the collapse. Far from it. I'm saying groups rarely combust spontaneously. Rifts and tensions accumulate quietly. Conflict avoidance, uneven emotional investment, romantic entanglements, unresolved resentments. Usually by the time the explosion happens, everyone has been secretly smelling smoke for months.

This brings me to the question within your question. Am I doing something wrong? Probably not in the catastrophic way your brain might be telling you, but there is something worth examining here. If you've traditionally been in one or two person friendships, larger community dynamics can be emotionally disorienting, as the rules are different. Dyads tend toward clarity and directness. Groups run on ambiguity. People perform different versions of each other depending on who is present. Alliances shift. Some people want emotional intimacy. Some just want proximity, entertainment, or somewhere to be on a Friday night.

I suspect one aspect of your pain comes from entering a community with expectations for intimate friendship. And why wouldn't you? You wanted solidarity and mutual care. You wanted something durable. But for some, that might not have been the case.

There's another thing I want to say, and I mean this lovingly. The impulse to hermit might feel right, but it will lie to you. Isolation almost always markets itself as peace. I'm going to read that one more time. Isolation almost always markets itself as peace. It says, "Look how calm it is here. You can't be betrayed if you can't be reached." And for a while that can seem regulating, especially after relational chaos. Your nervous system wants fewer variables, fewer disappointments, and group chats where someone passive aggressively hearts the wrong comment and leaves everyone wondering what they've missed.

Okay, so I'm going to pause Danielle's response there to talk about this for a second, because I think there are two really important things that are happening in this section of their response.

And one of them is about how group size changes communication. So this is directly connected to ensembles, or working in groups to achieve creative goals. And I think this is so important, because as a group grows, the number of relationships in it grows much faster than the number of people. A duo has exactly one relationship to manage. A trio has three. A quartet has six. Add a fifth person, you're at ten. The math isn't linear. It's, you know, it's what? Exponential, combinatorial, I don't know, I'm not great at math, sorry.

So that's really the root of everything that feels different about ensemble communication at different sizes. So this is where the meat of our Micro Action Monday is. So your microaction for today is to think about what types, or what sizes, of ensembles you're in in a creative context. Are you in a duo? Are you in a trio? Are you part of an ensemble? And I want you to think about what communication tools, or what communication frameworks, are really important to know.

So let's run through a couple of these. First, dyads, as Danielle says, or duos in our case. This is only one channel of communication. Nothing is getting triangulated. Nothing's getting relayed. And disagreements, or differences of opinion, are immediate and personal. There's literally no majority to appeal to, no third party. So you have to just figure it out together. So trust and rapport are everything here, because there's nowhere to hide and no one else comes to mediate.

So this means that the benefit of a duo is that everything's highly responsive, and things can move more quickly, because you only have to manage two inputs of information. Whatever you decide together, that is what happens. Coordination only has to happen in one direction, and information from outside the duo is considered and regarded just by those two folks that are in it.

Trios are where the first appearance of alliances can really show up. Two people can side against, or align with, the third, even unintentionally. This is a big part. You may not be thinking that you're doing any of this intentionally, but it absolutely shows up in a trio or larger. A trio introduces the possibility of being outvoted, or being the odd one out. If you're starting a trio, it's really good to keep these things in mind. If you personally are not comfortable with being the odd one out, that might be a reason to think a little bit more about the shape of the ensemble that you're creating. And a trio is really great because it's small enough to feel intimate, and large enough that you can have that split vote of two against one.

Quartets are where communication starts requiring more explicit structure. You typically start to identify a lead voice for certain decisions, or rotating who raises issues or gets to decide on an issue. Even if this is subconscious, even if you haven't said it out loud, most ensembles of this size start to default to a lead voice. Subgroups can also become a very natural tendency, especially in a quartet — you might get two and two, and you see those alliances that are not necessarily negative. We're not talking about Survivor here, where it's like we're creating alliances and voting people off. We can also think about this as alignments — two people in the quartet align on a certain value, and two more people in the quartet have a different perspective on it. Totally fine, for better or for worse. It just happens.

This is where the ensemble starts to need agreed-upon norms. Who gets to call rehearsal, or who decides what our rehearsal process is, how do we resolve a two-two split, rather than relying on personality alone in a quartet. And honestly, heading back to duos and trios, this is still really useful information to create some "if this, then this" in your ensemble communications. But especially at quartets and larger, we're starting to think about who gets to vote, what happens when there's a tie, does anybody's vote have a stronger weight because of the role that they have in the quartet or in the administrative structure, any of that kind of stuff. These are just important things to talk through together.

As you get into larger ensembles, this direct peer-to-peer communication becomes slightly impractical, depending on how big it is. Then coordination starts to shift to hierarchy — a conductor, section leaders, a manager — or to formalized systems. You've decided as a group what the rehearsal protocols are. You've decided how to do written feedback, or you've decided what a voting process is for making decisions.

The individual voice perhaps starts to diminish, or people self-select into groups of "this is my topic to weigh in on, I have a vested interest in this particular topic," or "I'll defer, my perspective on this does not need to be the driving force behind this conversation."

Honestly, the "who's the mayor of the room" dynamic from your infrastructure episode really shows up here. Knowing who the mayor is, is a really useful thing to know, even if it's just in your own head — okay, who does the group shift to? At my home right now we are doing a watch of the show Community, which is such a great distillation of group friendship dynamics, or group ensemble dynamics, that kind of stuff, and you can see based on people's body language who they turn to when they're trying to make decisions on something. We start to understand whose vote has weight, and that can lead to some sticky situations. It can lead to some hurt feelings sometimes, if we are not honest about those things, or if people feel like they're not being heard, or they don't get to have as much authority in the space as someone else.

So these are actually important conversations to have within the group, and it is not unkind to talk through and designate leaders of your group, or people who get to be certain decision makers based on their knowledge or their experience with a certain topic. That's okay. Clarity is kindness here.

So what I want you to think about here, your Micro Action Monday, is really about: what size of an ensemble am I participating in? Maybe I'm in a bunch of different things. Maybe I'm in a bunch of different structures. And how does communication work here? Are there some common pitfalls that we're experiencing, based sheerly on the number of people that are involved, and some ambiguity around group communication? Could we make that easier to deal with by coming up with protocols, or some "if this, then this," like I said? So it doesn't hurt to just kind of pull back the veil a little bit and look at how your group talks to each other. How do we make decisions? How do we communicate important information with each other? And then see if there are any kind of regularly occurring pitfalls. Can you solve that by understanding how the group functions and wants to make decisions together?

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That's the first part, and that's really the meat and potatoes of this Micro Action Monday. But I do really want to point out the other part that Danielle writes here, which is the "isolation almost always markets itself as peace." The "look how calm it is here, you can't be betrayed if you can't be reached." And I'm taking this part in a slightly different direction. We were just talking about ensemble communication. But this part just really spoke to me about — yes, we're going to go through difficult ensemble dynamics, we're going to go through difficult relationships in music, you're going to have a lot of different relationships, and different types of relationships, that go really well in your musical or creative life. You're going to have a lot of relationships that get really weird in a hurry, and that's something you won't know until you're in it. You might have a collaborative relationship that completely implodes. You might have an ensemble that implodes. And it's okay. It's going to happen. I'm hoping that you have enough self-awareness together that you're able to move through those difficult or challenging situations without perpetuating harm, or creating harm, or self-sacrificing in a negative way for yourself.

But this sense of the impulse to hermit, because you've had maybe a difficult collaborative relationship, or a collaborative relationship that completely fell apart — I get it. I do. It happens. But it doesn't mean that you need to self-isolate, or stop putting yourself out there for future collaborations, just because that one went completely sideways or off the rails. You've learned a lot from perhaps your own involvement in those challenging situations, what you might have seen coming along the way. Remember, Danielle wrote that groups rarely combust spontaneously, right there. You can be kind of keeping an eye out for some rifts or tensions that are accumulating in your collaborative relationships.

And again, coming back to this idea of — if you've gone through something challenging and you want to hermit, you want to kind of isolate yourself from your creative community, take a moment and honor that your nervous system just wants fewer variables, wants fewer instances of risk. I mean, we get that, everybody has that. But it's worth it to realize that, yes, sometimes it does not go according to plan. Sometimes it's not exactly what you hoped for, but it's important to put yourself back out there. Try again. Have a coffee meeting to think about new collaborative relationships. Go into it asking each other questions. Talk about these types of communication styles. See if you can be clear with each other earlier in the process about the things that you like, or the things that you don't like, what your preferences are in working together, so that you can have good, communicative, collaborative relationships.

So with that, divas, before I go on and on and on with all of this information, I just want you to come back to good ensemble communications. And if you've gone through some challenging experiences, honor that your nervous system just wants a little bit of peace, and say, "It's okay, I'm going to take care of you while putting myself out there again."

Okay, with that, divas, stay sparkly inside and out, and I'll catch you next week. Bye.

Thanks for joining me for Micro Action Monday. Again, I'm Megan Ihnen, and you can find me on all the socials at @mezzoihnen. That's I-H-N-E-N. Did you know that Studio Class is part of The Sybaritic Singer? It is. And if you liked this episode, you're going to love my 29 Days to Diva series — that's on sybariticsinger.com. And if you liked this episode, will you please consider leaving us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts? Thanks, it means a lot to me.