Explore next steps to improve your mental health. 
James Lavino’s first big break came by way of Winnie the Pooh.
Spending his 20s in New York (circa the late 1990s), Lavino found himself composing scores for his friends’ documentary films and dipping his hand in whatever creative endeavors came his way—including editing at the literary magazine “The Paris Review.”
Lavino had earned an undergraduate degree in English at Boston University and a master’s at Yale, but around this time, the lead singer in a band Lavino played in landed a gig working on a kid’s television program for Disney called “The Book of Pooh.” It changed everything.
“Somehow he convinced them to let us write a few songs for the show,” Lavino says. “So my first experience of really getting paid to do music was writing a song for Tigger to sing to Piglet about how they were friends to the end.”
From that point forward, Lavino was all-in on music, dedicating himself to making it as a composer. From writing choral and concert music, to scoring Emmy- and Oscar-nominated productions, it was a career path he never knew was possible. Even as a kid growing up in Society Hill, Philadelphia, where he sang in the renowned St. Peter’s Choir of Men and Boys (which now welcomes all genders), Lavino never dreamed that music would one day help support his family.
For nearly two decades Lavino experienced the full spectrum of what it meant to work in the arts, as a freelance professional. The highs were very high, like when he sat in a candle-lit pew in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve, listening to the choir perform one of his works—a moment that gave him goosebumps. Or when he wrote the music for the dedication ceremony of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan.
“Just to be sitting in my house with CNN on, watching [former President Barack] Obama talking with my music playing, that really felt sort of surreal, but also very, very gratifying,” Lavino says.
A Turning Point: Composing a New Career
As every self-employed creative knows, working independently also comes with challenges. Long work days are spent mostly in solitude. And fighting for fair compensation for every potential contract can become tedious and, at times, demoralizing, Lavino says.
“I was in my house all the time by myself, not able to control when I would work or how much I would earn,” Lavino says. “Music had been this great source of connection, but now had become this kind of prison, this agent of isolation in my life.”
As he approached his mid-40s, Lavino felt less enamored with his career each day and started considering what else he might want to do. His wife had repeatedly suggested that he look into becoming a music therapist—a mental health professional who uses music as a tool in interventions and treatments.
As it turned out, Drexel University, located near Lavino’s Philadelphia home, had a master’s degree program for music therapy. Within the first few weeks of enrolling, he found himself redefining his relationship with music and what it could do to help others.
“Music was no longer this commodity, this thing to be perfected and then evaluated and criticized,” Lavino says. “It became a way of, again, connecting to people. And that was a big thing for me.”
Combining in-person talk therapy at Thriveworks with musical interventions has led to fulfilling outcomes for Lavino’s clients. He’s used it to help autistic children learn impulse control strategies, while others have been able to communicate more about themselves by choosing songs that they identify with. He also helped one man who was no longer able to travel, due to health complications, rewrite James Taylor’s “Carolina on My Mind” to include all the places his client wanted to visit, if only in his mind.
Each example has been compelling. Lavino recalls a women’s trauma group that sang together: One woman had been a singer all her life until her partner physically abused her and made fun of her voice. She hadn’t been able to sing again, up until that point.
“She said, ‘I feel safe enough in this group and with you all to do this. I’ve rediscovered this part of myself,’” Lavino says. “I mean, think about how powerful that is.”
4 Tips for Anyone Considering a Career Change
In his quest for a different career path, Lavino, too, rediscovered how he could leverage his love of music to feel more fulfilled. He recognizes that it sounds easier than it is. Deciding to make a transition to a new field is difficult. Then, actually following through on it presents another host of challenges.
He offers the following advice, based on his own experience:
1. Know when to go.
Most of us know when we’re not happy. It doesn’t just show up in our emotions and moods, but it often manifests in how our bodies feel too, Lavino says. If you can’t sleep or you find yourself not eating enough (or, alternatively, stress eating), think about why that is. Do you feel physical dread on Sunday nights, anticipating what Monday will bring?
“The body informs the mind, the mind influences the body,” Lavino says. “It’s one big system. And your body might be trying to tell you something.”
2. Ignore your younger self.
Lavino observes that most of us decide what we want “to be” when we’re about 22 years old. Then we wrap our identities in careers we chose before we knew much about ourselves—or how the world really works.
“If a 20-year-old walked into the room and gave me life advice, I wouldn’t necessarily dedicate myself to those ideas,” he says. “We kind of follow these scripts without really evaluating them.”
Lavino recommends thinking more critically of what you’re pursuing and why you’re forging on in a career that might not serve you anymore. He suggests doing so in a thoughtful evaluation of what you enjoy about your job and what is causing strife, then consider your options.
3. Work on other parts of yourself.
When we adopt our jobs as a big part of our identities, it is difficult to untangle ourselves, under any circumstance. Taking time to think about how to become a more complete person, who has wide-ranging interests and responsibilities like family, friends, and hobbies, puts career in perspective. Like the adage says, it’s what we do, not who we are.
“That makes it easier to say, ‘Yeah, I did this for a certain number of years, and now I want to try and do something else,” Lavino says. “Then it’s not giving up or failing.”
4. Embrace the challenges.
Not everyone has the resources to go back to graduate school in their forties or take time off to figure out what, exactly, comes next. But if you are going to make any kind of career shift, it’s going to present some scary moments, whether it’s sitting in class with students half your age or just not really knowing what you’re doing in those first months of a new job. You’ll get through those circumstances, Lavino says.
“I tried to model for my kids some of this stuff—that it’s OK to not know what you’re doing. It’s OK to be new and bad at something,” Lavino says.
These days, Lavino’s world is smaller. He doesn’t have a career that involves Los Angeles or television or the film industry. And he prefers it that way.
“It’s literally just me, ten feet away from another person, and just being there,” he says. “And I love that so much. It’s so much more meaningful than any of the baubles 20-year-old James was so desperate for.”
