Victoria Ricalde shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi Victoria, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: Have you ever been glad you didn’t act fast?
As a matter of fact, I’m quite intentionally taking my time with my next steps right now. This past spring, I completed ten years of teaching music with a local family-owned studio, Rojas School of Music. While I found it rewarding in a number of ways, I’ve decided to step away from teaching, at least for the time being, and that has given me the mental space to contemplate where I want to focus my energies next. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy, of course! But we’ll get to that.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m an intensely curious person who loves to learn new things and connect with new people. Also, I’m an artist who works in a variety of mediums—usually music, but I also write poetry and fiction, and can occasionally be found working on my junk journal at the local kava bar. Also, I’m an educator passionate about shaping a thriving, empathetic, community-centered, and culturally literate next generation. And, I’m an advocate for sustainability and earth care in my community. And, I’m a wife and dog mom! I’m passionate about a lot of things and they all inform my work.
Professionally, I am a performing artist active in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. As a multi-instrumentalist with degrees in both classical and jazz performance, I’m a bit of a musical chameleon—you can find me performing in a Bach cantata one weekend, a pit orchestra for a local theatre company the next, and a jazz jam the next. But my favorite performance experiences are when I get to share my original music with enthusiastic listeners. I currently have two albums out, both of which I wrote and produced myself: A Wilderness of Mirrors (2022), and Emotionally Healthy Spring Semester (2024). If you want to hear my work, search for “Victoria Ricalde” on your preferred streaming service. My latest release is a two-track feature on the album Denton by UNT’s Commercial Music Ensemble, the Zebras. Here’s my song “Wack-A-Mole” from that EP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65k2NPkZL8k
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
This is not a particularly unique take, but one of those events for me was the COVID-19 pandemic. As we know well, during those couple of years everybody had to stay in and do everything in isolation. It was a necessity at the time, of course, but unfortunately this self-reliant mentality has stubbornly clung on right up to today. I’m seeing people buying things they could easily borrow from their neighbors, using all kinds of delivery apps instead of going out to shop and eat, and regularly staying in to watch shows on streaming services instead of going out into the local community to engage with arts and entertainment. Now of course I have a stake in this because I am a musician and want people to go out and enjoy the arts so I can earn a living (haha). But beyond that, I think we need to get back to the idea of a real, in-person, connected community as a focal point of human life. We NEED that connection. Scientific studies show that there is a real impact on well-being from physical touch—don’t take my word for it though; run a web search and dig into it!
What fear has held you back the most in your life?
Oh, I have had many. The fear of not living up to my “potential,” whatever that means. The fear of being judged as not good enough by other artists—especially ones I look up to. The fear of making the wrong choices in my career and becoming trapped in an unfulfilling job. These all boil down to fear of failure, and what I have been painfully learning over the last year or so is that failure is an essential part of success. In fact frequently we learn more by failing than we do by succeeding. So I have been very slowly divesting myself of all my beliefs that failing at something means I am a failure as a person. Far from it—it only means I put myself out there. I tried. The book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff has been very helpful for me in this respect. The author suggests that if we treat the outcomes of our endeavors like results of an experiment, we can analyze them dispassionately, like a scientist, and decide to persist, pause, or pivot. I’ve been running a lot of tiny experiments in my life lately and it’s helped me shift from being results-oriented to process-oriented. Honestly, it’s so freeing.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
I think the people who are building the technologies that are shaping our lives today are very smart! But they are solving the wrong problems. We don’t need an AI that is going to write a thank-you note to Grandma. But we could use an AI to optimize the development of clean energy. We could use it to model the rollout of a food service industry infrastructure based on reusables. Unfortunately, intelligence does not always coincide with wisdom. It seems to me that the people in charge right now may be smart but not wise. (Some of them may not even be very smart either—oops, I said it!) I think that in order for our society to move in a direction we can all be happy about fifty plus years from now, we have to take a longer view and make different decisions than the ones we are making now. For more on this topic I highly recommend the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. (I also think people who aspire to be leaders should read more in general… stop me before I go on a tangent about books!)
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
This is a funny question because I think whatever I say here I should probably just do regardless. But I suppose my answer is that I would stop pausing at the end of the diving board to work up the nerve to jump. My tendency, my personality, is to carefully assess the situation before acting, but it might be quicker to fail and try again than to wait until favorable conditions happen to materialize. Now is the time for me to take some bold actions in service of the life I want to live and the impact I want to have. Whether I have five, ten, twenty, or fifty years left, there’s no time to lose.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.victoriaricalde.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victoria_ricalde/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victoriaricaldemusic/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@victoria_ricalde
Image Credits
Victoria Ricalde
