I have a new model....

Until her death, and the flurry of all but panegyric obituaries, I had never heard of this woman, Mary Berry, convert, academic, musician -- what a role model! what a heroic, yes, heroic role she played!
Her life (putting aside the nun part ;oP) is what I should aspire to.
I've got to find more ways to inspire and motivate my singers. (Last night, perhaps because I was dropping, and my cords feeling as if they were in shreds, choir rehearsal was sensational. We made real progress, we made real music, and I think, I THINK they were happy... no complaints about the Gregorian verses of Ecce Panis which we will alternate with verses from that motet, no whining about too much new music, none of the near-refusal to exert themselves a little that I sometimes get from a few, a very few of them.)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23661315-16947,00.html

Mary Berry
Musicologist and nun. Born June 29, 1917. Died May 1, aged 90.
MUSICOLOGIST, nun and don of the University of Cambridge, Mary Berry was highly influential in reviving Gregorian chant in Britain and abroad. Through the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge she promoted the teaching, study and performance of Gregorian liturgical music within a 2000-year-old tradition of Christian song and, after the sweeping changes generated by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, she preserved the chant and kept it alive when the old certainties were falling all around her. ...
Devout and erudite, Berry radiated a joyful and sunny blessing, occasionally interspersed with crisp commands if singers hit a wrong note. There were no concessions to ignorance - either of the chant or the liturgy - but her bubbling humour leavened long hours of choir practice.
With a fund of interesting and mildly scurrilous anecdotes delivered with a twinkle in her eye, she was fortunate to attract many fine cantors to sing at festivals and record CDs on the Herald label.