‘Singing is 80% confidence and I’ll teach you the rest,’ was the opening line from my teacher at my first singing lesson in 1987.
Great, I thought.
But what happens when the confidence goes?
Six years later, aged 21, I had a degree, contacts, a voice people liked, solo credits on albums, energy, drive and quiet ambition. I had been given encouragement, praise and a gentle push in the right direction from both a producer for Decca Records and from a former coach at the Royal Opera House. But there was one big problem: I didn’t think I was any good.
The further I got into my twenties, the more I was beating myself up for not being as perfect as I wanted to be and this quest for perfection and lack of self-belief was providing me with an excuse to never ‘put myself out there’ and never take a risk. And if you don’t put yourself out there and if you don’t take risks, you don’t get heard and you don’t improve. Something needed to change.
During this time, I taught French, German, English, English as a Foreign Language, Business English as a Foreign Language… I went to Italy to learn Italian. I worked in New York in a banking software company. I temped in London at a branding consultancy. And the irony was this: when I didn’t put so much pressure on myself, I excelled. I entered all these professions and foreign places with abandon and impressed the lot with my confidence and creative outlook on life. But, oh how ironic, I couldn’t find the belief to do the thing I truly cared about – to sing.
It wasn’t until the end of my twenties when even my singing teacher out in Paris was looking at me in an exasperated way – ‘I just need you to believe you’re good!’ – that I realised this ‘belief thing’ was in my own hands.
There was only one person who could change it, and that person was me.
I plonked my savings into a life coaching diploma, read every personal development book I could get my hands on and began to shift my thinking. I turned ‘I can’t’ into ‘I can’; I visualised the outcome of ideal scenarios to get the mind comfortable with what my version of success looked like; I stopped taking myself so seriously and hey presto, the seeds were sown for a life of learning, discovery and embracing challenge. That elusive and, dare I say it, destructive pursuit of perfectionism, slowly became a distant memory.
Oh boy was I set free! I had changed my thought process from, ‘No, I can’t do that!’ to ‘What if I could do that?’ That was all.
35 years after my first singing lesson, this is what I now believe: Singing is 80% mindset. And you are in control. Boom!
Photo credit: SiPhotography