Strengthening your voice is a lifelong journey, but when you’re trying to learn something new – a technique, a piece of music – it can feel especially long and arduous. Changing old habits of using your voice can leave you feeling like you don’t know anything at all anymore! But take heart. Every one of us who wants to use our voice more fully has to deal with this untethered feeling once in a while. Here are some techniques you can use to feel less alone, and more certain about the progress that (I promise) you’re making.
Michèle Voillequé is a singer and a voice teacher living in Berkeley, California.
Episode 13, Why Should I Look In The Mirror??
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Our music is thanks to Katya and Ada.
The show is edited by K.O. Myers at Particulate Media.
TRANSCRIPT
Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you.
A student recently said at the beginning of a lesson, “I feel like I don’t know how to sing anymore! I want to know – am I doing this right?? I don’t know what I’m doing.”
And I want to talk about that today because this is so common.
This is exactly the process of changing an old habit, of stepping away from an old way of doing something and trying a different way. And even when you can feel that the new way is better, that the new way is easier, the new way is less tiring, it doesn’t make it any easier to learn.
I mean, at some point when we’re learning to do something new and it’s easier on the body, there are endorphins that kick in. Like, the body feels better, and that kind of, I think, helps us remember how to do it. Because we have such a good feeling doing something in this new way that we build those neural pathways a little bit faster, because the whole system is experiencing ease and joy.
There is an endorphin payoff, but it takes a while to get there, especially if you’ve been doing something one way for a long time. Like, if this is the way that you’ve sung your whole life and now you’re taking voice lessons for the first time or you’re trying to change that way of doing something for the first time and say you’re, in your 30s – it’s gonna take more than a couple of tries to do it differently.
You can’t overwrite years of doing something with, you know, a couple of attempts. It takes a lot of iterations, a lot of attempts, a lot of tries to begin to form a new habit and to feel competent in that new way of doing something.
And that journey from the old way to the new way for me in my own life has felt more than once like crossing a desert. Like, it is not fun to be really clear that the old way doesn’t work, but not sure how to do it the new way all the time, especially when I would go home.
Like, I could do things in my lessons, but then I would go home and I would try to do it the new way, and I felt like I would just fall on my face.
And, that’s part of it. That’s part of the process. And it’s also part of the process, this wanting to know, “Am I doing it right?” Not just the, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t feel like I don’t know how to sing anymore,” but, “Am I doing it right? I really want to know if I’m doing it right.”
Because building a new habit is taking time and effort and mental resources. And that, “Am I doing it right?” is a totally understandable question from your brain. Like, “Are we just wasting our time here? because I don’t want to spend all of this energy if it’s just gonna be wrong.”
So it’s not enough to want to change the habit – I want to change the habit perfectly. I want an immediate payoff because this feels hard. And when things feel hard, we want to know that they’re worth it.
It’s hard to have faith when you’re crossing the desert, that there is water coming. You’re going to get to drinking water. You’re going to get to food. You’re going to get to community. You’re not going to be stuck out here all alone forever.
So this, “I feel like I don’t know how to sing anymore. I want to know if I’m doing it right,” this is a profoundly human experience that one of my students is having right now. And probably one that many of my students are going to have sooner or later because we all do.
I myself had this experience this week, this very week, about my breathing, about my breath support for singing.
I just sang, a big thing, a concert aria by Mozart, uh, a little over a week ago. I had the best time. This piece is like 11 minutes long, with almost a piano concerto kind of piano accompaniment. It’s really, this concert aria is really a duet between the soprano and the piano, and then there’s a chamber orchestra, too.
So it’s a long thing. It’s a big thing. And it was so fun. And I grew a lot as a singer and I think also as a person in the process of learning this piece of music. And I feel really proud of myself.
And I go to my lesson this week and we’re working on some new things and we start talking about breath support and all of a sudden, I have no idea where I feel my breath support in my body.
I mean, I know what I tell my students. I know how I teach breath support to other people. I know I can help other people pretty effectively with their own breath support. And there I am standing in my lesson and I’m like, “I have no idea what’s going on in my body. I can’t feel it. I don’t feel it in the way that I used to.”
Well, I don’t feel it in the way that I used to because I’m stronger now. But clearly, because this note isn’t sounding the way that I want it to, and it’s pretty clearly a support thing, I need to figure out how to use my body differently to support this note. And I’m just coming up blank in my brain.
Like, I can’t feel what I’m doing. And very much like my student who says, “I feel like I don’t know how to sing anymore,” I don’t know how to describe my own system of breath support.
And because I’ve crossed several of these deserts in my life, I’m a little bit more entertained by this experience right now than my student is by her experience, right?
She’s not enjoying, at least the last time we saw each other, she was not enjoying this desert very much. So I hope this is helpful to sort of normalize the process of changing a habit, of learning how to do something differently.
And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about, if you’re in this place where you feel like you don’t know how to sing anymore, how you can know whether you’re doing it right, even before you know you’re doing it right.
One of the ways you can know you’re doing something right when you’re singing or you’re speaking is, do you feel nothing in your throat? Sure, if you put your hand on the front of your throat and you say or speak, you will feel a piece of cartilage vibrate. You’ll feel vibration there. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about using your singing or speaking voice and not feeling any pressure in your throat, not feeling any strain, any discomfort. It doesn’t hurt. but even more than it doesn’t hurt, that it feels effortless. Whatever’s going on, there’s not effort in the throat. That’s a big one.
Other ways you can know you’re doing it right: is there ease in your shoulders? your neck? in your upper body? are you bracing yourself or do you feel loose? Do you feel loose like a tennis player, you know, do you feel easy in your upper body?
If your neck and shoulders are really tense, that is definitely not helping. So that’s, something to look at and look for.
One of the ways to test the tension in your neck, is to, while you’re singing and speaking, to turn your head slowly from side to side.
If you’ve really found an ease in your neck with your vocal production, you should be able to turn your head from side to side and it doesn’t affect the sound. It doesn’t affect the pitch. It doesn’t affect the tone, that your neck is free. You don’t have to turn your head very quickly.
And you may notice that sometimes, like through some of that 180 degree turn, right, from looking over your left shoulder to looking over your right shoulder, you might notice that there’s a part of that that feels really easy and part of it doesn’t, and that tells you something.
“Okay, my neck is, something’s a little sticky here.”
And how you can work on that sticky bit, if you have one, is simply approach that point where it feels not so free, and then just gently nod your head there, and then move away. Turn your head in the opposite direction.
And then come back and see if it still feels sticky or stuck, and nod your head again, just two or three times, really gently, really small. Doesn’t have to be a big movement of your head, and see if that doesn’t help.
One of the big habits that I see my students working on is releasing tension in their face as they’re singing or speaking. There’s a tendency to get really smiley and to have the cheeks be super active, and that is really tiring on the voice.
So, placing your hands on your face so that you can’t do that, you can’t be smiling – and you might hear, I’m putting my hands on my face right now, you might be able to hear how that’s changing the tone a little, my voice is getting a little squishy – and practice using your voice that way, with your hands on your face.
And then, use a mirror, sing or speak in front of a mirror and see if you can relax your face there without touching your face.
So, touching your face to relax and then try using your voice without touching your face but with a mirror to show you if your face is relaxed or not.
And for singing, because we’re singing, we get to have faces that are way more relaxed than speakers. So you really want to look for a very loose jaw, a very slack jaw, a more open mouth than normal, and there’s no need to smile when you sing. In fact, it’s usually not a good idea to be smiling and singing at the same time.
I have another podcast about using the mirror to help you make changes, and I’ll put that in the show notes.
So these are all physical ways of knowing if you’re doing it “right,” right in quotation marks. but you can also tell by listening, by the sound you’re making: is it clear? is it resonant? is it louder without extra effort?
And here’s probably the best one: does your voice sound unfamiliar to you? If you sound unfamiliar to yourself, and nothing is hurting, and it feels effortless, you’re definitely on the right track.
Now, it can be really hard when you sound unfamiliar to yourself to accept that that could be a good thing.
I want to tell you, it is a good thing.
Your brain is going to tell you, “Danger! Danger! Who is this? What is that? That’s freaky. I don’t want to sound like that. I don’t know what that was, but I don’t like it. It’s no good.”
When we’re really starting to make progress with our voices, that is often the very first message we get from our brains about the sounds we’re making is that they’re wrong and we don’t know why. It’s just a bad idea. And it’s exactly because the sounds we’re making are unfamiliar.
Remember that our voice is our survival mechanism. It’s our primary way of us keeping ourselves safe in the world. And it’s really tied into our sense of identity and what it is to be “me.” How I sound has a lot to do with who I think I am. And when we start messing with that, when we start working on that, when we start sounding different than we’ve always sounded, than we’ve ever sounded before, the brain gets really scared.
This is when it’s really great to have a voice teacher who can give you feedback about these sounds that you’re making and let you know that they’re good, and you’re safe, and that this actually is progress. We need that reassurance from a neutral party outside of our heads to tell us that we’re, we’re fine, we’re good, and we’re making progress.
You’re not weak if you need that. You’re a person if you need that, and you need that.
Being in the desert between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things is frustrating, it’s hard, it can be excruciating. And you can feel so dumb, you can feel so incompetent, you can feel so lost. This is not a fun place to be. But I want you to know that it is a place that we all go through.
If you’re really going to make a significant change in how you’re using your body to sing or speak, you’re going to have periods of time where you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. And I want you to know that’s really normal.
And even when you’re in the desert, there are ways to know that you’re not lost, that you are making progress. and there’s help available.
Please reach out to me or to another voice person. Thank you so much for listening.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.
That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.
Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.