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. 

Today’s podcast is the first in a series – I’m not sure how many episodes they’re going to be – but the first in a series on leading when you’re not in charge.

A question many of my choral singers ask me or that comes up in a lesson is, “What do I do when the people around me are not singing the right notes? I think I know the right note. I how my section is behind the conductor all the time.”

That’s a question about leadership, right? You’ve identified a problem. You wanna know how to help solve it, and you’re not in charge. You’re not the conductor, you’re not the section leader. A lot of choral singing boils down to herding cats.

But the question is a good one. “How can I be the best leading singer I can be, regardless of what else is going on?”

So that’s one way that leading when we’re not in charge comes up in my studio.

The other way is with folks who are not thinking about a singing environment at all, but just find themselves in life, in situations that they’re feeling called to step forward.

They’re feeling called to be a bigger, more powerful version of themselves. “How do I do that? How do I lead when it’s really just me? I’m not in charge of the project. I’m not the head of the company or the corporation. I’m not the one with the sign on the desk that says ‘The buck stops here.’ But I am in a system and I wanna be the best person I can be, the best version of myself. I want to lead. I want to show people how it can be better. And I’m not in charge.”

So that’s the impetus for this. And I’m going be speaking both to singers and to regular people, or to singers and to special people, however you wanna think about that.

What I have to say is good for everybody who is, who’s a human.

So, to get started, I wanted just to provide an overview, like how I’m thinking about it when we’re leading.

Being an effective leader boils down to really managing yourself in a number of areas, right? It means knowing your values and what’s within your reach, knowing your capacity, knowing your capability, knowing your skills.

It’s about being able to listen and hear where the gaps are, hear what’s going on in the world around you.

And it means remaining open to the world around you, not just simply putting your head, deciding it needs to be different, putting your head down and going, and the world be damned, but, listening carefully and continuing to observe and noticing the effect that you’re having or not having so that you can make adjustments.

And where I wanna start is with Stephen Colbert because he has a part of his show – it’s not every interview he does – but there are many interviews throughout the year where he sits somebody down and asks them to fill out the Colbert Questionnert.

This is a series of questions that allow a person to be “truly known.” When you’ve taken the Colbert Questionnert, you’ve allowed yourself to be “truly known.”

Of course, this is a comedian, right, so of course it’s not, you’re not really truly known, but a fun static interview form and lots of people have come, have run through it and I ran myself through it.

You can find my answers on my website, mvmusik.com, if you wanna read my answers to the Colbert Questionnert.

One question he asks, in particular, I think is really valuable for this as we’re considering, “how do you lead when you’re not in charge?” And that is, “Describe the rest of your life in five words.”

And there are, you can imagine, any number of ways to answer that question, but when we describe the rest of our life in five words, if you take the question seriously, it really tells you what’s important to you.

They can be a sentence or they can just be single words, your choice, but it really tells you about what you value, what you find important, what are you gonna spend the rest of your life doing, and how is it gonna be?

So it’s not the end of your life, it’s the rest of your life. 

I want to share a few examples of how different celebrities have answered the question.

Jodi Foster said, “Food. Movies. Skiing. Bed. Family.”

Mark Hamill said, “Staying in pajamas all day.”

Michelle Obama said, “Family, friends in the sun.”

Billie Eilish, “laughter, smiling, snuggling, eating, singing.”

Sigourney Weaver said, “Forest. Ocean. Garden. Family, friends, dog,” and she knew it was six and Stephen said that was okay.

And the last one I’ll share with you is Jon Batiste, who was Colbert’s band leader for quite a long time, and so he had the opportunity to watch this interview over and over and over and over again and to think about his answer. And his just, very simply, “Trying to change the world.”

I think you can hear in these examples what’s important to the people, and you can infer from what they said, what they value, what they find most important, what it means to be truly them. How are they gonna be happy? How do they feel most like themselves?

How do they feel authentic? How do they feel strong, committed. How do they know they’re doing the right thing?

And so I want this for you, too. I want you to sit with what are your five words? Describe the rest of your life in five words, and I’ll share with you mine: singing, teaching, loving, connecting dots.

And that’s honestly what I’m doing. It’s what I do now and it’s what I want to do, for the, yeah, the, that’s the rest of my life in five words.

And in there for myself, I can hear the values of community and collaboration, wholeness, connection, learning, acquiring wisdom as a value, taking action, experiencing the world, working for justice, empathy, transformation, generosity, the practice of inquiry, asking questions, of course, love and pluralism.

Diversity is, uh, that, well, is pluralism really obvious? I think it is. I think the connecting dots is about, pluralism is about finding the connections the different things.

And knowing that you’re enough and that we need one another, we all need one another.

And so when I’m looking for myself, when I’m in a situation where I’m not in charge, but I want to be leading, that’s what I know is under me.

That’s what I know is fueling my activity and engagement in the world are those values, and that makes it easier for me to know what to do next.

This is a short episode because I want you to take on this task. I want you to describe the rest of your life in five words and see what values you can pull out of that.

Maybe you already have a list of values that you developed years ago or maybe last week at a workshop, maybe as part of your “turning of the year” ritual, maybe you sit down and you think about what your values are, what’s important to you.

Find those things.

Find the five words, see what values you can identify and next time, we’ll look at how to apply that, when you’re out in the world and wanting to lead, even if you’re not in charge.

Thanks 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.