Embracing the challenge: Dealing with avoidance

Recently, I've been reading The Empowered Performer: The Musician's Companion in Building Confidence & Conquering Performance Anxiety by Sharon L. Stohrer. This is Stohrer's second book on performance anxiety, so she goes into greater depth and provides more extended strategies than she does in her first book. 

One of the sections that struck me has to do with avoidance. Related to how we practice our music, she says, "When we have tricky runs or difficult shifts or places that feel too high vocally, we tend to avoid them. No wonder then, when we continue to struggle with those problem areas!" (p.82)

Have you ever caught yourself doing that? There is a difficult section in your song, but instead of devising strategies to work it out, you pretend that it's not there and just hope that it will get better on its own. As stated in the last blog, "Hope isn't a strategy." Stohrer instead encourages singers to do what is entirely logical: When you go to practice, find the spots in your music that trouble you the most, and address those spots first. Rather than trying to escape or ignore the difficulty, she encourages us to embrace it. 

As far as why we avoid these spots in our music, it could be due to perfectionism. To help explain this, Stohrer quotes author, professor, and researcher Brené Brown: 

"Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels the primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize painful feelings or shame, judgment, and blame...Somewhere along the way, we adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish, and how well I accomplish it." -Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

If we believe, even subconsciously, that we have to do everything perfectly because we are what we accomplish, the difficult spots in our music will serve to expose our imperfections. So, to avoid the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame, we simply avoid those parts in our music that we can’t yet perform perfectly. Makes perfect sense, right? 

Stohrer comes back to Brown’s philosophies to help us move beyond this mindset: 

"As Brown mentions in her book Atlas of the Heart, perfectionism is not about self-improvement, it's about trying to win the approval and acceptance of others. Striving for growth and mastery should be self-focused rather than based on external factors, 'How can I improve?' rather than 'What will everyone think?' It can be extremely difficult, as a performer, not to rely on external validation. After all, the public won't come in droves to see your performance simply because you think it's amazing. However, do you really think anyone will think your performance is amazing if you don't believe it wholeheartedly first? In order for you to believe you will have an amazing performance, you must look inwards to improve; and in order to improve, you must make room for imperfection and mistakes." (Stohrer, p.75-76)

Stohrer closes this section of the book saying, "Accept your faults and remind yourself often that you are on a journey of self-discovery, of growth as a musician, and as an increasingly-empowered performer. This is a process, NOT a destination." (p.76)

Similar ideas were explored in yet another NPR interview I heard recently. Reporter Mary Louise Kelly was speaking to author George Saunders about his new book of short stories titled Liberation Day: Stories. Here’s an excerpt from the interview: 

KELLY: Are there some [stories] that you work on for days or weeks or months and, at the end, you think, well, that was a crazy idea, and I'm not sure it landed, so let's go and set that one aside? 

SAUNDERS: What tends to happen is I just say, ‘Well, I just haven't opened up to it enough yet. I just have to keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.’...You'll hit a certain obstruction in a story, and it seems like often the key to getting past that is admitting that you're there. And you can't say, ‘Oh, I'm a loser. I'm a terrible writer. I'm a bad person.’ You just say, ‘The story is challenging me in a way I can't figure out.’ 

KELLY: I love that. It's such a good way of thinking about all kinds of challenges, isn't it? Whether it's writing or anything else. 

Next time you hit one of those challenging spots in your music, instead of avoiding it, consider the perspectives above. Acknowledge the difficulty and admit that you’re not yet able to perform that spot the way you would like. Acknowledge that it doesn’t make you a bad singer or a bad person. Think about how you might address that challenge. Then get to work. 

Now go practice. 

Still strategizing

As creative types, we can sometimes find inspiration or insight related to the practice of our art in unlikely places. These last couple of weeks, for me, that came from a war correspondent and a college football coach. 

In the first instance, I was listening to a recent interview on NPR with journalist and author Thomas E. Ricks. In the conversation, he was using his experience as a war correspondent to provide analysis of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In his perspective, much of the success of the movement seems to have come from the way movement leaders adhered to certain principles of war. Specifically, he cites how activists were well-disciplined and focused on preparation, and how they followed up each demonstration with detailed analysis of how the campaign went and what they could do better in the next event. In short, as he says, "They were a learning organization." 

He goes on to praise the leaders for their establishment of, and follow-through on, specific strategies. "Strategy is essential," he says. "If you don't have a strategy, you have basically a car without a steering wheel." 

He also felt that the steps they took in working toward their established strategies were informed by their self-identity. Movement leaders had to clearly define who they were as a movement and what overarching mission they were trying to accomplish. "From that," Ricks says, "tactics will flow." 

In fact, Ricks believes that some of the early failures of the movement stemmed from both a lack of planning and from focusing on goals that were too big to have easily identifiable next steps. It was after these mistakes that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was brought into the movement. As Ricks describes, "King sits down and says, 'OK, what are we going to learn from this?' And he stews on it a lot. And the lessons are, let's be more focused in our goals. Let's not try to change everything at once." Ricks believes it was this willingness to be honest with themselves about what they were doing and how they were doing it that allowed them to develop the necessary strategies to find success. 

The second instance of inspiration has much less historical significance. Even so, it allowed me to make a connection to our work as singers. 

I was reading a preview of the Utah/UCLA football game, which took place on October 8th. The lead-up to the game included a fair degree of hype since it involved two nationally ranked Pac-12 conference rivals. Utah was ranked #11 and was favored in the game despite UCLA's surprising 5-0 record and #18 ranking. With UCLA coming in as the underdog, head coach Chip Kelly was discussing his team's approach to the game. "We know if we're going to beat Utah, it's going to be because of our preparation during the week," he said. "Things don't just happen to you; hope isn't a strategy." 

As I have discussed in a previous article (inspired by a blog by voice pedagogue Matthew Edwards), strategies and goals are different from hopes and dreams. Of course, it's perfectly fine (and probably important) to have hopes and dreams. But without smaller, achievable goals along the way—and strategies for how those goals will be achieved—those hopes and dreams can feel so vast and far-off as to be more frustrating on a day-to-day basis than they are rewarding. 

In both of the instances above, we can see how much value is placed on the direction we get from having specific strategies whenever we are working toward a desired end result. How can you bring more strategizing into your practicing this week? Look back at your goals from the start of the semester. If your progress toward any of these goals has stagnated, let's devise some new strategies. 

Now go practice.