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 I wanna talk about overcoming embarrassment.

Recently, a student said that their primary goal with voice lessons is to not be embarrassed to sing karaoke, and I think that’s a great goal.

I know we all want to hear that we’re killing it, right? That maybe the thing that we sang was “even better than the original.” We wanna feel like, you know, we hit the right notes, we shaped the phrases the way we intended. We sang the high note at the end all the way to the end. We wore the right outfit. We didn’t trip when we went up on stage. We held the microphone well. We want that feeling of accomplishment, right? And mastery, and like, “Yeah, I did a good job!” 

I am pretty sure that’s what my student means, and voice lessons can totally help with that.

And it is true that embarrassment is an inside job. Whether we feel embarrassed is entirely up to us. And so I wanna talk on this episode about overcoming embarrassment and what makes it easier to overcome embarrassment.

I don’t mean to suggest that I have entirely figured this out, but I have made it pretty far down the road and I have some strategies that I think will be useful for you.

What do I mean when I say “embarrassment is an inside job”? Well, when you look it up in the dictionary, to be embarrassed means to feel overly self-conscious, awkward, or shame.

And shame is the idea that “because something happened, I’m bad.” Shame, as Brené Brown describes it, is different from guilt. Guilt is, “I did something bad.” Shame is, “I am bad.”

So in the context of singing well or badly in public, “I sang badly in public” – that could be true. That’s happened to me. I have sung badly in public.

“I am bad because I sang in public” – that is not true and that is not useful to think, but that’s where embarrassment comes from, the idea that we are bad when we sing badly.

But we’re not. I’m gonna say it again, even though it may be difficult to believe: we are not bad when we sing badly, we are not bad people because we sing badly.

We are not bad people because we sing badly in public. We are not bad people because somebody’s irritated by the sound of our voice. We are not bad because of that. 

And if you think that you are bad because you sing badly, there are lots of good reasons for you to be thinking that, so let’s get into that.

Why? Why would we have this idea if it’s so not helpful and so not true, why is it that we think we are bad when we sing badly? It all comes down to sticking out.

So humans are pack animals. We survive by forming communities. In terms of the animal kingdom, it takes a human being a really long time to achieve independent adulthood.

It’s really important as a person, as a human being to be one of the crowd, to do what the other people are doing, to not stick out, to not make trouble.

Don’t get yourself kicked out of the house, right? Just lay low, blend in, do it like they’re doing it. That’s how we stay safe, and that’s how we learn to use our voice, in a way.

If you’ve listened to any other podcast episodes of mine, you’ve heard me say that the voice is primarily a defense mechanism. We are born, we cry out, we’re found, and we’re cared for. And as we continue to be cared for and we grow, we learn to imitate the people around us. And that’s how we acquire language. That’s how we acquire an accent. That’s how we learn to get our needs met in a more developmentally appropriate way.

Instead of gooing and cooing and smiling really cutely, we figure out how to form sentences and how to say things politely and how to use our “inside voice.” And then we learn how to form arguments and we learn how to banter. We learn how to tell jokes. We learn all kinds of things that help us make our way in the world.

And because our voice is so automatic and so connected to this sense of safety, it is very easy to confuse the sound of our voice with who we are as a person. And so then when we go to sing and we don’t sing well, there’s a very real fear that if we don’t sing well that we’re going to be ostracized, that we’re going to be kicked out, that this is not okay, that this is not safe now, this is not fun. This could really threaten our lives.

And while that does, you can follow that train of thought, it’s actually not true.

You can sing really badly and not be executed for it – like that, that is not a thing. And you don’t have to travel much further than your next local open mic or karaoke night to see that it’s possible to sing not very well in public and to go home safe and sound. And it’s possible to sing not very well in public, and even receive applause from the crowd.

However embarrassed we might feel about the wrong notes we sing or just the little mistakes that happen in any given performance, they are not as dangerous as they feel.

And we all know people, probably, maybe not personally, but we’ve all seen people sing badly in public and have no shame about it at all. They’re not embarrassed at all.

This embarrassment is a choice, and it’s a choice that we can learn to make less frequently.

The first step with all of this is to recognize that embarrassment is real and it’s part of what’s kept us safe and alive this long. This feeling of shame, this fear of being ostracized has really kept you safe and protected. Probably, it’s worked to your advantage.

If it’s the case now that you’re not singing as much as you’d like to because you’re embarrassed, it’s gone a little overboard and we need to course correct for it. 

This will be a little roundabout, but I think it will be worth it.

There’s a skill that musicians have called wood shedding. To woodshed is to practice in a very particular kind of way. To woodshed is to work on a section of music so much, with such detail – taking it apart, putting it back together, if the rhythm’s complicated, changing the rhythm 16 different ways, and then trying to play with the original rhythm again – it’s to work on a small passage so much that you really, really get it.

And wood shedding is saved for things that just at first glance feel impossibly hard.

Regular practicing doesn’t necessarily involve this level of attention maybe, or repetition of the same thing over and over, and over and over again. Regular practicing might be, you play it through slowly, you work on a couple of passages that are a little tricky, and then you play it through again a little faster and you know, you just kind of find your way with it.

And it’s the kind of practicing that most non-musical people could probably tolerate, right? You’re pretty sure that you’re not being annoying.

But if you’re wood shedding – and the idea, “woodshed” is to go to the woodshed, to leave the house, go to the furthest part of the garden where the woodshed is, and practice there, please, where nobody can hear you.

If something needs to be woodshed, it means that the player knows that they’re going to irritate the people in their lives if they do this around them. And they need to go off where nobody else can hear them and just figure it out and then bring it back into the house and play it the way it’s supposed to go.

What I notice for myself and for my students, one of the big things that holds us back is our self-criticism when it comes to our singing. And not just self-criticism about how we sound, but self-criticism when we try to do it differently.

In order to sing well, we need to do three things really differently with our bodies than when we speak. We need to make more space. We need to make more internal space. We need to let our jaw be loose. We need to let our throat feel wide. And that’s just not a speech behavior.

We also need to use air, a lot more air in order to sing well. To speak well hardly requires any air at all, but to sing well, we really need to figure out how to take a deep breath and how to support the exhalation so that we can sing in tune.

And the third way that we need to use our bodies differently is we need to change the balance of tension in our body. So, when we’re speaking, we’re gesticulating a lot with our head. We’re nodding. We’re moving our head from side to side. We might move our head forward of our shoulders or back.

There’s a lot of attention, when we’re speaking, focused from the neck up. And when we’re singing, we need to bring that energy lower into our trunk. In order to sing well, we need to not feel anything in the throat at all, and hopefully no tension in our neck and shoulders and upper body, and instead energize our core.

So for singing, the muscles that we need to be working the most are way below our chin. And speaking doesn’t feel at all like that. For most people, speaking feels like something that’s going on in your brain. Maybe they notice something happening in their neck, but it’s like something in the brain and then something in the mouth and then it dribbles off the chin and that’s how we speak.

So let me recap. To sing well, we need to make more space inside our body. We need to use a lot more air, and we need to use our muscles very differently than when we talk.

And if you try to do this “in the house,” so to speak, if you try to do this from the framework of a speaking person, we just bludgeon ourselves with criticism because none of those behaviors contribute to a sense of safety and wellbeing as a speaker.

But if you can take yourself to the woodshed, to the far edge of the garden, into the woodshed where it’s safe to let your jaw hang open, it’s not ridiculous to use a ton of air. And where you can squat and plié and twist and do all kinds of things to energize your lower body to support your voice, it’s totally appropriate in the woodshed.

And when my students can make that journey from the house to the woodshed, they make a lot more progress faster, mostly because they’re not beating themselves up for looking funny, sounding funny or acting funny. Because honestly, that “funny,” that looking, sounding and acting funny, that’s just the opinion of the people in the house.

It’s not actually true that they’re looking, sounding and acting funny. They’re looking, sounding and acting like singers, which is the goal. But at the very beginning, that behavior feels fundamentally inappropriate and unsafe.

So my first bit of advice as you’re trying to overcome embarrassment is to create an environment for yourself, in your mind, a place of non-judgment, a place where you feel free to experiment, where you can be playful, where you can practice curiosity and you can intentionally do things that are not good speaking behaviors.

You can intentionally do things that would lower your credibility in the eyes of your employer. You can intentionally do things that might make you unlovable or you fear might make you unlovable, and know that this is all in service of developing a singer identity within you.

A second idea that may come in handy is that singing is way more about feeling vibrations as they travel through your body than it is about thinking.

Speaking well is all about thinking. Singing well, in my opinion, is all about feeling, being in touch with your body, noticing your breath, feeling what it is to create more space inside your body, feeling what the sound feels like as it travels through your body.

When you can make the shift from thinking about singing the right notes to feeling the music in your body, it will be much harder to feel embarrassed. 

For one thing, you’re really busy. Feeling in your body takes a lot of attention. There won’t be a lot of time left over to feel ashamed. But also, feeling in your body keeps you in the present moment, and that is the best way to avoid self-criticism, self-judgment, shutting yourself down – staying present to your experience as you’re having it. There’s no time to step outside and get judgemental about it.

So singing is more about feeling than it is about thinking. 

And the third strategy/suggestion that I have for you is to further turn your focus inward and set small, doable goals for yourself that are private goals for how you’re using your singing voice.

The applause and positive feedback from other people is wonderful and can certainly help you solidify your identity as a singer and help you feel like you’re on the right track, and you’re making progress, and this really is working, and that’s really great.

That’s all true. And, if your brain is convinced that this is something you should be ashamed of, that you should be embarrassed by, you’re not gonna be able to let that feedback in deeply. And no amount of feedback is going to counteract, is going to overturn that decision to feel ashamed or embarrassed.

We really need to fix the shame and embarrassment from the inside.

So what can help with that is noticing, obviously noticing yourself more, noticing your small successes.

Say you’re trying to learn a new song and you get all of the words right in one of the verses for the first time – celebrate that private success in some way.

Just even giving yourself a little physical pat on the back or saying, “Go me!” or “Look at that. I did that. I know the first verse now, this is so exciting!” Let yourself feel that joy and accomplishment. Nobody else has to know that you finally learned that verse. Of course you can tell people that you did, but the point is that you notice your success yourself.

Someone came into their lesson recently and said that they were singing along to a song in the car and it just felt free and fun and they had no idea how they were doing, but they felt so happy to be singing along in the car and not feel embarrassed. They were just happy to be singing.

That’s a private success. That’s something you need to notice and celebrate. You might even keep a list.

If you listen to the podcast at all, you know I love me a list.

Noticing and celebrating your private successes really does make it harder to feel embarrassed. 

I really hope this has been helpful. I would love to know what you think about it, and 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.