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 something that I have done and I see my students do, and that is hiding our, in air quotes, “real” voices at home.

There’s something that happens when you start taking voice lessons and you start getting instruction. You wanna do it the way your teacher is telling you to do it, and you still wanna sing the way you’ve always sung.

So you take the advice from your teacher and you maybe apply it, practicing at home, but then there’s singing that happens in the car, singing that happens in the shower. It just feels good to be you and to be singing. And a lot of times that voice doesn’t make it into the studio, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason, I think, is it’s hard to feel that free and relaxed as we do in the shower or in the car or wherever it is, that you let your voice just do what it’s gonna do – you’re just enjoying being in your body and singing – it’s hard to do that in front of a teacher in a stressful, inherently stressful environment, and so we don’t.

And often we can’t even replicate it in front of the teacher. Like, we can’t even access that part of ourselves in front of somebody we imagine, or we have hired to have a critical ear.

And the second reason that that voice doesn’t make it into the studio is because we’re afraid that the teacher isn’t gonna like it. We’re afraid that the teacher is gonna tell us that that part of us that feels so free and so easy, and so much joy is actually wrong.

It’s a very real fear. It’s a sad fear.

You don’t wanna be with a voice teacher who’s gonna tell you that’s wrong, because that voice that is free and easy and fun, that’s your private voice – that probably has a lot to do with who you are as a singer.

All of the qualities of that voice may not be everything that you like, right? And that voice might have a limited range and that voice might feel stuck sometimes, and it might feel squeaky or gravelly, or you might not be entirely happy with it.

But the freedom with which it’s made, that is a fundamental thing that’s important to hang onto and to analyze and to make friends with, because the freedom that comes with that voice is the freedom that you want to apply to whatever technique-y things your voice teacher is teaching you.

If this sounds at all familiar, please keep listening. I’m gonna talk about these two things, the nervousness that comes when we sing in front of a teacher or somebody we’ve asked to evaluate us, and also the fear that comes when we’re singing in front of a teacher or someone we’ve asked to evaluate us.

So first about the nervousness: it is so normal.

I had been studying with my current teacher for about eight years before, all of a sudden, one day in a lesson, I noticed that I was no longer

nervous being at my lesson. My body felt calm and all of my attention was going toward trying to apply what he was teaching me.

All of my focus was on using my voice differently rather than being divided between the task of using my voice differently and tracking how nervous and awkward I felt being at the lesson.

Now, I’ve said other places on the podcast, and I’ve certainly said to my students again and again, I may be the slowest learner there is.

It might not take you eight years to feel comfortable in front of your voice teacher, but I want you to know that if it takes you eight years to feel comfortable in front of one of the sweetest, most caring, compassionate, kind, forgiving, clear, brilliant people…

If it takes you eight years to let go of the nervousness and just give all of your attention to your voice and the learning, that’s okay. You can still make great progress.

One of the reasons I think it took me so long to learn to feel at home in my body as I was learning was because a lot of my earlier learning experiences in my life were not kind.

They were competitive. They were, a little threatening. They were difficult. They were not kind, compassionate, expansive, clear.

A lot of my early learning experiences were, “Show us how smart you are.” “If you don’t do it right, you’re stupid.” It had a kind of all-or-nothing quality to it, right? You were either an A student or you were a C student, which when I was growing up, that was failing.

You were either good, you were bad, you got it or you didn’t, and there wasn’t a lot of allowance for process, for actually acquiring knowledge, actually learning how to do something. 

A lot of the teaching seemed to be focused on the idea that the teacher says something and then the student absorbs it, and then it’s done. And if the teacher says something and the student doesn’t understand it, there’s clearly something wrong with the student because the teacher said it perfectly clearly.

And so I had in my nervous system a lot of junk, a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety about being in the position of not knowing something. And I really credit my current voice teacher with teaching me this life lesson, too, which is that it’s okay to not know something – that learning is a process.

We go from not knowing how to do something, to learning how to do something, and that takes as long as it takes. And it’s a collaboration, at least in the voice teaching world as I understand it, and as my teacher understands it, it’s a collaboration between two people talking about the thing, experimenting with the thing, and figuring out a way to describe the thing to one another so that the knowledge can be transmitted, can be imparted, can be incorporated and used.

I believe my experience of learning, for the bulk of my life, learning as a competitive sport, right, learning as a black-and-white all-or-nothing activity – I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I see that kind of educational history in almost all of the students who come through my door, and that’s something that we really have to actively work to undo and to find compassion for ourselves when we don’t know something and to, open up a space – yeah, I, I don’t know. I, all I can say is, like, a space of compassionate forgiveness where we allow ourselves the opportunity to not know something and to allow the possibility that we will know it, right?

But first we have to sit with that, “I really don’t know.” And that is really uncomfortable.

But the more comfortable we get with that state of beginner’s, what some people call beginner’s mind, right, that just blank slate. The more often we can return to this “blank slate” kind of feeling and not be anxious about it, the easier it is to learn new things and to incorporate the teaching that’s being presented.

So that’s what I have to say about being nervous in your voice lesson. It’s totally normal. I was nervous, oh, and I should say it took me eight years with my current teacher to not be nervous.

I had been taking voice lessons from other people for years before that, and I had never not been nervous. So I had been a voice student for decades before I learned how to not be nervous in a voice lesson. 

And again, I may be the one of the slowest learners on the planet, but I think I’m not unusual in that.

Getting over our nerves while we are in front of a teacher is part of the reason we are in front of that teacher because that feeling of nervousness is going to happen most likely anytime we go to perform.

We need to develop the skill of feeling nervous and focusing anyway.

And so you may be frustrated with being at your voice lesson or being in front of any kind of teacher and feeling nervous, and that makes it difficult to learn. But the more you do it, the better you get at it.

The better you get at noticing your nervousness and learning anyway, noticing your nervousness and doing the thing, whatever the thing may be anyway.

And that skill is just invaluable because, again, that’s what performing in front of an audience is like. We don’t get the option of appearing in front of a group of people and never having a child cry out in the middle of the thing that we’re doing.

Or, to use one of my other examples, somebody having a medical emergency while we’re performing, right? We don’t get to control the environment that we’re performing in.

We can pick the venue and we can invite the audience but whether or not there’s a lightning strike on the building has absolutely nothing to do with us.

And of course, things that dramatic don’t happen that often, but you get the point that I’m making. We need to be able to maintain our focus on our speaking or our singing while we’re nervous and while other things go sideways.

And if you’re frustrated by your nervousness in a lesson, this is how you can reframe it as an opportunity, as a learning opportunity to feel the nervousness and do the thing anyway.

Okay, so the second thing about being afraid to show your voice teacher your real voice, or your free voice or you know, how you sing when you’re in the shower, or how you sing when you’re in the car – those are two very particular sonic environments.

Like, there is no other place that sounds like the shower other than the shower, right, because it’s just so ring-y: the walls are so hard, the sound comes back to you so quickly.

And singing in the car depends on the car model, but what I notice for myself is singing in the car – it’s not quite like the shower, it’s not as loud as the shower, but it is a confined space and the speaker is right there.

It’s difficult to recreate that environment in a voice studio, whether that voice studio is a grand room, with wood floors and wood walls, or whether it’s like my own voice studio, which is a living room, which is a pretty ring-y room, though. The room is very generous, your sound comes right back to you, but it doesn’t sound at all to me like singing in my car.

So it’s hard to trust that how you sing in the shower or in the car is actually how you’re singing in the teacher’s studio because the physics of it, the acoustics of that space are so very different.

There is also the very real, private feeling, right, when you have this way that you sing, when you’re all on your own, that feels true and feels good. It’s precious, it can feel like the deepest part of you. And to share that with somebody else is to make yourself incredibly vulnerable.

And to share that with a teacher, there really is an opportunity that it could get crushed, right? You could be told to undo it. Like, “No, that’s not how you should do it. That’s not your real voice. That’s not good for the world. That’s not good for your body. That’s not …” whatever. That fear is real.

And the best way I think to manage this fear is to first be honest with yourself that you have it. Honestly, look at your behavior. Do you sing in a completely different way in your lesson than you do on your own?

There’s nothing wrong with you if you do, but you will make more progress with your voice faster if you can admit that you’re doing that, if that’s what you’re doing.

And then you can ask yourself the next question, why? What’s that about? Is that about fear? Is that about, I just can’t make sense of what my teacher is saying to me yet, so I’m gonna keep singing the way I’ve always sung ’cause it feels good to me.

Why are you not bringing that voice or trying to bring that voice into your lesson?

And then, if you’re still with me, keep singing the way you wanna sing in the shower, in the car, doing dishes, however it is that you sing, that you don’t share with your teacher.

And do your best to start noticing how you’re doing it. How are you singing then? And what does it feel like? What does it sound like? Describe it as best you can and the description might come with physical words, right?

It feels free. My throat feels open. I don’t care who hears me. I have plenty of air. Whatever, those kind of words that describe what’s happening in your physical body.

And, depending on the kind of imagination you have, whether it’s a particularly visual imagination or a kinesthetic imagination, you might have a whole other set of ways to describe it.

I feel like I’m flying, like bird on the wing, I’m soaring.

I feel like I am settled into the earth. I feel like I am grounded. I feel …you get the idea.

Once you start describing for yourself the way that you sing that you don’t share with your teacher, if you can make a practice of that, of noticing how you sound, describing how you sound, finding the metaphors, the images, the physical instructions to sound that way, I believe over time you will develop a vocabulary that you can then take into your lesson and start asking questions.

Maybe not bringing your free voice into your lesson yet if you’re not ready, but you will develop a vocabulary for yourself of how you understand your voice, that then you can talk about, in your lesson, when you’re doing it the way your teacher wants you to do it, when you’re being the, in air quotes, the “good” student, right?

Maybe not your most vulnerable, but you’re open and trying and working-on-it self.

Because our voices are unique: nobody else is gonna sound like me.

Nobody else is gonna sound like you. And similarly, nobody else is gonna be in my body while I’m using my voice. And nobody else is gonna be in your body while you are using your voice.

And that means that what it feels like to be us when we’re using our voice, those are words that we have to find ourselves.

Those are descriptions that we need to create for ourselves and everybody’s description sounds different.

That’s one of the things I love about teaching, ’cause I love hearing how other people describe what it is to be them when they’re using their voice. It’s so rich, it’s so fertile from the imagination.

We have to come up with those descriptions ourselves, and then when we can share those with a teacher who can make sense of them from their point of view, then we can really make progress because we’ve, we find a common vocabulary.

It cannot be a one way street. It cannot be that you just accept whatever your teacher says about you and your voice and what you’re feeling and how you’re making the sound. That is not a good teaching-learning situation.

You need to feel strong and confident enough in yourself to offer your own descriptions, to share your own experience because ultimately you are the only one who’s in control of that instrument.

It’s not like a piano where one person can sit down and play it and somebody else can sit down and play, and two people can sit down and play together, or three people can sit down and play together.

Our voice isn’t like that.

We are always the only people in charge of it, and so I, I totally get hiding part of your voice from your teacher, having a secret self who sings the way she wants to sing, when she wants to sing that way that she doesn’t let anybody else hear.

I know that for me, I know that happens with many of my students.

I think we do that because we don’t know how to show that person to somebody else. It’s too nerve-wracking to do that in front of another person and/or we’re afraid that we’re gonna be judged and shut down and told that we’re wrong, when deep in our hearts we think, “no, this is right. We’re onto something here.”

You don’t need me to tell you that being vulnerable is hard work. That not hiding, coming out of hiding is scary.

What I know for myself is that when I can be with me when I’m singing in that fantastically free and fun way, when I’m experiencing anything that I feel like I can’t share with anyone else, if I can be with myself, if I can be vulnerable with myself, and really notice what I’m experiencing and be compassionate with myself for what I’m experiencing, provide my own self, my own kind listening ear, I gain vocabulary.

And over time, having the words to describe what’s happening I find, I’m more able to find the courage to share that experience with other people.

So this is what I wanna leave you with:

Hiding is normal.

Not hiding is scary.

We can learn to do the scary thing by starting with ourselves, by starting with our relationship to ourselves and the voice that we love, if you have one.

Not everybody has a voice they love, but if you have one, start there.

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.