Permission to be bad

I'm all about lofty goals and high standards. I can spend an entire lessons
picking at little details that need to be improved in a student's song. But sometimes we have to give ourselves and our students permission to be bad. Sometime that is the only way we grow.

This week a student expressed concern that her voice just isn't sounding as good as it used to and that she didn't feel like she could do things that she used to be able to do. Anytime a student comes to me with these concerns I want to make sure that both of us know exactly what is going on with the voice and determine if there is something I need to send him/her to a doctor for. The first thing I have a student do is keep a voice journal recording what they do, what it feels like and how it sounds. For this particular student, I also made a check list of technical things that she could check when she wasn't happy with her sound. And finally, I gave her a list of things that can affect the voice and how it sounds and feels. We didn't have to go far into the list to discover the reason her voice wasn't happy. She has a very tough schedule this year at school, and her stress level is really high. I know from personal experience what that can do to a voice. So we talked about doing what she can do and understanding that it won't be good, but she can learn and progress.

Tonight, my practice session was a perfect illustration of that. Today I was dealing with a lot of pain and tension, which is bad news for a singer. As I started to work on my songs, it didn't feel good and I could feel and hear lots of things I wanted to change. But, since I knew how hard that would be on a night like tonight, I gave myself permission to be bad and focused on checking my memorization. Because I gave myself permission to be bad, I didn't stress over those things I didn't like. That just adds more tension. I focused on what was working well. By the time I finished, I was actually making pretty good sounds, but I wouldn't have arrived at that place if I'd freaked out over the details tonight.

There are some practice sessions where you need to pick things apart and really do the detail work. And sometimes, you need to go for the big picture, allow bad sounds to happen, and be open to whatever good comes. I'm learning that about my own work, and I'm planning to be more conscious of it in the work I do with my students.