Transcription
In this pod series, I'm diving into the seven psychological foundations that I believe should shape your singing, helping you sing with real soul.
In this series, we're stacking up layers of understanding, so if you can, please listen to the previous podcast on the topic's Emotions and Idity.
Today we're talking about morship.
In the last podcast about identity, we closed our eyes and took ourselves back to childhood, and we remembered our personal heroes.
This time, we're going to reflect on our initial singing or musical guides.
So what are musical mentors ?
The dictionary says a mentor is a wise or trusted counsellor or teacher.
Musical mentors are artists who were or are already where you want to go.
You admire their talent, their voice resonates with you, and you aspire to their values.
Overall, you're enlightened by their presence .
And when we talk about how this relates to identity, let's return back to those very first spark moments of who inspired you to sing.
So let's take a deep breath and relax, close your eyes if you want, and recall when you were a child or a teenager.
Who were those first singers who made your heart go, wow?
Now open your eyes.
Did you see them on TV?
Did you see them live?
Was there one singer or was it a band?
Now, as an adult, your tastes may have changed, but I'm sure there is a special place in your heart for your initial love.
That first singer that gave you that call to saying.
Now, there's a deeper layer to mentorship, and this has to do with neurological mapping.
When I first started school, I was so excited to see the world.
I loved the classroom.
I loved the bus.
I loved all the people I went to school with.
But I especially admired the girl sitting right next to me at the front.
Her mother was the teacher and she was sitting right there all straight and polite with her long hair done up so pretty every day.
And, well, I actually copied all of her work during grade one .
And of course, this didn't serve me well because in grade two, I was at risk of failing.
I remember being appalled at being put in the slow reading class because I really believed I was smart.
As I squeaked into grade three, a breakthrough happened .
I had my eyes tested, and then I got glasses.
So for the first time in my little school career, I could see the blackboard.
The world opened up for me and I continued to be one of the top students throughout those years.
So now I wasn't born with a criminal mind.
I just didn't know any better .
I couldn't see the blackboard.
I couldn't see what was being shown to me.
I didn't know what I didn't know, which was I was very nearsighted and I could only see what was immediately in front of me.
But instinctively, I found someone near to me who had the answers already.
At five years old, I probably didn't know I was copying.
I was just finding a way to follow along.
And I was so grateful to that little girl who let me see her answers.
So while this isn't a musical story, that was my first experience of having a mentor. And of mimicry.
Isn't it curious that when we see something that inspires us, we experience a feeling of possibility and we desire to mimic them?
This is exactly what we did as kids, a time when role play and dressing up were our favourite things to do.
And for many artists, those days never went away.
Neuroscience tells us that our brains are constantly mapping our values and behaviours towards those initial influences in our lives.
In fact, that's how neuroplasticity works.
We are mapping most of what we see in experience right now, good or bad .
And that's how we learn.
As babies, we learn language and we develop our facial expressions and are speaking voices by mimicking others.
It's perfectly natural to want to emulate those people who capture your attention.
As singers, yes, we want to develop our unique voices, but our musical mentors can fast track deep layers of understanding about music.
They can show you the blackboard that you can't see right now because you don't have the experience mapped in your brain yet.
For example, in my coaching practice, I have an exercise where we do a live performance analysis and we observe in great detail how the artist is moving sound through their body and how they're using the space and feeling the story.
Try this with your first musical influence and listen to their song with your eyes closed, pretending you are them and imagining that voice coming in up, up through your breath and moving through your body.
Stand up and use a hairbrush as a microphone and just pretend that recording and sound is being generated through your body.
Experiencing something like this or even just imagining it offers a dynamic way to learn paving the way for a deeper understanding that in turn makes you more curious and open to building the technical skills and the musicality to shape the voice you were born with.
It will also tell you what you already know, which may actually surprise you.
We still need to put an effort to sing well, but finding the right guides to align with can really spark inspiration and strengthen your vision.
What we seek from mentors is their qualities, their values, their spirit, to help align with our own, and then it inspires us to tackle the practical work ahead.
Eventually, when those training wheels come off and we grow to be self-training artists, we will become mentors ourselves.
It's all just one big cycle.
Remember that your mentors have mentors, too.
And these superstars aren't outside of you on a pedestal.
They are literally sitting right next to you, showing you their work so that you can enjoy it and even be derivative if you want.
The most important thing is to remember that your recognition of their specialness is because they touched the specialist that was already inside of you.
They have introduced you to the possibility of excellence.
While there is always new talent to distract us, it's a good idea to take time to look back on our first influences with affection and reverence.
So that's my step three for Singing with Saul, recognizing that mimicry of your mentors is a legitimate means towards more knowledge and inspiration as you develop your own sound.
It would be so cool if you could drop me a comment and let me know who your first musicalal inspirations were.
I would love to hear all about it.
Please subscribe and follow me so we can keep in touch.
You can catch step four when we talk about core power for singers.
Bye for now.
See you soon.