Recently I decided to have a couple of singing lessons.
Yeah, I know. It’s provoked quite a weird reaction in most people I’ve told.
Singing is something I’ve never been much good at and something I’ve always wished I could do. One of my coaching clients is a singing teacher and I just felt that now was the time to have a go. Moreover, it would be a great opportunity to do something that feels really vulnerable (cross ref The Daring Way™ which argues that vulnerability is the foundation of joy and connection).
It was so interesting to me being conscious of all my internal chatter in the run up to it. Just booking the lesson brought up SO MUCH SHIT for me.
I vividly remembered the time at school being told that I wasn’t very good at being on the stage, and therefore stopping doing anything drama like.
I began thinking of all of the other things I had stopped doing in my life because I wasn’t very good at them, instead focusing on the things that I excelled in (mainly academia and hanging out in local car parks). Sport is a great example – I was pretty average at running, hockey and netball and pretty rubbish at tennis (probably due to a recurring double vision issue I have!). Weirdly I won my primary school badminton tournament but it didn’t turn out to be a premonition of great things for me. Rather I remember trying again at University in an inter-hall tournament and literally conceded the game half way through when I realised how embarrassing the score was going to be.
I began to wonder why I couldn’t do these things just for the pure enjoyment of them, rather than having to excel at them. And I felt really angry at myself for conceding the badminton game.
Then my husband started asking me about the “singing lesson” – it was almost as though he was making those annoying inverted comma things in the air. He clearly thought I’d finally lost the plot – ‘aren’t you going to feel really, really embarrassed in there?’. Well – yes – probably. It was clear that he thought this was a mad idea, which then brought up further internal chatter for me. ‘If people close to me don’t approve of this choice, maybe I shouldn’t do it’.
It ended up being a metaphor for so much. For the things I had longed to do as a child and abandoned because of a fear of not being good enough. For going against the crowd and doing something that other people might think was odd. And then, finally, as I struggled to keep the appointment in my diary amongst other work and children pressures, its relevance became tied up with just how often I put my own ‘frivolous’ requirements at the very bottom of the pile.
The lesson was fine. I enjoyed it despite it being hard. Sue was very supportive and not at all judgemental. We did lots of breathing exercises, posture and making of sounds rather than singing – perhaps because the teacher suspected by self-consciousness. She asked about my objective for the lesson. It suddenly became crystal clear. I want to be able to sing loudly, and probably out of tune, in the car with my kids without being totally mortified. But, more importantly, I don’t want to pass this avoidance of the mediocre on to the boys. I want them to seize activities they love doing for the hell of it and not necessarily to need to be ‘good’ at them. And I know enough to know that I can’t just tell them that – I need to role model it myself.
*Photo courtesy of http://all-free-download.com/free-photos/download/cool_microphone_picture_2_166367_download.html
