Practice and Mindset

Hello everyone and welcome to this lesson on practise and mindset. Voice is different from every other instrument because it is in your body, and that means that anything you do or consume will affect your voice. This includes what you eat and what you drink. It also includes how much you sleep and things like exercise, and it also includes socialisation. So, If you are talking really loudly or screaming over loud music, your voice will be affected, and it also includes your environment. So if you're around a bunch of forest fires, I guarantee that your voice is not going to be feeling great. Your mental state also affects your voice, and this is due to something called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body. And it's the nerve that goes directly through both of your vocal folds and helps you sing. This nerve not only goes through your vocal folds, but it also connects up to the emotional processing centre of your brain, and it kind of hovers around your amygdala. So that means that anything you feel or think immediately gets translated to your vocal folds. This can be great, because that's one of the reasons that voice is so expressive. But if you're feeling really nervous or sad or just having a really rough day, That will also be translated into your voice. Most of you probably know somebody who is just naturally great at singing. Maybe they've never had a voice lesson and they never practise, but they naturally have good pitch, great vocal strength, and they just wow everyone at karaoke. Part of this is due to confidence, and that vagus nerve really can affect how well a person naturally sings. But the majority of great singers don't establish that confidence in singing just with a snap of the fingers. They practise and they learn to have faith in their vocal technique so that they have faith in their singing and develop confidence. You want to think about training your voice like a professional athlete trains for an event. Essentially, you're using muscles in your throat. Some of these are very, very tiny muscles, and there's lots of little ones to coordinate, but regardless, they're muscles, so you want to train them to become stronger and more reliable. This means that you should be going to your vocal gym most days. I recommend practising 6 days a week, maybe taking 1 day off, and don't immediately try to do heavy lifting. We'll have a lesson in a little bit about warming up your voice so that you can ease into it. And in addition, don't expect that you're suddenly going to be able to lift 250 pounds after just a week of practise. You need to work up to that. You want to think about training your voice like an athlete trains for any physical performance. Singing is fundamentally training your body. It requires development and coordination of a tonne of different muscles, both inside your larynx and throughout your vocal tract, and also, it's going to require development and coordination of a tonne of different breathing muscles. You wouldn't expect on your first try to be able to execute a triple backflip off the high dive with minimal splash. So don't expect that you're going to just instantly execute every high note with complete, gorgeous, beautiful aplomb. It's going to take practise. And how much practise is a question that I get a lot. I recommend practising 5 to 6 days a week and taking a day off. It's kind of like going to the gym. If you tyre your muscles out, you sometimes need to give them a break to recuperate, essentially. And I definitely recommend that you warm up before you do any other singing practise, then probably do 10 to 15 minutes of vocal exercises and then dive into your songs. Your practise shouldn't exceed more than a few hours a day. An hour of practise a day is really good, but if you can only fit in half an hour of practise each day, that's also awesome. And remember that that vagus nerve is going to play a big role in your practise, so don't beat yourself up for mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. It's an important part of the process to make mistakes so that you learn what not to do the next time. So, try to be patient with yourself in your practise, accept your mistakes, learn from them, and take confidence that you are getting better. And I will see you in the next video on posture.