Part 2 of the Thinking Trilogy.
Christ once stated, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” That was not a hyperbolic utterance. It’s a fact. People are great self-fulfilling prophets. If you think you can’t do it, you won’t. If you think you can, you will.
Here’s an obvious caveat: if you think you can fly you’ll still never sprout wings. Now that we’re over the obvious, let’s dig deeper.
As a singer, what goes on in your mind comes out in your performance. After judging an international voice competition, I compared notes with the esteemed judges on the panel. I was the non-singer pilgrim in a holy place. But our rankings were nearly identical. Their top criterion was voice. Mine was performance. The second the singer walked on the stage I had a fair idea what was going to happen next, and according to my esteemed fellow judges, their voice quality followed their on-stage demeanor.
On-stage demeanor is all about the brain. How much confidence does the singer have? It isn’t confidence bred from a positive mind, but it is a positive mind cultivated by performance experience. Most singers simply don’t have enough performance experience. Read my other blog posts on how to get more experience and the importance thereof.
As the brain is trained, the paradigms shift. How you think about things matters. A paradigm is a way of thinking. Classical liberal arts education educates the mind in the art of learning how to learn. That is good. But it also tends to personify nearly everything and the student is left “feeling” about things rather than thinking about them. Today’s catch word is “feeling” as in “What do you feel about that?” rather than, “What do you THINK about that?” Feeling is emotive. Thinking is logical.
Can you change the way you think? Yes. Over time experience will change your outlook. Usually experience teaches you and your thinking improves. Sometimes we feel the victim and experience leaves us with less.
But, as I pointed out from Viktor Frankl, that is YOUR choice.
What virtually every singer needs is a forced paradigm shift when it comes to commercializing your voice – or put in the business vernacular – “monetizing your talent.” Such a thought is anathema to a singer – marketing is beneath you, or it sullies you, or it is prostituting your talents. I’ve heard them all. None of them are true, but all are debilitating to a singer’s mind and career.
How fast can you change the way you think? Usually an entire change takes time, but it can begin with a “Forced Paradigm Shift“.
Next time I’ll give you an example where a person changed an entire mindset in less than one second. It is based upon a true story.
