Being courageous is a practice

Voice Confidence

One of the most common mindset shifts I work on in one to one vocal coaching sessions with voice clients, is helping them to build more confidence and courage.

This could be in:

setting and maintaining personal and professional boundaries; aka truth speaking
singing on stage for the first time heck even just being able to sing in the house when family members are around
or my absolute favourite ~ to be bold and say YES to that dream gig ~ the TED Talk or the album release.

True courage as a singer emerges when we are afraid and we act anyway.

When working on confidence mindset, the first thing we always do together is to acknowledge how we’re feeling.

Our nervous systems tell us that fear is bad. I mean, it literally kept our ancestors safe when saber tooth tigers were on the attack ~but there are no saber-toothed tigers here.

Yes, your knees and your voice may shake… AND, you’re also equipped to be able to move through those experiences. (like, literally, your body is designed to help you do that)

My absolute favourite experience is to witness clients take the stage for the very first time, afraid, and then come out on the other side of it so glad that they did, and feeling stronger for the next time and the next time and the next time.

The same goes for setting boundaries in our day to day lives and communication.

Courage is a muscle that needs to be strengthened.

A lot of us weren’t born with bold moves and so it’s really unfair of us to expect that we’ll have courage if we haven’t worked at it.

I love Brené Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection.”

There’s a beautiful quote:

“courage is a habit, a virtue.You get it by doing courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn to courage by couraging.”

Over my years and years of coaching, I’ve witnessed that courage is the catalyst to confidence. The confidence naturally comes when people step into their courage.

My one hot tip for this is to focus on the thriving parts as you learn to navigate the courageous acts that you perform every day.