The Inner Singer Podcast is dedicated to assisting you in developing your inner singer which is your conscious and unconscious beliefs and programming, your patterns, stories, habits, mindset and self-talk.
In these podcasts you will discover tools and techniques that you can use immediately to strengthen and support your inner singer which will ultimately have a powerful positive affect on your outer singer – your voice.
Your inner singer – conscious and unconscious beliefs and programming, patterns, stories, habits, mindset and self-talk are what will determine your feelings about your voice and your perception of your voice.
It is this that ultimately drives and runs your voice and your confidence in singing, and is responsible for your vocal success.
If your inner singer is not congruent with your outer singer, as well as what you want (your singing goals), there is little chance of realizing your singing potential.
The Inner Singer Podcast is for singers who want to gain confidence, discover the joy of their own voice, and improve all aspects of their singing and performing.
This includes shifting from a negative mindset to an optimistic and positive supportive mindset.
Introduction to The Inner Singer Podcast
Episode 000 – Transcripts
Thank you everybody for tuning in to this first episode. Thank you all you wonderful folks have been so supportive when I first announced that I was doing the Inner Singer Podcast. Thank you so much for your questions and comments and ideas for episodes.
This first episode is really just to give you a little bit of the groundwork why I’m doing the Inner Singer Podcast, a little bit of my background and what’s in store in these episodes.
A little bit of my background is I’ve been teaching, just in case you don’t know me, for the better part of 25 years. Vocal technique and vocal performance and coaching singers all across the entertainment business.
What I began to notice over the years, putting two and two together, is how certain singers would get to a particular level, and even though the technique I was teaching worked amazingly well and very quickly and for pretty much everybody – I’ve never seen it not worked for somebody as a matter of fact. So if they actually do the work, it really does work to bring tremendous amounts of positive change. It’s incredible!
So I was just putting two and two together, watching and seeing these people and seeing how they would get to a particular point and I suddenly began to see that the challenges they were having were no longer about the voice. It was really something going on inside them.
It was no longer about their singing technique. It wasn’t about high notes or breathing or style or what they sounded like really. It wasn’t about the outer singer, in other words. It wasn’t about what people see. It wasn’t about what people usually think of as the voice. It was really about this thing that was going on inside their mind, telling them stories about how they sounded or what right they have to sing or if they could get any better or why they weren’t any better.
I just really saw that all of a sudden, they would hit a ceiling. And I would think, “What is going on? What is going on? Why are they not making the progress they should make? Why are they choking in an audition? Why are they not getting the part when they’re perfectly capable of doing the part? Why are they so down on themselves? Why do they think they’re getting worse instead of realizing how much better they’re getting? What is going on?”
So I really started doing a lot of research. Of course I’ve been involved in personal growth and personal development for well over 30 years – certainly as long as I have been doing voice.
I did have some tools and resources of course. Then I started doing quite a bit of research on neuroscience and our patterning and our wiring and what’s going on in our brain and the circuitry and our belief systems.
So then I developed a program and I started working with singers with some really positive results and some wonderful things with singers all over the world. I was seeing great changes with some of the techniques I was using that I would take, that I would learn from other people and other practices and I would put it into the singing space with some really, really, really cool results.
Anyway, I did that and did that and did that. That’s been the last probably since about 2008. That’s when I started really employing that.
And then I thought, “Well, I’m seeing so much great fruitage from this. I really want to make it a little bit more public.” And so I decided to do the Inner Singer Podcast focusing only on the inner singer. Whether we like it or not and whether we believe it or not, it’s the inner singer, our thoughts, our habits, our beliefs, our patterns, our belief systems, our wiring, core beliefs, how we feel about our voice, ultimately how we feel about ourselves, that inner singer drives the outer singer and we’re ultimately going to sound, how we’re going to perceive our voice and the success we’re going to have with our voice, the success we’re going to have as a singer.
And it doesn’t matter, I don’t mean success like you have to be winning a Tony Award or winning a Grammy Award. That has nothing to do with it. I mean, strictly success in terms of reaching your potential and loving your voice so that you become, in a very non-egotistical way, your own favorite singer. Very few people I know are their own favorite singer.
Seriously, we really owe it to ourselves and we deserve to love our voices and to give ourselves permission to have a great time singing. And quite frankly, putting technique aside for a second – we’re going to be putting technique aside a lot actually in these episodes – putting it aside for now, it really doesn’t matter in this moment what your voice sounds like, how the voice feels, how good your high notes are, how strong your mix is, what you can do stylistically. None of that matters because in this moment, you really do have the opportunity to choose to enjoy and love your voice and have fun in the process.
Now what I just went into is a little precursor of an episode that I’m doing. But this is what the Inner Singer is about. It’s identifying, uncovering these belief systems, these things that are keeping us back and holding us back – and I’ll be sharing some personal stories that also got me on the road to this because I have a lot of experience with my own inner singer sabotaging my outer singer. I have many years of my life where my entire identity was wrapped up in how well I would sing on a given day.
And quite frankly, since I wasn’t singing so great at the time, my identity was not that great most of the time. So I have a tremendous amount of experience, personal experience and stories that I can share and things that I have done that hopefully will help you along the way as well.
I really want this to be something that’s very special that honors the inner singer, that nurtures the inner singer and that makes you completely aware of the fact that you have an inner singer. It is just as important, if not more important, to nurture and exercise and develop a great relationship with this inner singer as it is to take all the voice lessons and develop this relationship with your outer singer.
As I said just a few minutes ago, it’s the inner singer that will determine your perception of your voice. Your inner singer will determine your perception of your voice.
It’s not going to be great high notes, a strong mix, wonderful riffs, awards and people telling you how wonderful you are. That is not ever going to determine your perception of your voice or how you feel about your voice or your singing. It’s all going to be your inner singer. Until we really come to that place where we have a relationship with our inner singer, then our outer singer is going to be limited by the beliefs that we’re carrying.
Now to some of you, this may be really obvious. And to some of you, this may be the first time you’ve heard information like this. That’s great. That’s what this podcast is all about.
My goal and intention in this is to make these episodes bite-sized, short episodes. I’d like to keep them between 10 and 20 minutes. And sometimes, they’ll be shorter. Every once and a while, they may a little bit longer. I’m going to be sharing personal stories that are very relevant and relevant information. I want to also give you techniques and tools to use to help you along the way because if there’s nothing that I can give you that’s actionable or something that you can use, then it’s not going to benefit you that much.
So if I ever tell a story, it’s going to be relevant. It is going to have a meaning and it’s going to give you something as a takeaway to be able to do. I won’t just talk to hear myself talk – although at times I’ve been known to do that, but this is not going to be one of those times. In these episodes, I’m not going to be that.
Another one of my intentions is to help bring back the joy of singing for those of us who have lost it. I lost it for years because I kidded myself and lied to myself. I basically told myself that I enjoy teaching more, I enjoy being on the background more. All of these stemmed from a scary experience that I had onstage when I was doing a VT years ago. This would be the source of one episode that we’ll do. So I don’t want to go into that right now.
But just sufficed to say that I became afraid to go onstage not because I was afraid of my voice and not because of stage fright – I love being on stage and being in front of people – but I became very, very, very obsessed with the idea that I could forget the words and completely mess up the show.
I used to look at these musicals that I was doing. Once the music starts, it’s like a train that starts. I would tell myself this story. It’s like a train that’s going. If I forget a lyric, the train keeps going. And there’s no way to stop it.
I used to tell myself, “If I’m doing a straight play, it’s not a big deal if I forget a line.” I can just pause, take a dramatic pause. One my colleagues will realize I’ve forgotten or I’ve gone up on a line. They’ll help me get me out of it.
But if you’re singing in a duet or you’re doing a solo and the music is going and you forget the lyrics and you stand there looking at the video and the headlights – which by the way ultimately never happened. I garbled words one time in my life when I was doing Che in Evita, one time time and nobody knew and it wasn’t even a big deal. Yet even that didn’t change my wiring. It didn’t change my patterning. It didn’t change the fact that I was still afraid that I was going to forget the words. It took almost 100% of the joy out of my singing.
When I was doing Che and when I was doing George in Sunday in the Park with George, my favorite – when I think back, this is sad, but I get it. My favorite part of the show was the curtain call when I could finally relax and breathe because it was over. So there was not a tremendous amount of joy in the process of performing the show. I was just relieved when the show was over.
That is pretty sad when you’re getting the opportunity of a lifetime to do two roles that are the opportunity of a lifetime. I didn’t know if I was unworthy. I don’t know what it was. Again, I’ll go into this more in the episode that I cover this in because it will have a takeaway. But I do believe that it probably was a lot of feeling unworthy. The role was beyond me.
And it wasn’t. That’s the funny thing. But in my mind, my inner singer was freaking out even though it wasn’t about my voice because of that underground core belief of, “I’m not worthy of being here. I’m not good enough.” Because of that, even though I wasn’t afraid about my voice, I found something else to be afraid of and it sabotaged my experience, so it just wasn’t very much fun.
Anyway, there’s more about that in an upcoming episode. But it’s things like this that are very, very important. I have seen many of my students, many singers and friends lose the joy of singing as the stakes got higher. The further they went on in their career, the more success they had, the more it started becoming a job and not being fun.
I’ve also seen the exact same thing with singers that were not even doing this professionally and maybe didn’t even want to do it professionally. They started getting so intense on the technical aspect of it that they became immersed in what they sounded like. They became immersed in the sound and the fact that this person was better than they are or they couldn’t sing this song yet.
How many times have I applauded a singer? One of my students, I said, “That was fabulous!” Instead of taking that in, instead of saying, “Oh, thank you. Wow! That felt really cool,” the response, they diffuse it. They immediately say, “Oh. But I can never do that in a song” or, “Yeah, but I can’t really go through the whole song and end on a note that good” or, “Yeah, but it was a little pitchy” or, “Yeah, but my vibrato, I really didn’t have control over my vibrato” or, “Yeah, but I messed up that run” or any number of comments that diffuse what I had said and all I said was, “Wow! That was really great.” They meet it, boom!
So who’s meeting that at that point? Who am I interacting with at that point? Their inner singer. I’m hitting up against a belief system that I cannot break through at that time.
It’s as if they have glasses on that tint everything of certain color and everything they see is colored by the tint on those glasses. Everything I say of a positive nature, of a complimentary nature, of an encouraging nature is met through the filter they have in their inner singer. The belief systems, their core beliefs, the patterns, the circuitry in their brain, whatever is going on with them with their inner singer acts as a filter and doesn’t even let it in.
So it’s for these reasons and many, many more that I’m creating this Inner Singer Podcast to address all of these. And my real intention is that these really get out there. I would love to see singers embrace and love their voices and reach their potential in their singing, in their lives, in their performing. And this is one thing that I would really like to do, to help that end, to help the process of people really falling back in love with their voices, and if they never have loved their voice, falling in love with their voice for the first time, becoming their own favorite singer. So that’s why I’m doing this.
This has been the introduction to all these. The episodes will follow. I hope you’re looking forward to hearing the episodes. Please, if you find them valuable, most singers have singing friends, I would love it if you would share these episodes with people. I would love it if once they get started and you’re feeling that they’re worthy of that, if you would go to iTunes and subscribe. Give us a nice rating if you feel that it’s worthy of a nice rating.
The people who are first hearing this – it’s probably not even on iTunes yet, but if you’re hearing this, if you’re on the third or fourth or fifth episode, then we’re probably on iTunes by now.
So here’s to loving our voices and becoming our own favorite singers and having a lot of fun in the process.
One little final thought here. As you can tell (or you probably can tell anyway), I do not script anything. I never have. It’s not fun for me. It’s not the way I work. Even when I give talks or lectures, I don’t usually script anything. I never script anything.
It’s rare that I even take any notes up on stage with me sometimes to appease the part of me that says, “You should probably take some notes on stage.” To appease that part, I take notes on stage and I generally hardly ever look at them if ever.
So these are going to be pretty much on the fly. I know what the topic is and I will talk. So if you hear a few “uhms” once in a while and anything that sounds like I was talking to you normally, that’s what I’m doing – I’m talking to you only.
I hope you enjoy that aspect of it because scripting is not something that I enjoy doing. To me, it limits the flow of energy.
For example, I said some things today that are not really said before. So it really is fun for me to be in the flow of energy and in the moment and talking to you as if you’re here and being very, very open to where the direction goes versus having to stay close to a script or an outline.
So these are not scripted. I hope that’s cool with you. And so welcome to the Inner Singer Podcast. Here we go.
Thank you for listening to the Inner Singer Podcast. And please share this with all of your singing friends and head on over to iTunes and subscribe. If you found it of value, give us a nice rating. Thank you so much.