Have you ever felt like just quitting singing?
I have a million times.
I almost quit this podcast for the same reason!
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “What’s the use, I should just give up”?
In the first part of this episode I’ll tell you why I almost quit this podcast. And how I became aware of what was going on. Hint – I had some help.
Do you trust your intuition regarding your singing?
Do you “push through” with will power?
Do you have someone in your corner that you trust as a mentor or guide?
What does the World Series have to do with singing?
Everything – as usual…(-:
Enjoy!
The Inner Singer Podcast
Episode 28 – Transcripts
How I Trusted My Intuition
Well, hey there, everybody. This is Mike Goodrich. Thanks for tuning in to the Inner Singer Podcast.
And thank you all for having done the ratings and reviews. I really appreciate that. That helps the show out a lot. And for those of you who maybe haven’t yet and would like to, you can shoot on over to iTunes in the Inner Singer Podcast. If you can leave a nice rating and review, that would be great.
That really helps people when they’re searching for terms in iTunes to be able to find the podcast. That way, we can help a lot more people. I know a lot of singers could really benefit from this, so I really appreciate that.
Thank you so much for all of those who have done this so far and for thos who will do it in the future. Appreciate it! Anyway, let’s get it on with today’s episode.
I wanted to share something with you. I’m not exactly sure what I would title this. Usually, I don’t title these podcasts until after they’re finished it because, oftentimes, I just have an idea that I want to talk about and then kind of see what unfolds, and then I know what to call it when I’m finished. And that’s going to be the same with this episode.
But I want to share a little something with you, kind of my experience going through this podcast. Let’s see how you can apply it to singing because pretty much anything I talk about has something to do with singing. That’s the idea, obviously, The Inner Singer Podcast, right?
But anyway, let me tell you what I mean here. Last week, I did a podcast. I asked if some of you or if all of you or how many of you would go over and do ratings and reviews and what-have-you. I kind of leaned on that a little bit heavily. And then, I want to tell you where that was coming from and I want to kind of see so you can see my process and just be really transparent with you with this. We can see how we do this in other areas, again, namely, singing.
So anyway, when I started this show, I had not really obviously many listeners. I have a lot of people on a mailing list (of which you may be one) and I have given out videos and sent emails and what-have-you. I’ve never bombarded anybody, however, with things. I could probably send out more things.
But anyway, then I decided to do this podcast because it seemed like it would be really fun, and it’s an area I think that needs attention for most singers and there was nothing really out there addressing it. There’s nobody really out there addressing this. And I had a lot of questions over time, over the few years that I’ve been doing this—well, actually, about six or seven years I’ve been doing this. No, my goodness, my little boy was eight, and I started doing this before he was born as far as The Inner Singer idea, these principles and these ideas.
And so I started doing the podcast, which I absolutely love. It’s really fun setting up the studio out here, get the microphone going and just talking to you folks. I really love that. So anyway, that’s how it started.
So, the impetus for doing it was fun. “This is going to be fun.” And it’s free, so I’m not thinking in terms of monetary value. But I thought, “Well, maybe it’ll get shared. And wouldn’t it be cool if a lot of people started listening and ti was really popular? People were sharing it and all these kind of stuff.” So this was where my head was. But initially, it was just “This is just going to be fun. Let’s see if it catches on.” So it’s very light, very fun, very free. No pressure.
And when I first started, I thought, “Well, this is really cool because in a way, it was really neat because…”—you know, when I first started, obviously, nobody knew it really existed except some of you people on my email list. And so I wasn’t getting a tremendous amount of listens or downlaods or anything like that.
And I was really cool with that. I thought, “Wow! Okay, this is really kind of neat because I’m really getting my feet wet with this. I’m getting my flow. I’m feeling into my authentic personality on the microphone. I’m feeling really comfortable doing this. It’s just kind of like I’m talking to you like you’re in-person here. It’s unedited, it’s just easy and cool. And I really like it.”
And the stakes aren’t very high because I think, “Well, I’m not getting that many downlaods and that many listens, so I can pretty much be myself. I don’t have to please anybody.”
And then, time went on. Here we are at episode 27 last week. And I even had a student a couple of months back who said, “How’s the podcast going?” I said it was great, I really loved doing it. I remember telling her, I said, “I don’t even check my stats.” My hosting company, you can see stats. You can see statistics. You can see how many downloads you’re getting per episode, what episodes are the most popular. And then, you can kind of go through from a marketing standpoint and you can look and say, “Okay, this title seem to get a lot of downloads, and this title didn’t. I wonder if it’s in the title because that’s what people see first.” I said, “Okay. Well, why did this episode get this many downloads and this one didn’t?”
And so, a few weeks back, I started looking at my stats. And again, from the idea, “Well, this will be fun. Let’s just see how this thing is catching on.” And so I looked at the stats, and I thought, “Whoa! This is going better than I thought, way more downloads than I thought I was getting.”
iTunes doesn’t really give you a way to check how many subscribers you have. I’ve been trying everything to try and figure that out. And apparently, they don’t. Well, it’s not really subscribers. It’s how many downloads. So, I’m like, “Okay, cool. I’m getting some downloads. It seems to be getting some interest and building some traction.
And when I started looking at the downloads on a daily basis, I noticed myself actually leaving the window open on my computer and checking them just periodically throughout the day, “Ooh, I’ve got more downloads. I’ve got more downloads.” And I’m looking at the episodes, “Well, isn’t this as popular as that? What’s going on? I wonder… hmmm…” And then, I look over to iTunes to the ratings and the reviews. “Well, I’ve still only got this many ratings and reviews. It’s great that they’re all 5-stars, but I got to get more.”
I’m just kind of sharing with you my process.
As this is happening, I’m looking at it and it starts going from fun to, “I got to do something. I wonder if I’m not doing something right. Maybe I should be advertising. Maybe I should be doing this. Maybe I should be doing that” and I started, like I said, checking my stats every hour.
And then, in the last episode, I came on and the first thing I did was ask for people to go rate and review it—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I said to my wife, “Gosh! I’ve been doing this for 27 episodes. I think I might be out of ideas. I don’t know what to talk about. Maybe I should interview people and do this, that and the other thing.”
She’s great. She could feel my energy and she said, “You know, I think you’re kind of drifting away from your original idea of doing this because it was really fun. And now, you’re looking at all your statistics and you’re trying to figure out what to title these episodes. You wonder if ‘I should start interviewing people’ because you seem like you think you’re out of ideas.” She said, “You’re never out of ideas. There’s always something to talk about.”
I reflected on that and I thought, “Wow! She’s really right. I’ve created in my mind ‘People are downloading, people are listening. Now, the stakes are higher. Now, I have to live up to this. Oh, I’ve got to get more reviews. I’ve got to get more ratings. I’ve got to get this thing out there.’” And all of a sudden, I started feeling this anxiety. I sat with that and felt into it.
There’s not wrong with looking at stats. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with looking at stats. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with doing Facebook ads and driving them to the podcast and see if people like it. There’s nothing wrong with any of that stuff. But the energy behind it started getting not fun. It started coming from an anxious place like, “I should do this. I better do this. I’m not doing this enough.” It started coming from that kind of an energy.
So, you feel that. You could feel that probably as I’m talking. You feel like, “Yeah,” that energy of, “Okay, I’m looking at my stats. Why isn’t this one going? Why is that one going better? Is it in the title? I can’t figure this out. What’s going on?”
And so you could feel that energy of “What can I do? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing something else?” You could kind of feel that energy versus checking your stats from a different energy, a different perspective and seeing that, “Wow! People really seem to like that episode. That’s awesome. Okay. So I wonder why that one is not as downloaded.” I would think of that title and looking at it much more from a curious place, a scientific place rather than a desperate place, saying, “Let’s play around with that. Maybe I should change that title within iTunes and see if, all of a sudden, it gets a few more downloads. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“And maybe I should run some Facebook ads and beef this thing up a little bit. That would be cool and fun. And maybe I should tell some of my singing buddies, the teachers. I know hundreds of teachers around the world. I used to teach a lot of them. Maybe I should tell them, ‘I’m doing a podcast’ and have them send it out. That would be cool. That would be a cool way to build it.”
Now, you can feel the energy behind that. That’s much more like, “Wow! That would be fun. Let’s see if we can play with this a little bit more and get these numbers up and get more pp hearing this and help more people.” That’s a much different energy than the one that I was falling into.
So now, why am I telling you this story when seemingly, it has nothing to do with singing? Well, let me relate it back to students—and myself, but students that I’ve had over the years—that start to sing or come in when they have a break maybe in their career and they want to improve things.
So, they start working on their voice. They start making progress. They’re very excited. They’re having a great time, “Oh, this is great.” And all of a sudden, they get a major audition or they get a call for some kind of a show. They immediately go into this kind of fear place, “Well, am I ready for that? I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Look, I’ve got to sing this. Now, I’ve got to be great. Now, I’ve got to be perfect. Now, all of a sudden, the stakes are high. I can’t be having fun anymore. This has been great up until now. But come on, now, I’ve really got to do this.”
And so that energy creeps in because the stakes are getting a little higher. They leave the joy, they leave the fun, they leave the play—just like I did temporarily. They start checking their stats. “Is this high note good enough? Is this good enough? Is that good enough?” And all of a sudden, the fun goes out of it.
You can probably relate to that. If you’ve been singing for any amount of time at all, if you’re like most of the people that follow me, most of the people that follow me are intermediate singers to advanced singers. And there are some beginners.
So if you’re a beginner, please don’t be put off by that. I welcome beginners. I love beginners. It just happens to be. I’ve surveyed most of the people who usually land up and follow my stuff have sung for a while. I don’t know why that is, but that’s cool.
But the point is if you have sung for a while, you’ve probably experienced that on some level whether or not you’re just singing for fun, you’re singing karaoke, you’re singing in a band, you’re in Broadway, you’re in a TV show. Whatever it happens to be that you’re doing, all of a sudden, something comes along that makes you feel like, “Uh-oh, the fun’s going out a bit. I’m not enjoying this anymore.”
I’ve had countless students that have experienced that. They’re having a great time. They’re recording a record. Now, they’ve got to play a show. “Uh-oh, am I ready to do this? Now, it’s not fun.” They start letting the fun go.
Now, that doesn’t mean—I’m not being unrealistic with this. Don’t think I’m being all Polyanna and unrealistic. I realize that when the stakes get a little highe, our tendency, of course, is to go much more into our survival. Now we feel threatened, so we go into survival. And sometimes, we default back into our old survival singing habits which are not very supportive. We fall back into our survial inner singer habits which are also not very supportive.
But what I’m talking about is if we can bring an awareness to that, and if you can have kind of like the buddy system—I have my wife which is great. She was able to look at that, feel into it and say, “You know what? You’re going down the road here that you’ve been down before of perfectionism, of you’re losing the fun, of you’re not enough. You’re buying into all these stories that you have told before in other things—in singing, in parenting, in whatever, in everything.” Like we’ve talked about, “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
So, she said, “What if you just made another choice and didn’t do that?” There’s nothing wrong with checking stats. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about advertising. There’s nothing wrong with asking the people who listen to your podcast to go over and rate and review it. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But the energy that it’s coming from is losing the joy, is losing the play. It’s more from a desperate sort of “I’ve got to get these numbers up. I got to do this, I got to do that.”
So, for singing, when stakes get high for something—whether you have an audition, you have to sing in a wedding, in a show, whatever, a concert, it doesn’t matter—just realize that, “Wow! There’s a part of me that really wants this to be perfect. There’s a part of me that really feels like, ‘Okay, the fun has to stop because I can’t have fun and be perfect. I can’t have fun and do this. Oh, no! That can’t happen.’”
I had a job one time. I used to whistle in the halls and the boss said, “Mike, don’t whistle.” I was thinking like, “Really? Don’t whistle. Wow! Okay, don’t be happy. Don’t be happy.”
And it reminds me of the World Series that was just on. My little boy and I watched the Series. We watched all five games as much as we could. We watched the last game which happened to be last night. I’m not sure whenever you’re listening to this. So, whenever you’re listening to this in the future, then clearly, the World Series wasn’t last night. But as I’m recording this, the World Series was last night.
It was really, really interesting in watching that because the World Series, the stakes are high. I was really pleased to hear that one of the coaches, the managers of the Mets, I guess, before the game had a big talk with his guys and said, “The main thing, guys, is to make sure you go out and have fun.”
I thought, “Wow! That’s really cool. That’s a lot different than people of the past who have been, ‘You got to go out and win. You got to win’ and all this kind of stuff, ‘The stakes are high.’” It was really nice to hear that even in the Major League Baseball, some things have transpired where people are talking about fun, “This has got to be fun. If it isn’t, it’s going to be—“
And of course, the stakes are high. There’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of everything on the line when you’re playing the World Series. And if you’ve got an audition for a big Broadway show or you’re singing at a wedding or you’re just going to karaoke with your friends and your friends happened to know you’ve studied voice for a while and now you feel like, “Oh, my gosh. The stakes are high. They know I study. I can’t suck. I got to be good.” So all of a sudden, you think that the stakes are higher and you’ve got to be perfect.
And that’s what I was thinking. That’s the reason that I share this story with you.
And also, when the stakes are high, the joy aspect of it. We can have a tremendous amount of fun and laughter and playfulness even though the stakes are high. I mean, again, you look at major league baseball, and you look at these guys, and you look at their faces a lot of times. And unless something really great is going on, they’ve got these serious looks on their face. It’s been proven that people test better, learn better, perform better in a joyful environment—not in such a strict, staring, concentrating, focusing, not playful kind of thing.
It was really interesting last night. I will say one more thing about this. I didn’t know if I was going to say it or not, but it’s very interesting. We can see this in ourselves. I don’t know, the last World Series here, the Mets against the Royals, it’s a really, really interesting thing to happen. It was actually kind of hard to watch.
It was in the ninth inning. The pitcher for the Mets have pitched a great game. He had shut out the Royals, the entire game. For eight full innings, the Royals had no runs. The Mets had a small lead, two to nothing, going into the 9th.
So, they’re going to the top of the 9th with the Royals. And the first thing the pitching coach did very wisely is he goes over to the pitcher and he says, “Okay, we’re taking the out. Great game! Rest.” I didn’t hear any of his dialogue, but this is what was going on.
The pitcher got really upset. Normal, the pitcher’s throwing a shutout, he wants to go the whole game. But he’d thrown over a hundred pitches. That’s a lot for a pitcher under stress in a World Series game. So he’s throwing under stress.
He got very emotional, got upset. “No, no!” He immediately went to the manager with “I don’t want to be taken out of the game” kind of thing.
Again, I didn’t hear the dialogue, but you see this going on in the dugout and the announcers are telling you what’s going on. So the pitching coach who represents a lot of wisdom and knows that it’s not just about this guy throwing a shutout for the game. It’s about his future. It’s about not abusing his arm. It’s about not over-pitching. And it’s about bringing in somebody fresh that the Royals don’t have time, that they haven’t seen all night, and just getting three outs, boom, winning the game and going home.
But the pitcher who got very emotional about this because he wanted his win and he wanted to take it all the way went to the manager, and the manager gave in. You could tell by the look on the manager’s face that he was going against his better judgment.
So, he went against his better judgment. He let the guy go out at the top of the 9th. The Mets pitcher walks the first guy, and the next guy gets a double which scores the guy at 2nd. Now, it’s a 2 to 1 ballgame, a guy on second and no out.
The manager, you can see, “Oh, okay. I’m getting this guy out.” Bang! He walks aggresively to the mount probably thinking, “I knew I should’ve taken this guy out.” He gets them out, puts in another guy. But the Royals were already on a roll. Bam! They get two runs, tied the game, and end up in 12 innings, winning the game in extra innings. I believe it was either seven or eight to two. Bam! Just wiped him out.
Why did I bother to tell you that story, baseball, which again, seemingly has nothing to do with singing? That’s because if you look at those three guys, if you look at the pitching coach, the manager and the pitcher, and you say, “Okay, how is that representative of me? What can I learn from this episode?”
And again, we have to look at this and say, “Wow! I’m sure they feel horrible and almost unforgiveable.” I mean, gosh, of course, they feel awful.
But what happened to the pitcher? He lost sight of what was good for the team, and actually, even what was good for him. He just wanted to be able to go out and control the situation and finish that game. His main thing was, “I want to finish the game. I want to finish the game.”
The pitching coach who had some space and distance between that felt into it and said, “Nope, you’re a young pitcher. We have your career to think about. It’s best for you. It’s best for the game. Let’s get a new pitcher in who’s fresh, hasn’t thrown all night, the Royals haven’t seen him, they don’t have him timed, they haven’t even guessed him. Bam! Let’s get three outs and go home. Let’s win this game.”
That’s how the manager was feeling as well. But the manager bought into the pitcher’s story, and thought, “Well, the guy… he’s thrown…”
Honestly, I didn’t hear the dialogue, but you could really read the energy. “This guy is throwing an all-hitter—I mean, not an all-hitter. He’s throwing a shutout. He wants to finish the game. He is strong. He is doing well. They haven’t gotten any runs off him. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I should just let him go. I don’t know, it’s kind of against my better judgment. But okay, we’ll go with it. You say you can do it, let’s let you.” Bang!
So, again, what does that have to do with singing? What if these three parts are all part of us? What if the pitching coach is part of us? What if the pitching coach is the higher, awakened part of us that has some space and distance between whatever singing situation that we happen to be in?
And what if the pitcher represents our ego that really wants to control things, “No, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this… or I should be able to do this,” or whatever.
And then, the manager represents the other end of the stick which is, “Well, I think that I should be doing this, but I could probably do this, you know?”
Do you see how that begins to relate?
Let me relate it directly to singing. What if you had an audition? Let’s make the pitching coach somebody else. Let’s make the pitching coach your teacher. And let’s say your teacher is, “This song is so good for you. This is great. You can do it every single time. You can do it on your worst vocal day. You can do this and you can nail it. You’re present with it. You know it really well. Bang! Do this.”
And then, you have the pitcher part inside you that says, “That’s not showy enough. No, I’m not going to knock them out with that. I can do this one.”
And the teacher says, “Seventy percent of the time, you nail that. But what about the other 30% of the time? I think you should do something that a hundred percent of the time, you always nail so you don’t have to worry about it.”
“No, I want to do this, this, this.”
And then, the other part of you starts to side a little bit with the pitcher and says, “Maybe he’s right or she’s right. I probably should do this.”
And then, you have that little battle inside. “No, no, no. I should do this. I can do this.”
“No, but you really shouldn’t. I should probably do this and play it safe.”
“You don’t need to play it safe. You get this thing most of the time.”
“Well, I only get it 70% of the time.”
“Oh, come on! What are you?”
“Okay, you’re right. I’ll do it.”
And so, all of a sudden, it totally becomes about the song.
It has nothing to do with the song. It has to do with the energy behind picking the song. Just like my energy behind looking at my stats, now, all of a sudden, you’re coming from this place, “I can do it. I can do it. I can overcome […] Boom! No problem.”
And can you beat that other part of you who’s trying to side with the teacher or the really wise inner part of you, trying to side with that? But no, no, the ego wins. Boom! The ego, the control. “No, no. I can do this. I know I can do this.”
It has nothing to do with the song. It has everything to do with the energy behind the song.
If you had a joyful, playful energy and said, “Yeah, I do this a hundred percent of the time. This one, I do 70% of the time. I’m really feeling I can do this” and you were really following an intuitive inner sense, “No, I just have a sense. I really can’t explain it. I really feel like I can do this,” that’s much different than getting into a conflict with the bigger part of yourself, and saying, “No, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.” That’s just your control. That’s just control, saying, “I can do this, I can do this.”
But if it’s coming from a different place, then it may be valid to do the one even though you only do it 70% of the time.
See, it’s the energy behind it. Just like there’s nothing wrong with checking my stats, it’s the energy behind it. You could really feel.
When I saw that last night, I knew immediately. I could really feel it. “Oh, my gosh! They’re going to lose. The Mets are going to lose.” The manager totally went against his better judgment. He just went against his gut feeling. He blew his intuition out the window. And it was really, really hard to watch.
And why was it hard to watch? Because it’s so close to home. I mean, how many times have we all done this? We’ve gone against our better judgment. We’ve gone and went against our gut feeling, against our intuition, and it hasn’t worked out so great.
So, in this case, they had a pitching coach who was advising them from the outside. But again, sometimes, that will be maybe somebody that advises you, and sometimes, it’ll just be your intuitive higher sense that has space between you and the situation—you and the audition, you and the recording, you and whatever that has to do with your singing or anything, even life.
So anyway, just look at that. That was really amazing to watch that last night.
But remember the energy that you bring to thing. Is it a “No, I can do this”? Is it a real adrenal control, “No, I’m better than that. I’m stronger than that.” Is it that or is it really a joyful, “No, I really have a sense I can do this. No, this is going to be cool. I’m really feeling into it. And I feel that this is the higher part of me saying. This is not the part of me that just wants to show off. No, there’s something that I can really feel into here”?
So anyway, I just offered those stories to you. I know I’ve talked for a long time. Goodness, this is—I have talked for a long time, haven’t I? Okay! I thought this was going to be a real short podcast.
Anyway, thanks for hanging in there with me. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. I hope this was of some service to you. Okay, bye now.