How Failure Can Actually Help You as a Singer
You fall up the stage steps and want to crawl into a hole and die.
You crack on the high note in the bridge and your face flushes beetroot red.
You forget the lyrics, flip into your head voice when you’re meant to belt or open your mouth and nothing comes out.
Every single little hiccup feels mortifying, you lose what little trust you had in your voice in an instant and it can make you want to give up altogether.
We’re constantly told not to fear failure. To be fearless.
Let’s be real - that is NEVER going to happen.
If you’re able to get rid of fear entirely, it may mean you’re a cyborg or a sociopath, so let’s just keep him there for now huh?
OKAY WELL WHAT THEN?
Instead we want to build our capacity to experience failure.
If you’re wanting to avoid failure altogether, be my guest but you’ll be playing small.
Playing it safe feels like a great option until you wake up and realise that you’re not growing, you aren't challenged and are in fact kinda bored.
There’s a certain exhilaration and pride in putting yourself out there as a performer. Singing is a very vulnerable, brave and rewarding thing to do.
When you step out, courageous, you either fly (which feels so amazing) or you falter. Either way, you bloody well did it.
Sure, the more risks you take and the more comfort zones you leap out of, the more you put yourself on the line to potentially slip up. But the important thing isn’t how many times or how far you fall, it’s about how you RISE.
WHY FLEXING YOUR RESILIENCE MUSCLE IS THE BOMB.COM
I’m not going to start ranting about how tough the music industry is because everyone whines about it and it’s just annoying and not useful. But what I will say, is that in this line of work, you need to be resilient to survive.
After each mistake you have the ability to use your resilience muscle to lift weights or binge on ice-cream for the next week and a half. The choice is yours.
The best performers know to take failure with a spoonful of sugar, learn the lesson and move on. Each misstep tells you what you need to spend a little more time working on. Valuable information if you’re able to take it.
So go forth and embrace your mistakes so that if you fall, you fall forward.
If you liked this article, you might like my 5 day fear-smashing, resilience building and joy unleashing email series.
It has snippets from my book The Moderately Tortured Artist to help you move forward and give yourself permission to make epic, wholehearted music.