Tuning Slide 4.41- Finding Your Voice (#2)

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Cover bands don’t change the world – you need to find your unique voice if you want to thrive
— Todd Henry, Accidental Creative

Last week I started a series on finding our voice and our song. I talked some about Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (2004). The 8th habit is “find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.” Covey says that voice is

Your power to choose the direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation.

I looked at the cancerous behaviors that can be barriers to greatness- such as complaining, comparing, contending. But Covey also talks about those who do success and become what he calls “achievers” or those who do find their voice.

Achievers, those who manage to find their “voice”:
▪ develop their mental energy into vision
▪ develop their physical energy into discipline
▪ develop their emotional energy into passion
▪ develop their spiritual energy into conscience – their inward moral sense of what is right and wrong and their drive towards meaning and contribution.

That is quite an insight, in my opinion. He sees that we have four types of energy- mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

▪ He starts with the mental since as we have talked about before, a great deal of success is found in the “mental.” We have to first know where we are going. That’s vision, which comes from developing and directing our mental energy.

▪ But doing isn’t thinking. Doing takes a different energy than mental. No, will power is not what works. What we need is the actual physical energy to move ourselves in action. We know that from the need to practice, build endurance and range, and become flexible in embouchure and fingering the trumpet. But there is other physical energy involved, namely the physical ability to do the work in the first place. This is we need discipline. Physical energy becomes discipline- doing it.

▪ But these two energies, like all sources of energy can run down. The next energy he calls emotional energy which gives us a boost. I like his use of the word passion to describe the focus of emotional energy. Passion is a powerful force. It helps us focus the vision and the discipline into what excites us. Look at the definition and some synonyms for passion: an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. I.e. fervor, ardor, intensity, enthusiasm, eagerness, zeal. Adding these to our vision and discipline and we have more energy to work toward finding our voice.

▪ Finally Covey adds spiritual energy and conscience. Spiritual energy gives life to what we are doing. It grounds us in what is right and the better ways to live and work and treat others around us. It gets us in touch with powers, inspirations, and directions beyond ourselves. Conscience then gives our vision a moral and transcendent quality.

That’s what makes your voice so important- and unique. It doesn’t matter what field you are working - or playing - in. These four sources of energy help me discover me, who I am, what’s important to me, how I want my life to be lived. We don’t just imitate someone else, we are not a “cover band” for someone else’s music. This is ours.

While working on this I was listening to music. On my shuffle along comes a great Bob Dylan song- "All Along the Watchtower." But it wasn’t his version. It was the one far better known- Jimi Hendrix. Was Hendrix leading a cover band? No way! It was Dylan’s song, but this was Hendrix’s voice! The same is true, for example, in the amazing Coltrane recording, "My Favorite Things." It is, as many already know, a song from the musical/movie The Sound of Music written my Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yet Coltrane’s version is unique and definitely his own. It contains his vision, the discipline to work it out, the passion he had for music, and his own spiritual vision. It is no cover version- it is as original as the Rodgers and Hammerstein version.

That doesn’t happen often. Only those who have found their own voice will be able to move in this direction. Todd Henry, who I quoted above, has 10 questions that will help you find your voice. He posted these at Accidental Creative. He says that we may start with emulating others (being a “cover band”) but we must move beyond that to our own uniqueness. Here are his ten questions.

✓ What angers you?
✓ What makes you cry?
✓ What have you mastered?
✓ What gives you hope?
✓ As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
✓ If you had all the time and money in the world, what would you do?
✓ What would blow your mind?
✓ What platform do you own?
✓ What change would you like to see in the world?
✓ If you had one day left, how would you spend it?

◆ Spend some time in the next week thinking about these questions. Put them in a journal or diary and play around with them. I am adding nothing in the way of my explanations. I will let you do that for yourself. Then see how we can apply that to moving with our voice (your power to choose the direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation) into your specific expressions, your song.

Why? Well, back to Todd Henry:

We need you. You are not disposable, and your contribution to the rest of us is not discretionary. Do not abdicate your contribution. If you do, you will spend the final days of your life wishing you’d treated your time here with more purpose. Today, here, now, in this moment, resolve to uncover your voice and to begin acting to effect change in this world. You may be reluctant to accept the role that you can play, but resolve to engage. Die empty.
— Todd Henry, Accidental Creative