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

Tuning Slide #4.40- Finding Your Voice (#1)

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.
― Madeleine K. Albright

Steven Covey was an imaginative and insightful self-help and management guru whose work changed how many people saw their lives and tasks. His most famous book was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989. He listed three “stages” of growth into maturity and the “habits” that help highly effective people move to the next stage:
1. Independence
1 - Be proactive
2 - Begin with the end in mind
3 - Put first things first
2. Interdependence
4 - Think win-win
5 - Seek first to understand, then to be understood
6 - Synergize!
3. Continual improvement
7 - Sharpen the Saw

Any of you who have been part of Mr. Baca’s trumpet workshops know these seven habits and how important they are to many of us as we have developed our own musical maturity. These ideas have run through many of the ideas on the Tuning Slide over these four years, even though I have never specifically worked with these ideas in a series in the posts. (I think I just made a commitment to do that next year.)

In any case, in line with what I have been writing for the past six weeks about life lessons and music, I thought I would actually deal with an extension of Covey’s 7 habits that he introduced in a follow-up book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (2004). The 8th habit is “find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.”

The minute I saw the word “voice” I naturally turned to music and the ideas from a book on the subject I had picked up last year. The Art of Mindful Singing: Notes on Finding Your Voice by Jeremy Dion who uses mindfulness and singing to describe how music can experience well-being through music. So, as a natural extension of the past six weeks I decided to start with Covey and see how finding our voice- and our song- can bring us greater well-being and then later move into a bit of the ideas from the mindful singing book.

Voice is Covey's code for "unique personal significance." Those who inspire others to find theirs are the leaders needed now and for the future, according to Covey. The central idea of the book is the need for steady recovery and application of the whole person paradigm, which holds that persons have four intelligences - physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. (Wiki)

As the title of the Covey book indicates, effectiveness as described in his first ground-breaking book, isn’t the end. Now he wants to show how people can move from effectiveness to “greatness.” At the heart of that is our individual ability to make choices. It has almost become a post-modern mantra that we can choose how to respond to just about any situation that we find ourselves facing. We can choose to be angry or to forgive, for example. We can choose to wallow in sadness or find ways to move on. We can choose to be satisfied with being mediocre, or we can look for ways to increase and grow in our abilities and skill. That’s where the first seven habits move us.

But many times we are stifled, inhibited or blocked from those movements. The book talks of "5 Cancerous Behaviors" (page 135) that inhibit people's greatness:

◦ Criticism
◦ Complaining
◦ Comparing
◦ Competing
◦ Contending

This list is one that we as musicians have certainly faced.

◦ There is the criticism that others aim at us for making mistakes or, in this point, the criticism we aim at others who we don’t want to be better than us. There are outer critics and our own inner critic. No one is ever good enough for a critic. We can choose how we respond (if at all) to these criticisms or take them and grow with them.
◦ There is the complaining (whining) that I “can’t” do that, I don’t have the time to practice that much, I will never be able to hit that note. Who does the director think he’s dealing with, Doc? Nothing is ever good enough for the complainer. We can choose to stay a whiner and complaining, letting the inner critic win, or we can decide to move on.
◦ There is the comparing of myself to others either better than I am or not as good as I am. When I compare myself to the better musician, I can end up with jealousy or envy or low self-esteem. When I look to compare myself to someone who isn’t as good as I am, I can tend to get that egocentric behavior and attitude we are often told we have. We can choose not to compare with others and seek only to be better that the person I was yesterday.
◦ There is competition. I don’t mean we don’t compete. We will. But if it is a win-lose competition, we have moved into dangerous territory as we may end up only wanting our way to win. We compete in order to be better than the other. We can’t help others achieve their greatness, an important part of the 8th habit, if we are always seeking to beat them. We can choose to reach out and assist others to increase their skills and ability.
◦ Here is contending which leads us to move even beyond criticizing to wanting to make the other person look bad. Contenders are always looking for a fight in order to beat the other. Again, we can’t reach out and help others in positive ways if we insist they are inferior and unable to do what we do.

Covey sees these as “cancerous.” They are dangerous; they break and inhibit relationships. They eat away at who we are. They undermine any ability we might seek to discover. In the end they can destroy the possibility of greatness. Not that there aren’t good musicians who might even embody some of these cancerous behaviors. There have certainly been enough self-centered, angry, jealous, mean individuals who achieve “star” status in all areas of life from music, to politics, to business and beyond. They force their personalities and dysfunctions on others- sometimes as bullies, sometimes as oppressive individuals, sometimes as just plain people we hate to be around.

We can choose to NOT be one of those people. I am deeply saddened when I hear of- or meet- one of those individuals. Some of them are mean to themselves in self-criticism, lack of self-awareness or self-esteem. They are short-changing themselves. Some are mean to others. They are short-changing others- but are also short-changing themselves. They will never discover the joy and wonder that might bring even greater possibilities in their lives.

When we truly find our voice, it will have an impact on all that we do and all that we can be. More on how we do that next week.