Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Good Singing

What are your inner critics saying as you sing? Are they keeping you back from being the best you can be? If so, it's time to take control and set yourself free.

As a psychotherapist, I have heard many stories of early trauma. What has been surprising is how many are related to singing.

One woman, now in her 50s, with a lovely soprano voice, still gets teary talking about her father’s reaction to her singing. “He used to say, ‘Stop that screeching! I can’t stand it!’ I did stop singing for a long time. And even now, there are times when his words pop into my head.”

Early experiences like this lodge deeply in singers. After all, our instrument is our body. There is no place to hide, though in a big chorus we may try. When we sing, what we are presenting to the world is our voice, a primary expression of who we are.

A Chorus of Critics

Even if we have escaped early singing trauma, we may not be able to escape other voices in our heads. Many of us have an entire chorus of inner critics. 

Try this experiment: At your next chorus rehearsal, make a point of noticing what your inner voices are saying.

“You’re so sensitive.”
Are musicians more susceptible to the stresses of their profession than others? Research has found that professional musicians:
  • Show a stronger disposition toward anxiety than do people who are not performing artists.
  • Score higher than other humans on measures of neuroticism, also known as emotional instability.
  • Tend toward introversion—an inward looking personality that prefers to be cautious and plan ahead, and keep their feelings to themselves.

The other side of the coin is that independence is a strong trait in musicians, as is sensitivity.

The authors of Psychology for Musicians (Oxford University Press, 2007) write: “Taken together, sensitivity and independence have been linked to personal qualities such as creativity, intuition, and an aesthetic orientation, all of which can be very important in music.”

Mine go something like this:

“The conductor said the sopranos are flat. I know he’s talking about me.”

“The person standing next to me keeps looking at me. Does she hate my voice?”

“I know I’m not going to be able to sing the high notes today, so why try?”

Singing Is Just a Wee Bit Stressful

The truth is, singing in a choir, for all its wonderful positives, is also stressful. This is not entirely a bad thing. Meeting the challenges and overcoming adversity in order to produce a thing of beauty is exhilarating. But the stress does take its toll and it can contribute to self-defeating behavior.

The book Psychology for Musicians pinpoints a couple of behaviors that I immediately recognized in myself.

1) Self-handicapping is trying to preserve our standing in the eyes of peers by setting up excuses for failure in advance. “I feel sick today.” “I didn’t practice much this week.” “My voice is raspy and I don’t know why.”

In a way, saying such things is protective. If my performance is less than I want, there’s an explanation: “You can’t say that I didn’t warn you!” But, in an ensemble, this behavior serves to let my fellow choristers know that I can’t be depended on today and that can be a drag on the whole choir.

One professional singer, after noticing that she was resorting to self-handicapping, decided to stop—cold turkey. “I stopped babying myself and thinking, ‘oh, this going to sound like this,’ and ‘this will sound bad,’ because it is totally self-fulfilling and then all you notice are the flaws. It is not productive.”

Without self-handicapping, she was able to feel much freer to just sing.

2) Perfectionism, a close cousin to self-handicapping, is having unrealistically high expectations, especially of oneself. Perfectionist musicians are concerned over minor mistakes and inconsistencies, and tend to notice what is wrong instead of what is right.

You would think that perfectionism would produce stellar performances. After all, being aware of performance errors is absolutely necessary for improving one’s skills. But being overly preoccupied with mistakes ultimately derails you from relaxing into the sweep of the music. You aren’t able to give yourself credit for positive improvement, for the things you have done correctly.

For the past several weeks I’ve been learning a German art song. My self-talk has been as brutal as I think the language is: “I can’t speak German. I always get it wrong. It’s all unpronounceable guttural sounds.”

Finally, it occurred to me: “Why do I think I should do this perfectly when I haven’t practiced very much?” That week, I spent 45 minutes repeating the words over and over, and lo and behold, at my next voice lesson, I sang the piece well—not perfectly, but very close.

3) Mistakes with a mission. “Make your mistakes productive mistakes.” Joan Oliver Goldsmith, a choral singer and author of How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life, got this advice from a former executive at 3M.

Productive mistakes are 1) made in the service of mission and vision, 2) acknowledged as mistakes, 3) learned from, 4) considered valuable, and 5) shared for the benefit of all.

When I moved to San Francisco, I joined a very good cathedral choir. At rehearsals, I was surprised to discover that singers raised their hands when they made a mistake. I learned that this was a convention in Anglican choirs. It signals to the conductor that he or she need not spend rehearsal time correcting the mistake.

I have not quite caught on to this ritual. In fact, my first impulse is to try to cover up my mistakes with an averted eye or a well-timed cough. But I see the value of openly acknowledging a mistake. It communicates that I actually intend to do something about it.

Making mistakes is absolutely essential for any creative enterprise. As Ira Glass, the guru behind This American Life on Pubic Radio International, wrote:

All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. ...Your taste is why your work disappoints you.... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

What kinds of things do you have to “fight your way through” as a choral singer? Share your stories in comments.