New Year's Resolutions

If you can't be disciplined, be clever. Shinzen Young

Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it's for the worse or for the better. George Leonard

Go to work on a regular basis. Seth Godin

 

 

Welcome back, readers! Now that we're one week into 2011, how are those New Year's resolutions working out for you?

Singing well and sustaining a successful performance career depend on excellent practice habits, so this is a fine time to make a resolution to establish or refine your practice regimen. 

The first of my four columns on How to Practice discussed the importance of defining clear short- and long-term goals for your work in the studio. Setting clear and useful goals is a skill unto itself, so it's worth taking a moment to talk about that.

I'm a fan of the SMART Criteria model, first defined as a tool for corporate project management and now in widespread use – I first encountered the idea of SMART goals when I was learning to design fitness programs for my personal training clients. According to this model, a truly effective goal must be:

Specific. "I'm going to be able to get a clean onset on the high Db that starts the cadenza in Tacea la notte and then sustain and shape it beautifully" is much more specific than "I'm going to work on my high notes."

Measurable. "I will develop enough strength and skill to through all of Cio-Cio-San's music with solid technique" is better than "I need more stamina". 

Attainable. It's important to be ambitious, but if you're still in the early stages of your training, setting a goal of singing a leading role at the Met within the next couple of years is not as useful as, say, committing to having a strong five-aria package thoroughly prepared in time for audition season. Something you feel sure you can realistically accomplish is much more valuable than a dramatic aspiration when it comes to motivating you to work on your craft every day. 

Relevant. Know how the technical work, repertoire study, master class participation etc. that you're engaged in fits into your long-term artistic and career plans.

Time-Bound. Set clear deadlines for yourself. Even if you need to adjust them later, it's vital to have a date in mind for the completion of your goal. Open-ended goals encourage procrastination.  

Designing and writing down resolutions and goals can provide a huge jolt of inspiration and optimism! But you also need effective strategies to keep you moving towards your goals. 

Do you have the discipline to pull it off?

Shinzen Young says that when new meditation students see him for a consultation, they so often confess a total lack of discipline that he has concluded that this is just part of the human condition: By nature, we apparently just aren't very disciplined. His suggestion that "if you can't be disciplined, be clever" means creating external conditions and designing structures that will maximize the likelihood of your sticking to a meditation regimen, e.g. sign up for a retreat and pay the deposit; tell people you've begun meditating so that a sense of peer pressure will support your practice; invite friends to join you. In his own case, Shinzen committed to a three-year residency at a Japanese monastery with no easy way to get home!

But I don't believe that these strategies end up making you more disciplined. What they do is establish new, useful habitual patterns of behavior and motivation. 

I exercise nearly every day and have now done so for almost two decades. Someone who dislikes exercise might consider me to be very disciplined, but I would disagree. Discipline to me means doing something whether you want to or not. But I always want to exercise, because I love it and because my daily workouts help me maintain a sense of physical and psychological well-being. 

However, it certainly wasn't always this way for me. As a child I was that chubby, introverted kid who was always picked last for the basketball team. When I became interested in fitness in my mid-20s, I recall that it was emotionally very challenging for me to start working out because I had a long-held self-image as ungainly and weak. It took a combination of three forms of leverage to make me work out regularly: 

1. I was pretty broke most of the time, so I couldn't stand the thought of shelling out for a gym membership and then not using it;
2. I really couldn't stand feeling ungainly and weak - it just didn't gel with the rest of my personality; and 
3. A bad breakup left me needing to blow off so much steam that for a while the only way I could function was starting my day off at the gym.

These three different flavors of discomfort got me out the door enough days, weeks and months in a row that working out became part of my regular routine. Eventually, I developed a high enough level of skill and energy that the positive motivation of physical pleasure kicked in, so fortunately I continue to work out in spite of the fact that I no longer feel broke, ungainly, or pissed off at my ex! 

Establishing new habits begins with providing yourself with leverage that, as in my case here, may actually be pretty unpleasant before the results of your work start providing positive feedback. I have mixed feelings about this, but when I look at the way I've established good habits in my own life, most of them do follow this paradigm. Motivational guru Tony Robbins emphasizes the importance of using the dual forces of the carrot and the stick to motivate yourself to take action towards your goals – it's important to focus on the pleasure you'll get from achieving them, but it's often even more useful to be honest with yourself about the pain you will experience if you fail to resolve that tongue tension, improve your breath management, or memorize the ornaments in your new aria. 

No matter how committed you may be to establishing and following a new routine, it is incredibly valuable to create as much leverage and structure as you can. Something has to provide you with real-time motivation, because if you only make progress when the spirit moves you, you won't get very far. 

When George Leonard says "Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it's for the worse or for the better," he's talking about a phenomenon called homeostasis. We are self-regulating creatures, biologically designed to sustain a pretty stable existence. When it comes to things like maintaining a healthy blood-sugar level or body temperature, this is a very good thing. But, as Leonard points out, "it applies to psychological states and behavior as well". You may set up a fabulous practice regimen, stick to it, and begin to see some of the results you were longing for…and then all of a sudden you freak out, or get sick, or another concern derails your schedule and the new regimen goes out the window.

Sound familiar?

New and unfamiliar = uncomfortable, on a subconscious and cellular level. Even when you have longed for and worked hard for the changes you're creating in yourself, on a very deep level any change at all feels quite threatening. If you know this and anticipate the symptoms, you've got a shot at getting through the defenses that homeostasis mounts against change. 

This is another area where my experiences at the gym were highly instructive. I got a great education in homeostasis when I was doing some targeted work to improve my level of cardiovascular fitness. I was working towards sustaining a heart rate of 146 beats per minute. One day I noticed I had kept it up there pretty comfortably for a while when a voice in my head suddenly started screaming at me "Stop right now or you'll DIE!!" And I nearly did stop! But I somehow had the presence of mind to check things out first: I wasn't feeling any physical pain or fatigue, I wasn't short of breath, and my heart was doing what I had asked it to. I'm pretty good about stopping any activity that becomes painful or dangerously strenuous, but that just wasn't the case. All was well, so I kept going; the voice got quieter and then vanished; and it really did mark a breakthrough for me. 

I met my goal: my fitness level had measurably improved.

I use this as an example of how homeostasis works because it affected me so dramatically and also because, at least for me, fitness is so much simpler to observe and assess than vocal and creative work. The experience helped attune me to how insidious and convincing the voice of homeostasis can be, and I've gotten better at recognizing it in other areas of my life.  

Here is another important thing I have come to realize about goals that doesn't get a lot of discussion: No sooner do you begin taking action on your goals than your relationship to them and your perspective changes, sometimes dramatically. My husband embarked on a double-degree program at The Johns Hopkins University (in Biology) and Peabody Conservatory (in Voice Performance), intending eventually to complete an MD and become a voice medicine otolaryngologist. It was a great path to a career that would make excellent use of his skills in science and music. After two years of study and many intense experiences in both fields, he had the rather startling realization that what he really wanted to do was sing opera professionally. 

 

My blog is another good example of how goals change once you've taken action on them. I had originally conceived of it as a strictly academic singer's resource. But I also ended up writing a post on classic metal singers…one on returning to my musical roots in Vermont…a rant about copyright law…

Then I committed to producing a series on vocal anatomy, found out it was much too demanding to churn out quickly, didn't realize it was time to change my approach, and voilà: Blog derailed. 

I do thoroughly enjoy providing resources for singers here! But clearly I am not interested in limiting my interaction with this community to only that, because for me there is virtually nothing in this life that isn't related to singing.

Besides, I keep an eye on the stats here. You like the fun, wide-ranging columns a lot more than the wonky ones! 

I'm going to keep preaching my views on anatomy, technique, etc., but clearly even I get seriously fatigued when that's all that there is on my plate.

With that in mind, one of my important resolutions is keeping to a much more regular schedule with this blog, as well as allowing it to evolve in accordance with my own shifting perspective and goals. 

Making this commitment to you now will provide me with the leverage I will need to keep writing once homeostasis kicks in! 

 

I'm also using an online resource called Lifetick to provide some clarity and motivation with my goal setting and pursuits. You can access most of Lifetick's features for free, so sign up today and you can start getting nagging emails from yourself, too.

Comments

[Margaret Carpenter]

I liked this post so much that I actually went to the bother to sign in so I could tell you! Thank you!

[Invisible Oranges]

A lot of wisdom and food for thought here! Thanks for sharing! Now I need to get back to you on that singer video thing!

[Claudia Friedlander]

Thanks, @Margaret! Doing my best to walk my talk and practice more regularly and efficiently now myself! @IO - yes! bring it on!