351: How To Build Your Singing Confidence - Putting Cookies In Your Jar
Have you ever wondered how to build your singing confidence?
What if you could do it even before you were 100% sure if you sound good?
Confidence is a feeling and it can be something hard to figure out HOW to develop because it can be kind of intangible.
Here are some steps that you can take TODAY to BUILD your singing confidence.
Key Takeaways From This Episode:
- Why singing confidence has NOTHING to do with talent.
- Exactly how to get started building confidence in yourself as a singer.
- 3 FREE Resources to get started with your singing practice today.
- How to start building your singing confidence even if you don't think you sound good.
- The power of accountability, commitment, and dedication to yourself.
Links from this Episode:
Episode 350: How To Set Your Singing Practice Up For Success
Episode 349: How To Design Your Perfect Vocal Warm-Up
FREE Foundations of Singing Higher Course
Full Transcript:
Have you ever wondered how to build your singing confidence? You want to become a more confident singer, but you're not sure how. What if you could do it even if you have incredibly high standards, or even before you were 100 percent sure if you sound good? Confidence is a feeling. It's so intangible.
And here are some steps. That you can take to build that confidence. And that's exactly what we're going to go through today. So let's get started. Welcome to the star singer podcast, taking singers from overthinking and overwhelmed to loving your voice. Yourself and the way that you sing. I'm Tiffany van Bokstel and in the last 17 years, I've taught one on one lessons to as many as 50 singers a week.
That's thousands of voice lessons. And I'm so excited to share what works with you because singing is simple. You're just over complicating it. So let's get started. All right. So confidence is not built by your talent. Alright, I hear this all the time, like I wish I were a more talented singer, but singing is a skill.
Just like anything else, if you want to become a better swimmer, what do you do? You take swimming lessons, you get your booty in the pool. How come it's different for singers who just seem to sit around and are like, Oh, I want to become a confident singer, but I'm not, I'm not talented. You see how ridiculous that sounds?
And yet, I know that. There are some singers out there who do think that way. And I want to tell you that it is 100 percent a skill that you can develop and confidence is not built by your talent. It's not built by how good you are, how great you think you sound, your pitch, your vocal tone, how many compliments you receive from other people.
It's built by your actions, by your consistent. Actions. Okay, so think about this, your ability to have the discipline, face the hard things, build experiences, know more about yourself, that builds something that I like to call cookies in the jar. No, this is not my idea. I've heard this idea from many different places.
But, you get to put, when you do something hard, or when you do something that you said you were going to do. And we're going to go through some specific ways in a second here. You get to put cookies in your jar. There are days, When you don't need those cookies, right? But maybe there's a day when you have a really tough band practice and you can draw on all of your experiences before.
So maybe you have a really tough band practice. You get some feedback that you were pitchy or whatever, and you can draw on all of those other great performances. That you've had and you can remember who you are To have a Mufasa moment, right? Remember who you are, but honestly these cookies in the jar are really really powerful And if you want to build confidence if you want to become a more confident singer then The question, how do I sound?
Does it sound good? If you've been listening to me for a while, you know that's a really low quality question. There are much more interesting questions that you could ask. So today I'm going to pose the question to you, how can I put more cookies in my jar? And I'm going to give you a few ideas and hopefully this kind of creates some more ideas for you or gives you some light bulb moments where you can be like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So daily practice is a great, easy way to put cookies in your jar. Now listen to this. I think a lot of, a lot of singers go through practice and you're thinking about it wrong. All right. We have a couple of episodes in the past Let me just look quick here that are dedicated to practice. For example, the last episode, episode three 50 is how to set your singing practice up for success.
So I'm going to go through seven free resources in that episode. It's episode three 50. So if you want the specifics over how to do that, you're like, okay, I want to practice, but how? Check out that episode and then in episode 349 it talks about how to design your perfect vocal warm up because warming up your voice vocal exercises and Designing a singing practice session and setting yourself up for success are all separate things But if you know how to do those things It's going to make it easier because I bet a lot of people don't practice simply because they don't know what they're doing To practice.
All right. Now, if you're looking for some quick, amazing. Magical vocal exercises. You don't know where to start. I'm going to put the link to my free foundations of singing higher course inside of the description below, and you can just type in your email. And then I'm going to send you those exercises so that you don't have to think you can just do these proven exercises.
You don't have to wonder what to practice, because I find that a lot of times wondering what to practice, wondering how to practice means, you You spend so much time thinking about that and it gets overwhelming and then you just don't practice So I want to make it as easy as possible for you. So now that you have all of those resources Let's talk about daily practice and honestly, it doesn't have to be daily But it can be whatever you set it at for example, if you're like, okay, I'm gonna practice every morning on Monday Wednesday and Friday.
When you show up for yourself and you hold yourself accountable to doing something, to using those resources, to being creative, to singing songs. When you do that, you put cookies in your jar. You know that you've shown up, you know that you're dedicated. And the more you practice, the more you're going to know about yourself.
The more you're going to discover about yourself. The more you're going to say, Man, my voice sounds tired today, but that doesn't mean I'm a bad singer. That just means I need to get some more sleep. And you start to develop patterns from a logical perspective instead of like, Oh my God, I had a horrible practice session.
I just suck. I'm never going to be a great singer. And then going down this spiral. So, setting up practice. And being dedicated and always showing up when you say you're going to is a great way to build cookies in the jar. And a lot of the singers that I work with one on one, a lot of them are scheduling one on one voice lessons for different reasons.
But a big reason that is very powerful for a lot of people, even if that's not your goal in the first place, is by setting up a weekly voice lesson. You build cookies in the jar, because you know that you can. That you have to show up every week for that voice lesson. So it's more likely that you will practice between lessons and you have that lesson time to be dedicated to what it is that you want to improve.
So having a weekly lesson can also build cookies in the jar. It adds that accountability. You're showing up for yourself. You're showing up week after week. Another thing that can put cookies in your jar are tough experiences. Now these can be related to Singing or not, you know, I went hiking this summer.
I did. I went on a big trip. Uh, it was like 30 days, six, six national parks. Um, lots of hiking, 150 miles of hikes, lots of high elevation stuff. I mean, we're talking really athletic hikes. And so I just came back and I did my phase B Krav Maga certification, which both of these things put cookies in my cardio jar, right?
If I can train Krav Maga for 42 hours in one week and then take a three and a half hour long rigorous test, teaching Krav Maga with confidence is going to be a piece of cake. If I can literally climb mountains. Then showing up and doing a three and a half hour test is going to be a piece of cake. And when you put all of your tough experiences, and it could be anything, I mean, anything.
It could literally be like, I'm making this up, but it could literally be like, I survived domestic abuse. Honestly, how is life going to get harder after that? You have put those cookies in the jar, you've survived, you've moved on. That's a cookie in your jar. You know what I'm saying? Any tough experience that you've gotten through, you can put in the jar.
So I want you to think about the things in your life that you've overcome, whether they are related to singing or not. And when you draw on experiences like that, that are big, it could even be something like I beat cancer. If you have beaten cancer, my God, you can become a better singer, right? Let's put things like that into perspective.
So use. Any experiences in your life that were tough, that you've overcome, to put cookies in your jar, to show yourself, to prove to yourself what you've done, and show yourself how possible it is, how deserving you are to show up for yourself as a singer. Now let's talk about any experiences that you have that are kind of related to your singing.
Maybe you're an excellent public speaker. Okay, public speaking and singing in front of people for a lot, a lot of people is a very scary thing. But if you have any experience public speaking, you know what it feels like to have to prepare, to have to practice, to have it come out differently at home in private than when it does on the stage.
And you can draw from those experiences and from those strengths. To put the cookies in the jar. Do you have theater experience? Do you have dance experience? Do you have acting experience? Have you had a crazy performance? When I was a freshman in high school, I got my first role in musical theater as a stepsister in Cinderella.
And for one of those performances, I did not have a voice. At all and we had no understudies I didn't I did not have a voice. It took me an hour to warm up to get one octave Okay, I only had access to my head voice. I did not have access to my chest voice, but I thought okay This is no problem Joy has this higher part And it won't be a problem.
Well, I have this duet called the stepsisters lament and All of a sudden in act three when we do the stepsisters lament I have no access to my head voice. All I have is access to my chest voice. So I looked at my, my quote unquote stepsister and she knew and when we were in the moment, we switched parts.
So I sang the chest voice part and she sang the head voice part. And honestly, I don't know if Nothing is scarier in my opinion than having to sing when you don't have a voice. So I have those cookies in a jar and when I go on to sing and I'm, you know, gratefully healthy, in voice, and ready to go, it's so much easier.
I remember that experience when I had no voice and I was able to make lemonade out of it. Right. And once you prove to yourself that you could handle situations like that, you put cookies in the jar, you become a more confident singer. All right. How are you going to put some cookies in your jar so that you can start to become the confident singer that I know you are?
I can't wait to hear from you. Let's be friends on Instagram. DM me with any ideas at Tiffany Van Boxtel. All the links are in the show notes below. If you love the podcast. Thank you so much for leaving a five star rating and review. I would really appreciate that and we'll see you next.
