Be a Voice, Not an Echo
Sometimes when my brain is tired thinking about thousand things in-parrallel and I try to switch it off I am finding refuge in stupid stuff. Usually it’s low quality Netflix series or some dumb reality TV shows.
And yes, I realise that this may not be “on brand” and that I could have spent my time better - eg. read a good book or write instead. But oh well, sometimes it helps, so who cares?
This time I was watching The Voice audition.
Not only it did not turn off my brain, but it also brought chain of different new thoughts … (watching The Voice is now successfully crossed of my “brain switch off” experiment list I guess…).
The first thing I thought of was how stressful and even humiliating that might feel. Standing there, singing and looking at the backs of jurys’ chairs and being at their mercy…
Doing your best to impress with your voice and performance under a spotlight in front of a huge crowd of strangers.
Those singer wanna be-s are trying to prove themselves. Justify their right to sing. Seek permission and acknowledgement. Get verified. Be accepted…
Will the jury like it? Will they turn around? When will they decide?…
They don’t even know who are you competing with… were the ones before them better or worse?
Then I realised… hey, that’s exactly what happens in life too…
We all are trying to impress someone.
We try to impress at a job interview. We wanna impress our boss, that girl in the pub, our friends, stranger on social media… we all have those people who we hope will turn around and accept us.
And then, just like all those singers we fall into the competition trap. The trap, where there will almost always be someone who is (slightly) better.
And the we will fall into the next trap. Trap of comparison… where we will keep comparing ourselves with others…
I think some of the competitors at Voice are way better than the jury who choses.
And probably that is not fair at all…but then life is not fair either…
Have you you noticed who in the competition does best?
Who are those who get the “wow” from the audience? The standing ovations, the admired looks and the dropped jaws?
Yup… those who stand out. Those who stand out. Those who surprise…
And obviously those who are waaaay better than everyone else.
Waaay better than everyone before and after them… than the jury… than most of the singers we keep hearing on Spotify… than anything we’ve heard before…
In life it is the same… if you’re THAT good in whatever you do, no one will care if about the rules anymore - tables would turn and others will be trying to impress YOU so you choose THEM……
But wait a minute….
If you are THAT good, probably you don’t need them either. You can just go ahead and do your own thing in your own terms… because those who you will be doing it for would love you even without the acknowledgement, status, titles and all…
When you are THAT good — you won’t have a competition.
Your only competition will be the better version of yourself.
Have you noticed what many on that Voice stage do wrong?
Nope, it has nothing to do with the voice pitch, how they sing or how they move on stage. In fact in has nothing to do with music or singing at all.
They chose the wrong as we call in marketing “target audience”. What I mean is they are trying to impress the wrong people. They focus on the jury… and what they should do instead is…get under the skin of the main audience…
Because if they manage to provoke their tears and have them masmerized the jury would have no other choice but follow the crowd.
And even if for some reason they do not turn around the singer has already won. Jury’s reaction is kind of irrelevant at that point!
So be true to yourself, don’t even get into competing with others, be amazingly good at what you love doing and wow the right people… and then you’ll have others compete for you!
Good luck rebels.
I am rooting for you!