Practicing Is Like A Relationship: How To Keep The Flame Alive

What is your relationship with practicing?

Is each session like a date with someone that you love being with, and who loves being with you? Or is it like a marriage that’s gone stale from inattentiveness and boredom?

In other words, is your relationship with your practice rewarding? Or is it just another thing to tick off your list? Or worse, beat yourself up about because you’re not practicing often enough, or well enough?

My relationship with practicing is a love/hate kind of thing. I’ve tried a gazillion strategies over the years and tested some of them with my students.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Keeping The Spark Alive

Strategies are helpful, but it all starts with how you feel about practicing. What and how you practice matters. But the fuel for showing up every day for yourself and your singing comes from why you practice in the first place.

That Why, that initial spark that ignited your desire to become a singer — is something you need to keep alive. If you’re in music for the long haul, through thick and thin, success or failure, a healthy relationship with practicing is essential.

Just like a relationship, your practice needs nurturing. It’s essential to pay attention to it, checking in every day to see how it’s doing, giving it the love and care it needs to grow.

When your relationship with your practice is healthy, procrastination is easier to keep at bay. You can pick up where you left off in your last session, and before you know it, find yourself immersed and in flow.

Connecting your practice to your musical values helps too.

Let’s say that one of your musical values is improvisation. You’ve always wanted to be able to feel more confident as an improviser and decide to make that one of your musical goals.

Once you’ve figured out a goal that has meaning for you, what do you need to practice to achieve that goal? You brainstorm a list of possibilities: A book with exercises for vocal improvisation, listening sessions where you sing with the masters of improv like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, and a teacher that you’d like to study with who specializes in vocal improv.

You order the vocal improv book, and, while you’re waiting for it to arrive, you learn a scat solo — note for note — that you’ve discovered on YouTube. After the book lands in your mailbox, you go through it and work through the material. When you’ve gone as far as you can on your own, you contact a teacher and set up some lessons to get some additional help and feedback.

Or maybe one of your musical values is emotional expression. You’ve been working on some new material. You’ve memorized the melody and lyrics, but when you sing the song, it feels mechanical — devoid of feeling.

To breathe new life into your performance, you decide to delve into the story of who you are and who you’re singing to. You spend some time writing down different scenarios — who you are, who you’re singing to, where you are, and why you’re singing the song.

After fleshing out these scenarios, you sing the song using each one as a template for creating emotion. You record yourself, listen to the results, and sing again, focusing on the scenario that best expresses the feeling you want to share with an audience.

These are just two examples of how you can transform your practice by connecting your musical values and goals. Now you have the beginnings of a practice plan that makes it easier to see what to practice next and infuses your practice with meaning.

The Importance of Play

One of my favorite strategies for practicing is to view it as play. Meditation teacher Thanissaro Bhikku writes about this concept in his book “The Joy of Effort”:

“The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of … practice is to approach it as play — a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. The path doesn’t save all its pleasure for the end. You can enjoy it now.”

Your relationship to your practice shifts when you approach it as an opportunity to experiment and explore. Instead of dreading your practice sessions, you look forward to them. Your mistakes — a note you can’t quite hit, the lyric that stubbornly refuses to be memorized, gives you information that you can use to improve. Practicing becomes a puzzle, a game that you can play where you find the gaps in your abilities and fill them in.

And when it goes well, you can figure out how you did it. Which notes did you lean on or scoop into? What phrases gave you chills because of the intensity of the dynamics? How did your body, mind, and emotions integrate to create the feeling that you want to convey?

When you’ve figured out what made your performance stronger, you can apply what you’ve learned to other songs. Concepts become global, and the time it takes to learn new music decreases.

Like with any creative enterprise, you’ll still rub up against frustration. It’s challenging to reach for a goal and fall short. But failure is an essential part of learning. When you know how and what to practice, you’ll feel confident that your time, energy, and effort are worthwhile and that you’ll ultimately succeed.

In other words, rote practicing is a waste of time. Plus it’s boring!

A Relationship For Life

The skills you learn from practicing will not only help you grow as a singer — they’ll also empower you to grow as a person. When you have a healthy relationship with your practice, you’ll become more creative, resourceful, resilient, and whole in every area of your life. Each practice session builds your capacity to focus, solve problems, and nurture and care for your creativity. You’ll also cultivate curiosity and a willingness to fail — one of the most critical skills of all in your life as an artist.

And, just like healthy relationships that you’ve invested in over time, your practice will always be there for you. If you’ve taken a break for any reason, you can pick up where you left off, like a conversation between two life-long friends that never ends.

Practicing music is a practice for living. Isn’t that a marvelous thought? What better reason could there be to do it!

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