HOW TO MASTER VOICE: 7 Guidelines of Practice

[Music] hi there it's your girl z from transvoicelessons.com and in this video we are going to talk all about practice what should your practice look like how often should you practice how intense should your practice sessions be we're going to talk about all of those things and a lot more so let's get started first i'd like to talk about why i'm making this video most individuals i've worked with initially have very unclear unrealistic and ultimately unhealthy expectations of what practice is how it should look like and how it should function i don't want to call anyone out but i guarantee the majority of people watching this video also have these same unhealthy views about practice so before we talk about what we should do i want to talk about what we shouldn't do here is a general idea of what an unhealthy model of practice looks like you think practice should be anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour you allow yourself to feel guilt or shame when you don't practice the frequency of your practice sessions are low maybe once a day or once every other day or once a week but you're doing it in very intense blocks of time when you are doing practice maybe you're looking at the exercises like little loops or you just get stuck going through the motions but you're not really reflecting on what's happening or what you're trying to accomplish maybe you avoid experimentation because you're so focused on achieving the end goal and by avoiding experimentation plateaus will start to form and lastly maybe you only measure your vocal progress based on the satisfaction you have with your voice if any of these things sound familiar this is the video to help you so that being said what is a good practice model you want to make sure that practice works for you you want to make sure that you're developing a positive feedback loop that keeps you coming back for more you want to make sure that practice is digestible fun and enjoyable you want to make sure that you're looking at progress in a healthy way that allows you to move closer to the goal without striking yourself negatively by your comparison to the goal you want to make sure that you're not just going through the motions and that you're really trying to experiment and try new things at all points in time to avoid plateau these are the essential ingredients that will make your practice successful regardless if you are doing voice music or anything in between [Laughter] key number one we have to construct and nurture a model of practice which is designed in such a way that it gives us a positive feedback loop from the practice that we're doing even when we're failing think about it this way we want to like design and hack our brain in order to rig the system so it's always paying out satisfaction even when we're struggling to do this we have to address several key foundations of practice the ideal length of practice time the frequency of practice what great practice should look like the nature of exercises observation self-interrogation and developing an internal language how we should define progress and architecture to avoid plateau there is actually a way that we can frame all of these dimensions such that it reinforces us gives us motivation and makes us feel good as we're practicing and pursuing the thing practice needs to make you feel good it can't make you feel bad if your practice is making you feel bad you will avoid practicing you will do anything other than practice it is the nature of organisms to move towards positive stimuli and to move away from negative stimuli key number two the ideal length of practice time so what do you think the ideal length of practice session is the duration of a practice session i really want you to get a number in your head before i say it okay well the majority of people i talk to seem to indicate anything between 20 minutes to an hour let me just say right away that is an extremely long amount of time to practice something let's say internally you're holding on to that ideal of 20 minutes to an hour your practice will always feel like a daunting arduous task that you have to fit into your schedule life is extremely complex and extremely messy trying to force a 30 minute block of focused time around something you actually aren't that interested in into your schedule is incredibly suffocating let's say you do practice but you only practice for five minutes if your ideal is 30 minutes you're gonna walk away feeling like that five to ten minutes that you put in maybe you should have done more or you feel guilty that you didn't practice for longer this 20 30 or 60 minute target is toxic and hamstrings your progress by creating a negative feedback loop in the process because you are propping up an unrealistic and monolithic ideal of time so not only is it hard to schedule that and it turns the thing into a much more difficult task to work around but it can also undermine your positive feelings when you do practice for less time than that this comes back to the previous key about we need to design our practice to feel good to be manageable practice should feel like such a small and approachable thing that you're able to do it anytime you want and you're never feeling like it's this arduous task that you have to engage in so what's the answer you might be asking how long should i practice for well any length of practice time has value and i genuinely mean any 15 seconds 30 seconds a minute two minutes these are all amazing lengths of time to target for your practice they're short digestible and approachable windows of time that we can fit in anywhere and wheeled anytime practice should be made as portable as possible by thinking of the ideal length of time as 15 seconds or 30 seconds or a minute it's very easy to practice throughout the day and you may even practice longer and then if you do practice longer you'll feel like an over achiever instead of somebody falling short of the ideal number three how frequently should we practice how often to practice is often a common focal point for beginners this is because beginners like i said before often think about that 30-minute practice session and then are concerned about how often they have to fit it into their day instead by dissolving practice down into just a few seconds it makes the question of how often to practice much less important the answer is simple practice as often as you can if we're thinking of practice in 30 second chunks of time it should be very easy to fit several of them throughout your day short but frequent practice sessions will provide you more results due to the non-linear nature of voice exploration awareness and control and so by having and exposing ourselves to the concept as much as possible we will expedite that process key number four practice doesn't interrupt your life great practice becomes part of your life many people end up hyping themselves up for these big 30 or 40 minute practice sessions once a day where they're supposed to get out their documents open up their videos grind the exercises and sit there and stop what they were doing before they started practicing you need to shatter this mentality practice should be something non-interruptive and fun it shouldn't require you to stop what you were doing if you're on the toilet cooking watching tv or playing a video game you can accomplish great practice while doing those things practice is just so awful when you feel like it's something that has to stop what you're doing because we all exist in this idle state where you know if you message someone and you're like oh what are you up to and they're like oh not much you they're doing something right but they're doing nothing that's their idol state and we love to exist in our idol state our goal is to make practice feel like it's part of the idol state as opposed to us having to exit our comfortable idle state and then go do something else if you can make practice become something that is doable in your idle state you are going to practice far more than if it's some external task that you have to leave your comfort zone to do key number five observation reflection and awareness develop control and skill not exercises a lot of times i think people think of voice changing too linearly they think what's this little routine that i have to do i need to do this five times a day and this for 30 minutes that is not how this process happens going through the motion of exercises doesn't make you any better what makes you better is doing some exercise to explore a thing observing that thing reflecting on that thing and gaining awareness of that thing that means that you are who makes you better at this a specific external exercise doesn't do that for you you can do the perfect exercise over and over and over but if you are not receptive to learning anything from that process you will not have any significant growth occurring from that process gray practice should consist of easily approachable exploratory exercises followed by internal observation of what's occurring during those moments practice is not just about doing things well it's also about doing things poorly or exploring what it means to do something poorly oftentimes people can get focused on doing it right how do i do that right how do i do that right that's really the wrong question if you're stuck on something instead of asking how do i do it right you need to be asking yourself what is occurring to me that is making this wrong you have just as much if not more to learn about the wrong things as you do about the right things often by learning more about the wrong thing you're doing it can actually help you avoid that in the future and for that reason it's important that we understand we can learn from the good we can learn from the bad we can learn from every single vocalization we make and that is the goal of practice to turn you into a sponge that is constantly learning from every action they take and at first that might take some time to get used to that kind of mentality but it's ultimately how we develop skill because it's how we observe how we reflect how we develop awareness and ultimately what gives us control that bad thing you're stuck on is a lesson for you to learn from there is something happening there that you can gain incredibly valuable insight about and if we think that we don't want to be doing that thing we might miss that insight so we need to be observing patient and reflective key number six the perception of progress is a moving target you get to define this goes back to what i was saying there towards the end of key number six progress is something you make up it's an arbitrary measurement that you apply to your own voice and if you think of your progress as only being am i more satisfied with that voice that's going to preclude you from learning from the bad things because if you start getting stuck on some bad things you'll think no i'm not closer to the goal i'm dissatisfied i'm not making progress and that will stop you from learning those crucial lessons that you need to be learning about that challenge you're facing also if we're always measuring our progress based on our proximity to the end goal there are tons of growth moments that we will miss sometimes it's not about sounding more how we want to sound sometimes progress is figuring out the thing we don't want to do sometimes progress is learning better control over something that maybe doesn't necessarily influence the gender perception of your voice in this way progress is always a moving target and it's a moving target that you get to define and if you define it as the end goal it's going to feel incredibly overwhelming because you're always comparing yourself to that end goal but if you say i'm going to focus on progress tonight as getting a little better at this thing i'm struggling with or i'm going to define progress as understanding this thing a little bit more or i'm going to define progress as even successfully getting a practice attempt in that's amazing because that will ultimately feed back into the first point that i made about developing a positive feedback loop if every time you go to practice you are measuring your success against the end goal it's going to feel like a really rough time because every single thing you do you're not at the end goal so of course it's going to feel like oh my god i'm so far right but if you think about practice and progress as incremental goals that lead to the bigger goal it's much easier to do and it rewards you much more often it's kind of like in a video game if the max level is 99 and you're comparing yourself your current level to 99 you're always going to feel like it's super far away but if you're thinking about what the next level is what the next thing is to do just to improve then you get this reward cycle that keeps you clicking and chasing that level so our goal is to be able to define what success is so that we are always successful even when we're struggling that is completely doable completely feasible and it is much more optimal and will make you practice a lot more the road to the end goal is paved in numerous mistakes everybody who gets where they want to be with some skill leaves in their wake a pile of mistakes and those mistakes aren't errors or mistakes that you should be ashamed of they are badges of honor and badges of pride that you should have that shows you that you went through the process if we don't allow ourselves to fail and allow ourselves to feel successful in the fact that we are failing but we're still trying and still learning it will be very hard for us to progress so for that reason the perception of progress is a moving target you get to define and you need to define it in a way that makes you feel good about yourself key number seven always experiment and push against the boundaries of habit it is so crucial that we experiment because through experimentation we avoid plateau plateauing is really frustrating but it is an essential part of growing and whenever you do start to detect that you are plateauing you want to try to throw yourself off you want to try completely new things go into spaces you didn't know this is why i like to think about behavior like a little circle that you draw around yourself right it's very challenging to consider that there's something outside of that circle we have to apply real effort to reach outside the space of behavior that we are used to operating within and when we do that that will often break plateau it will often reveal new things to ourselves that we never noticed on our own experimentation should be built into your practice model because in that way you're developing architecture of practice that is inherently plateau-proof so there you have it those are all the main keys to practice in my opinion if we think about these things we can develop a practice model which is pleasurable enjoyable rewarding beneficial and instructional it should become self-operating and self-driving to where the model itself propels you towards your goals and for that reason that is why this important concept of the feedback loop cannot be overstated your sole goal in practice is to design it in such a way that you're exploring experimenting observing reflecting and getting positive feedback from the process if you're not having fun if you're not enjoying yourself when you practice you're not going to practice it's really going to be hard for you and if you do successfully practice while not enjoying it you're probably going to walk away feeling dysphoric or hurt or upset it is just not constructive for you like i illuminated earlier organisms in such a way whether they are single-celled or multi-celled we are designed to move towards positive stimuli and positive feedback and to move away from negative stimuli and negative feedback now the unique thing about practice is that it's an internal game and so if you're starting to build up internal negativity it'll cascade out into all sorts of negative behavioral decisions so we have to make sure that we are designing practice in a great way at the source we want practice to be fun and engaging we want practice to be short and easily approachable we want to practice frequently and make it just a regular part of our day that doesn't feel like we're moving out of our routine or out of our comfortable idle state to do anything we want to make sure that we're always experimenting and always trying to push the boundaries of what we thought we could do we always want to make sure that we're thinking about progress in a healthy way yes we have an end goal in mind but to reach that end goal we understand that there are lots of little sub goals that won't necessarily reflect if we're closer to the end goal or not in some ways voice learning is a lot like i give you a completely blank map and there's a red x on it that says you are here well it's completely blank so it's completely worthless you start to look at the map and you're like well there's nothing here how does this make any sense i don't know where i'm at so every time you're doing an exercise or an exploration the goal is to populate that map with landmarks so that you can understand where you are and navigate the terrain by relativity of those landmarks [Applause] so yeah that's all for this video thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments please just post down below don't forget to like subscribe and share this video if you found it helpful don't forget to check out my patreon if you would like to join the community or and support my work in the process and of course if you would like to work with me in private lessons or group lessons or have any interesting things to talk about please just email me at transvoicelessons gmail.com and don't forget to check out my music at the link below otherwise thank you all so much for watching take care and have a great rest of your evening [Music] bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: TransVoiceLessons

Views: 27,867

Rating: 4.9723063 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: fylIX28mlyY

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/appojuice]

thank you!!

[u/ClosetCD]

Great video as always! I highly suggest more people use the experimentation aspect of the voice. "Experimentation should be built into your practice model." Yes queen!

How can you know what is out there if you're not exploring in the first place.

[u/KawaEV]

I've been thinking and talking with my therapist a lot about this kind of stuff lately. I had a bad habit of giving myself homework and making tasks harder and harder for myself which made sure I got into the negative feedback loop over and over again. Not just with voice, but with other things I wanted to learn too. I've been learning to appreciate where I'm at and give myself credit for the things I accomplish and understand that lack of progress or knowledge doesn't say anything about my inherent self-worth.

This is an important video, and one this community dearly needed. Thanks for making it❤

[u/Polar_Starburst]

Your points about experimenting and not avoiding failure are spot on and the overall attitude of voice work like this as you express in your videos reminds me of an adage I take to heart: always be writing at least a little outside your comfort zone, that is how you improve as a writer. I learned that while composing 200+ short stories and narrative poems but it applies to pretty much anything you wanna learn and especially the development of one’s character.

Awesome work! Thank you for the video! 💖I’m gonna keep checking out your vids and figuring out where I wanna go with my own voice exploration, as feminizing is only part of what I am tryna achieve with sound.

[u/Femboy_Alice_]

didnt know you were on here too! thank you for all the free content!

[u/WeAreBorg_WeAreHugh]

Great video. Thank you!

(It djents😁)

[u/Virtue_Voidwalker]

YES my best breakthroughs come in the car when I'm going on unhinged rants.

[u/Cats_Under_Stars]

Are you taking students?