Musical Monday - Building Your Confidence

Enjoy this guest blog.  We can't learn enough about building our confidence and the confidence of others. My take is that confidence IS determination.  If you are more determined than fearful, you will succeed.  
Her set of actions are interesting.  In a nutshell, I think it is learn as much as you can, practice, in making mistakes, learn and be brave and keep on keeping on. Fail forward to success. But read on and see what YOU think.  I have editted but not added. 

Confidence. That elusive quality we all strive for as performers and as people. How do we get it and how do we maintain it?

To me confidence is overrated. The lack of it, however, does not quite command the deserved acclaim.

In many, it is precisely the lack of confidence which propels them forward.

Replace Confidence with Determination

The trait I notice in those who succeed is not so much confidence, but more a dogged determination.

It is sheer bloody mindedness and resilience.

It is the ability to try, to fail, and to try again. It is the ability to jump in the deep end with all your fears and insecurities and learn on the job, make it up as you go along.

Those who do this often enough build experience. And experience is vital. It takes time. In our age of social media, apps and computers we are under the false illusion that instant gratification should be the modus operandi of life. But it isn’t.

Building real skills and a deeper inner knowledge and reliable intuition, takes time and experience. One cannot argue with it.

And building a sense of self, an ability to find a place of inner calm and acceptance is hard work. It means accepting oneself with all one’s faults and follies and accepting the possibility that one may not please everyone.

The dictionary definition of ‘confidence’ is ‘belief in one’s own abilities, self-assurance’. I have met very few people who consistently ‘believe in their own abilities’.

10 Actions That Work

So what is there to be done? How does a performer build their self esteem?

This is only my opinion of course, but here is a list of practical things which can be done and which, I have come to believe through experience, work:

1. Be prepared and practice

Preparation and practice are not elusive concepts. They are something you can do, no matter how you feel about yourself.

2. Take sanctuary

Let your work be your sanctuary rather than the place to avoid.

3. Feed your passion

Be creative with your material and explore other repertoire, other artists, other genres, go to concerts, share with other creatives, dream about possibilities.

4. Take any chance to perform

Performance takes practice. The more you do it the better you become at it.

5. Carpe Diem

When an opportunity comes your way grab it with both hands and ride the wave. Don’t let it pass. Opportunities are rare gifts. If you ignore them until a time ‘when you are feeling more confident in your ability’, they may pass you by. Accept that you may never feel consistently confident and get out there and do what you need to do in spite of feeling insecure.

6. Accept

Learn to understand and accept your good and bad days. Think about what you do to sabotage yourself. Do you procrastinate when you feel overwhelmed? Whatever negative habits you have, be onto yourself. Break a large task down into smaller tasks and write lists. Simply get them done. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

7. Appreciate your quiet, awkward, nerdy, uncool traits

Being cool is overrated. Make friends with your demons, sit with your fears, and then get on with what you have to do.

8. Understand that experience takes time

Challenge the idea that your next song needs to be perfect or your next performance needs to be flawless. All great artists have had many failures. In fact they have probably had more failures. That is why they have succeeded in the end.

9. Be creative

Play, play with your music, sculpt a beautiful sound, bring yourself to your performance rather than hide behind it, play, explore, try things.

10. Aim to increase your success rate

..rather than aim to be perfect at all times. If 5 out of 10 gigs are good then that is not bad. Work your way up slowly. Allow yourself to fail, get up, dust yourself off and start again. Learn to laugh about it.

Confidence is a misplaced concept.

Learn to trust that you can get things wrong and then happily keep going. Learn to have faith in your own resilience, without loss of passion, humour and determination.

In this way you are building experience. And experience is hard to compete with.

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Leontine Hass BA, Melb. Uni, BMus. Kings College London, Dip. RAM is a singer, actress, vocal coach, Director of The Associated Studios and WAM.Co (The Word and Music Company) and a contributor to The Ultimate Guide to Singing. As a vocal coach, Leontine has a busy private practice comprised of professional singers and recording artists.