My Ambition, My Mistake
Besides vocal technique, artistry, pedagogy, voice emergency aid, speech & presentation, vocal rehab, hearing & listening, bodywork, stress & performance and media training, one of my endeavours is to always work on ‘self-connection’, a determining issue in the arts (in life) !
I’ve met quite a number of vocalists who focused on what others did, tried to sound like others, act like others, look like others, but often without knowing very well who they were themselves. It’s also a phenomenon of the era we live in, as our western society likes to teach people to focus on what’s outside, not on what’s inside.
Of course we all imitate sounds of others when we start singing, allowing us to learn to understand what we hear and feel, how to reproduce it in order to develop our own sound and finally develop our vocal signature and artistic identity.
However, we deal with different kind of stuff when someone has a identity issue.
Wrong
So I coached this vocalist/teacher for quite some time. Many things happened in that learning curve, including things we would interpret as positive: a technical breakthrough, a different emotion, approach or awareness, but also maybe something that may not even have been there. As teachers/coaches we like to think we understand someone, get to know someone, to sometimes realise … we are or were wrong !
At some point the behaviour of my student towards me started to change, to finally find myself facing a reflection of my work on a website that wasn’t mine. My thoughts and my way of expression myself had been copied without any request for authorisation, nor credit mention. You might as well call that copyright infringement, or theft !
As someone with a healthy connection to him- or herself is aware of his or her self-worth and wouldn’t even consider acting this way, I realised there was a problem. I gently but firmly urged the student to take down my work and develop her own content. Without success.
Edge
I recalled the student’s tendency to increasingly seek a trial of strength in our encounters and in the ones with others (colleague-vocalists, sound engineers etc). Simultaneously I started to receive feedback (she had started teaching some people I had passed on) saying she was unable to adopt a listening attitude, often didn’t have a clue and sometimes was on the edge of being obnoxious.
There was no way I could accept this situation any longer. Bearing in mind the above and knowing a discussion wouldn’t make much of a difference, I preferred to cease the collaboration. An online harassment campaign reared its ugly head (website hacked with its social media feed crippled by spam), which made me decide to completely cut ties.
So the big question here was ‘where did it go wrong’, or rather ‘where did I as a teacher/coach go wrong ?’ Probably after I’d been assuming something that had not really been there. My ambition, my mistake !
Flattering
It shows the importance of separating our own ambition as teachers/coaches from the student’s ambition. There are traps in a teacher-student relationship, and the art is to be aware of them and juggle your way around them. It’s tempting to accept responsibility for a student’s development, as it’s flattering and make us look good.
However, pedagogically spoken, it’s wrong. We are meant to coach or teach, not save or direct people. Let the student decide where he or she wants to go, otherwise he or she is being kept in a depending role, which is counterproductive and can even become tricky when dealing with fragile personalities.