Allow me to introduce Tucker and Harlan (see photo opposite page), two of the loveliest and most civilized shelties you’re ever likely to encounter.
When I first met my sister’s puppies, they were just under one year old. I expected to find them extremely adorable, but I was astonished by how well behaved they were, especially given their age. They were affectionate and sociable but they showed no inclination to jump all over her guests, chew or dig at the furniture, climb on the couch, or beg for food at the table.
My sister told me that Brian Lee, the dog trainer who had been working with her puppies, emphasizes positive reinforcement and strictly refrains from negative commands. He has found that it is usually completely futile to shout “No!” at a dog because their cognitive abilities are not sophisticated enough to associate your reaction with the specific behavior that triggered it. They will understand that you are angry and displeased, which may stop them in their tracks, but they will probably not learn to avoid repeating the behavior that displeased you or even feel terribly motivated to try. Lee believes that the key to training your dog to desist from destructive or irritating habits is interrupting the undesirable behavior and providing an enthusiastic invitation to do something you would like them to do instead.
Tucker and Harlan demonstrated plenty of evidence that this works for them, and it occurred to me that refraining from focusing on poor behavior while lavishing positive reinforcement in response to good behavior is also an effective approach for letting humans know how you’d like them to behave.
In the voice studio, I’ve always found that positive reinforcement is far more effective than admonishing my students what not to do or indulging in detailed analysis of their flaws. When the goal is replacing a problematic habit with improved coordination, it’s far more productive to focus on training desirable movements than it is to dwell on the things you want them to stop doing.
Implementing a program of positive reinforcement is more challenging when training singers, however, than when training puppies. Give a puppy a treat, and it gets the message right away and will enjoy its reward without reservation. But offer a singer encouragement or a compliment, and you may find yourself competing with negative messages that they are sending to themselves.
Vocal progress usually requires exposing areas of resistance, weakness, or poor coordination in order to work on them. Awareness is curative, so if I am able to help a singer unmask a problem for which they were compensating, merely inviting them to observe and experience the problem is often enough to set in motion a process whereby they can find a solution, either by applying skills they already have or with my assistance. Singers, however, reflexively avoid eliciting sounds and sensations they find unpleasant—so unmasking these problems can provoke a painful reaction. Their progress thus largely depends upon their ability to greet these moments with equanimity rather than being swept away by negative thoughts and feelings.
If you are able to simply note that “this body part isn’t moving in quite the way I would like it to,” that focuses your attention on creating new movement patterns and sends a message to other parts of your brain and nervous system that are capable of working the issue much more efficiently than the part of your brain that made the observation.
If, instead, you react to the information by engaging in negative self-talk, you miss the opportunity to investigate and resolve the problem. If you give yourself messages like “I can’t believe I’m still retracting my tongue! I sound terrible. I’ll never make it as a singer, and this must mean I’m a bad and lazy person!” it’s the neurological equivalent of shouting “No!” at your puppy. It makes you feel awful, does absolutely nothing useful, diminishes your joy in singing and your motivation to learn, and robs you of making the crucial observations necessary for fixing the very problem that irritated you.
Every singer I’ve worked with engages in this kind of reflexive self-criticism to a greater or lesser degree. Even though my students are well aware that voice lessons are supposed to expose and ameliorate imperfections, no one relishes making a sound that is anything short of free and sublime. But in these crucial moments, positive reinforcement from me is not enough to prevent negative internal commentary from interfering with my students’ learning processes. They must learn to greet these moments with equanimity and provide themselves with positive reinforcement.
This is more easily said than done because these reactions are often triggered before the conscious mind can intervene. And then you may find that you’re beating yourself up not only for your vocal deficiencies but also for your failure to greet the awareness of them with equanimity, creating an endless negative feedback loop. Once that process begins, it takes considerable mental skill to pull out of that loop. The good news is that this is a skill that can be developed.
Meditation and hypnosis are two examples of disciplines that can help you adopt a more positive mindset in your approach to singing, dog training, and everything else you wish to accomplish.
Meditation
Meditation is a means of enhancing your power of concentration. It trains the mind to observe thoughts, sensations, and other phenomena with detached awareness and expands the meditator’s ability to direct their focus. While many such practices trace their origins to the mystical component of various religious traditions, meditation is now commonly taught as a standalone technique distinct from its original spiritual or dogmatic trappings.
Those who have no experience with meditation may associate it with a particular posture or ritual—but any situation that is conducive to heightened focus can be used to bring about a meditative state. In The Science of Enlightenment, Shinzen Young points out that everyone has had experiences that relate to meditation, although they may not realize it.
“If you look back on some activity you do in life that’s meaningful to you, you’ll remember that sometimes you’ve been very focused and present during that activity, whereas at other times you can probably remember being rather scattered and find it difficult to be fully present with that activity,” writes Young. “And you probably also remember that the times when you were more focused, more present with that activity, that activity was, on the one hand, much more fulfilling and, on the other hand, probably more effective in terms of its results.”
Young equates the impact of meditation on your mind with the effect that strength training offers for your musculature. “A person’s baseline of presence and focus can be elevated through systematic practice,” he continues. “This is probably one of the most significant discoveries that the human species has made—the discovery that focus and presence can be cultivated.”
While any activity can serve as a meditative object of focus, it is best to keep things simple when beginning a meditative practice and set conditions that encourage a narrow focus. Try this seated meditation focusing on the body sensations associated with breathing.
-Set a timer for a modest stretch of time, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes.
-Sit on a chair or a cushion, assuming a posture that is comfortable but discourages slouching—a position that makes you feel alert but not rigid. Allow your hands to rest on your thighs.
-Close your eyes and bring your awareness to your breath. Notice all movements and sensations related to breathing:
–All movement in your abdominal area
–The rise and fall of your ribs
–Sensations in your throat, mouth, and nose
–Any movement elsewhere in your body that feels related to the breath
–Any sense of tightening or release related to the breath
–Any changes in how expansive or shallow your breathing seems to be
–Any sounds related to the breath
-Any time your mind wanders, gently bring your awareness back to the movements and sensations related to your breath. If you find yourself analyzing or judging aspects of your breathing, again gently bring your awareness back to the movements and sensations related to your breath.
Young teaches a meditation technique called Vipassana. In the West, that commonly translates to insight meditation, but the Pali word “vipassana” means “to see distinctly.” The version of Vipassana meditation that I practice involves observing specific phenomena and identifying, labeling, and tracking the movement of its various components. For example, in the seated meditation described above, you could note breathing sensations of expansion and contraction or differentiate between movements, feelings, and sounds. During a meditation focusing on the thought process, you could label the assorted things that arise in your mind as memories, judgments, plans, questions, or fantasies.
I find the mental skill facilitated by this technique particularly applicable to singing. There are many components to singing technique, so it’s important to become adept at distinguishing between them in order to both focus on them individually and integrate them together. Focused intention is essential if you want to work on the mechanics of breath management without being distracted by the sounds and sensations you elicit along the way. Heightened awareness is essential for keeping track of the individual movements of your jaw, tongue, lips, and soft palate during detailed work on articulation.
Detached, dispassionate observation is essential for gently steering your focus away from emotional reactions you experience in relation to vocal flaws or instabilities in order to concentrate on the actions crucial for their amelioration.
Hypnosis
Like meditation, hypnosis promotes states of relaxed focus and awareness. In addition, hypnosis cultivates greater suggestibility in order to reprogram specific behavioral and thought patterns. While meditation provides for a general, global elevation of your ability to concentrate, hypnosis facilitates targeted psychological and behavioral shifts.
Just as we all sometimes naturally experience states of heightened awareness characteristic of meditation practice, we also organically go in and out of states that could be described as hypnotic. Daydreaming, deep immersion in a film or concert, and absorbing repetitive activities can all lead to the mental suggestibility and relaxation that hypnotists value for promoting lasting change.
Nicholas Pallesen juggles dual careers as an operatic baritone and a hypnotherapist who works primarily with performing artists. I asked him how he applies principles of hypnotherapy to help his clients bring a more positive mindset to the studio and practice room. Pallesen believes that most negative self-talk stems from unconscious conditioning.
“Our brains function by running habituated feedback loops,” he says. “Whatever we focus on, our energy flows into that—any time you check in and observe a thought, you are habituating it and creating a stable feedback loop. Your brain goes looking for references to substantiate what it habitually believes. The trick is to do this in a positive way.”
For example, a singer who has struggled with intonation or flexibility issues for a long time may feel deeply discouraged and fear they’ll never be able to improve in these areas. An unconscious mental habit of focusing on their past failures and their pain of frustration can be enough to reinforce whatever is creating these issues and prevent them from engaging in the steps that would resolve them.
“When you’re in a negative state, it’s as though you are viewing the world around you through a pair of crappy-colored glasses,” Pallesen explains. “They filter out everything but negative experiences, so you aren’t seeing reality as it really is—and you’re also filtering out whatever positive self-talk you’re trying to engage in. Hypnosis can help you take off those crappy-colored glasses.”
Meditation offers techniques for replacing these habituated negative thought patterns with more positive, solution-oriented mental feedback loops. Instead of thinking, “I’ll never be able to sing in tune” or “I hate how I sound right now,” you can ask yourself questions like “What would I like the sound to be? How do I want to feel when I sing this passage? What must I do to facilitate that?”
Positive inquiry and reinforcement is a great motivator for learning, so Pallesen discourages focusing on what it is that you need to stop doing. “Focusing on what not to do is a trap—focusing on the problem will only keep it around longer, because whatever you focus on, you reinforce,” he says.
Accentuate the Positive
The very worst sounds you make in your lessons are often the very best learning opportunities, if you can suspend judgment long enough to observe what you did to create them rather than punishing yourself for them.
One of my students is a passionately expressive young woman who is fluent in several languages. When something goes poorly in her lessons, Spanish is her language of choice for berating herself. Her vehemence is such that I don’t need to understand Spanish in order to see that she is telling herself violently unkind things.
I finally suggested to her that when she is displeased with her singing that instead of cursing herself out, she take a step back and think, “How interesting that such sounds just came out of my mouth.” She responded to this suggestion with an incredulous look, so I asked her, “How do you say, ‘How interesting!’ in Spanish?” Still angry with herself, she sputtered, “¡Qué interesante!” I replied, “OK. From now on, when you have this impulse to berate yourself, just say, ‘¡Qué interesante!’ instead.”
It worked. At first, she would yell, “¡Qué interesante!” with more or less the same derogatory subtext expressed through her old habitual rants—but pretty soon it would just make both of us laugh, interrupting the negativity and creating space for reprogramming her old patterns, not only in her singing but also in her thought processes.
Learning and skill retention are most swiftly, effectively, and pleasurably accomplished in a positive environment. Like my sister’s puppies, your unconscious mind will be motivated to absorb new information when offered encouragement and rewarded with kindness, whereas it will likely respond to stern admonishment with confusion and pain. Your singing practice will necessarily expose issues that are challenging to address and may cause feelings of frustration and habituated negative thought patterns to arise.
When they do, techniques like meditation and hypnosis can empower you with the ability to show yourself the kindness and consideration you’d extend to a well-meaning, lovable puppy. Cultivate a mindset of positivity and curiosity in the studio—and don’t forget to give yourself a treat when you learn a new trick!
Dog lovers in Southern California who would like their pets to be more Zen are encouraged to visit Brian Lee’s website at wayofthedog.com.
