Home » How to Find the Right Singing Teacher

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Finding the right singing teacher can be difficult. Finding the best coach for you is an important task in any endeavor.  After all, we want to develop our abilities to our maximum potential and finding the right teacher is crucial. When we as adults think back to our childhood, there is often that special person who made a difference in helping us unleash some of our potential. So let's say you are about to take your first singing lesson with a teacher. How do you determine if this is the right teacher for you?

Some people may advise you to walk in to your first lesson as if you're auditioning the teacher. For instance, you may be advised to ask for the teacher's credentials and professional resume, and ask the teacher to sing for you to see if he/she can sing in the style you want to sing. This advice is meant to make you feel confident, empowered, and in charge of your vocal education. It may be well meant, but there is a better method to find out if this is the best teacher for you.

Walk in like a human sponge, completely open to discovery and experience. Embrace the fact that each vocal teacher has a different style, and you have no idea what to expect.

Soak up everything the teacher gives you without resistance so you can really experience the lesson. That's the only way to know if this is something you want to continue.

After the class, ask yourself:

--  Was I comfortable with the teacher?
--  Did the teacher relax me and make me feel freer to sing?
--  Do I have more confidence about my singing and my potential?
-- Am I a better singer after the lesson?

You should feel comfortable because you feel empowered, not because the teacher stroked your ego to keep you coming back. Also, the student/teacher relationship is fraught with problems when students submit themselves to a teacher who seems wiser and more powerful, just to find a way to feel comfortable with the teacher.

There are a few things to watch out for:

-- Did the teacher impose his/her power or did she make me feel powerful?
-- Did the teacher promote his excellence and his credentials rather than make me a better singer?
-- Did he/she have me stand in a certain way that made me feel tighter and more inhibited, with the promise that it will feel better in the future?
-- Did she make me do a lot of breathing exercises rather than have me sing?
-- Did she at all use words such as "correct" and "incorrect" rather than what is effective for my unique voice?
-- Did I feel a genuine rapport with my teacher?

If you walk in with a feeling of auditioning the teacher, you are already creating a level of resistance within you. Instead of feeling truly confident and empowered, you are then entering the lesson from a fear-based point-of-view. You are judging rather than experiencing and learning. If you resist you cannot experience. As a result, you will not have the awareness to know what helps you and what hurts you. Maybe it was you who were not ready to learn? The proverbial "the teacher arrives when the student is ready" is indeed true.

An empowered and confident person feels free to take risks, to be a sponge, to experience and discover. The teacher you want is the teacher that allows for this to happen, where you can experience a newfound magic within you. When you are open to discovery, you can easily recognize if the teacher's behavior makes you uncomfortable. If so, you immediately know that this is not the place for you - and the teacher's influence or the teacher's credentials cannot change that.

On the other hand, if you went for the ideas and suggestions and truly experienced a shift within, and you experienced the release of a newfound voice - a potential you haven't discovered before - then you know it is a road worth taking. By letting go of resistance you become more aware. By becoming more aware of your own experiences, you become empowered.  You then become better to instinctively feel who the people are that you want to be part of your journey. Now you can really be in charge of your training, and study with the teacher that is best for you.

 

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