I’ve started to master singing and I think there are three main mentalities that allow you to produce a good sound, maybe a 4th step as well.
Step One: Relaxation
The mentality is that you feel completely and totally relaxed in your shoulders, neck, but MOSTLY the throat and vocal chords. Literally, every note has to be zero effort.
This is achieved by (in order of importance):
Breathe support
Keeping open for high notes
Warmup
Step Two: Sit on the Note
Work on sitting on the note in the back of your throat instead of moving up or down (especially when going up). A good trick is to imagine moving down when you are going up for a note.
Step Three: Let the Consonants Carry the Sound
The last step is focusing on enunciating, basically letting the “speech level” words carry the sounds.
After all these steps, you should be left with clear notes that are on key, but the final step is always letting your voice and tonality tell a story and the emotions you feel.
I started to understand what it means to have “self-discipline” and using that to build self-confidence.
It isn’t about holding yourself to arbitrary rules and forcing yourself to do things that you don’t want to do (but think you “should do” or that other people think you should do).
It is about challenging yourself. If you have a challenge mindset, you don’t worry about failure, you are interested in the possibility. If you have self discipline in a challenge, it means to focus on that and as you follow through, you start to build confidence.
As Goggins says, you don’t get happiness or confidence from comfort, you get it from facing yourself and facing your fears.
The big issue between people who really understand and those who are fake motivation is that people who are fake push themselves for other people, they push themselves out of fear. The people who understand, have embraced fear, they push themselves WITH the fear. People who don’t understand, disconnect from themselves and ignore fear. The people who understand CONNECT with fear, feel it MORE not LESS.
I am trying some new things out to update my routines and actions from the last post.
My morning routine: short walk outside. No computer or phone until I walk outside and get some good sun exposure.
My reset. If I feel overwhelmed, take a shower or go into my closet.
Practicing the transition from my chair to my door: I’m going to mark a tally on my “Active Life” tracker calendar (shout out to my girlfriend <3).
In trying out this new “Active Life” tracker, I decided the following today after trying it out today:
I will leave the apartment as many times as I can
If I feel tired and want to sleep, I can just go to the gym and come back after
If I want to play Valorant or doomscroll, I can go out, do some quick work, then come back and go on my phone
I’m also proud of myself for doing some sketching today in the “woodcut” style that I plan to use for my business card.
I like it a lot but I want to continue on working on making it more clean like this:
Some thoughts:
It helps to look at a photo reference
Might help to sketch out a design beforehand
Need a harder brush (sharper edges) for the image
Now it’s time to plan my day and look at yesterday’s questions.
What am I going to do about my art coaching and AI gaming companies?
Am I behind schedule and if so what do I do about it? Yes, I am behind schedule. I think what I need to do about it is that I want to focus more on the business side of things. For coaching that means finding clients and for AI gaming I’m not sure yet. Either way, I need to start figuring out what it looks like to run the business.
Should I extend the schedule? Maybe a little, but at the moment no.
Am I losing money? Yes, but this is something I want to do and get better at. The best thing to do for me is to not to have a gameplan, just run with what I have until the money runs out. Perhaps I could also try to find a business partner or something to level up to the next step or collaborate with my current business partner more.
How do I get out of my procrastination phase and get working? Leaving the apartment more. Doing a deep clean of my apartment.
What do I do about my art coaching website? Create a powerpoint for it, create a basic website.
How do I get everything done in such a short period of time? I don’t need to. I failed at section one of the business, but that’s ok. Failure = growth. I learned that not taking faster action to get to sales doesn’t work as well. Maybe I need to get more people involved to help me or to just bounce ideas off of.
Should I start registering for fairs? Yes most definitely, also think more about what I can give away.
Should I pay someone to design the website for me? I absolutely could, it probably is a very good idea.
How am I going to get the motivation to start drawing? How do I start drawing consistently? I need to find the joy in just creating this new art style.
How do I start going to the gym and working outside the apartment consistently? Through my “Active Life” tracker! And from being the hero, and valuing my body as a temple. And by leaving the apartment every time I want to do something unhealthy (going outside, then coming back and gaming etc.)
How will I start cooking again and cleaning up my apartment? Where will I find the time? We can do it piece by piece, we also don’t need to cook immediately, just work on it slowly.
How will I prepare for the next week of work? How do I balance my other businesses? I should focus work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for a specific time period (8-5). Then trust in the process. If I leave the apartment a lot, things will get done on all fronts.
When will I continue to work on my Javascript projects? What is the breakdown between AI work time and coaching work time. Not sure, we have a couple of options. We can focus on coaching, switch gears to AI therapist (as greater chances of monitization), or try to create a release schedule. Or forget about getting something out as being a full stack dev would be pretty valuable and worthy skill on its own right.
Now to write some of the questions I have for tomorrow:
How am I going to balance contract work with my businesses tomorrow?
What can I do to make sure I get enough sleep for jiujitsu?
What is the plan for getting customers for my businesses?
Should I sign up for a consultation with a Fiverr coach for javascript? Should I work first to get an understanding of full stack?
Should I start looking for someone to build my coaching website?
What can I give away at the fairs?
What is the next step for my woodcut art style? What is the plan for the business cards?
When am I going to create my powerpoint for my coaching website outline?
I’m happy, I think two mentalities that are helping me are:
Whenever I want to do something unhealthy or distracting (youtube, Valorant, etc.) first leave the apartment then do it when I come back. I usually get more done, are more in touch with my body and don’t feel the need to self medicate after.
At the end of the day, imagine what I wished I got done, what would make me happy if I got done and turn those things into a list of questions to tackle and solve tomorrow.
I was in Taichi class the other day and my instructor said something very interesting.
She told us that if you are leaning forward, then you are “giving too much”. And if you lean back too much, you are “accepting too much” and when someone gives you a compliment, all you need to do is say a simple thank you.
It is an very interesting concept in taichi, this idea of always being in balance, always sitting on your heels even when pushing forwards.
I really want to experiment and see how much I can apply this to things like Valorant or productivity.
I’ve always had trouble finding a relaxed position for my tongue at the roof of the mouth. I always felt that I was forcing it and in the past when I tried to “mew” I got terrible headaches.
However, I noticed I spend a lot of time breathing from my mouth and I wanted to fix things so I used a bit of connection theory to come up with an idea on how to hold my tongue and I came up with this simple technique:
Imagine your spine ending at your tailbone and reaching up all the way and ending at your tongue
Imagine keeping your spine open at extended
This imagery has a couple of benefits:
Most importantly for me, this allows me to move my body and my tongue without feeling like I cannot maintain tongue posture (mewing always felt static and forced to me)
I’ve been thinking so long about the fear of failure and embracing pain since the fear of failure holds me back in almost every area of life.
David Goggins is famous for being someone who has made his thing embracing pain.
It’s interesting because I always wrote people like Goggins off, and I still feel like he is missing the subtle touch, the emotional and artistic, but I actually think he is onto something,
Some of the main takeaways:
Embracing showing how messed up you are don’t care what anyone thinks
Everyone is messed up, if they are judging you, they are just better at hiding it than you
Use every naysayer as motivation
When you embrace your faults, you will find the who you really are and pursue that
Self discipline is creating self respect
This self discipline thing has always been interesting to me because I’ve heard this before. But I don’t really understand it. Isn’t discipline yelling at yourself?
The embracing failures and not hiding your failures to see what you really want to be is really telling to me as well. I always wonder what I should do, but I can wonder what I could do. And being willing to show everything wrong with me just will get me closer to clarity on who I am.
