Is there more room for positivity in the training of musicians and in their own self-talk? Is there an alternative to the overemphasis on what is ‘wrong’ and a more individualized training anchored in what is ‘strong’?
Many of us have had a version of this experience at some level of musical study. We find a piece of music we love and work very arduously, bring it proudly to our teacher and sing/play it to the best of our ability. As the last chord fades, we are met with perhaps a quick bit of praise, if any, and then are headlong launched into a laundry list of should-haves, could-haves and musts to be focused on immediately. The joy of the piece is diminished and pushed aside as self-doubt of your own artistic talent, values and choices starts to move in and make a new home.
As an experienced collegiate and private vocal educator for over twenty years, I have lived versions of this and have also seen student’s passions for performance replaced by crippling negative self-talk and anxiety. Oftentimes the more individualistic the artistic expression, the more it was “corrected” until there was very little left of the original artistic impulse.
As a pedagogue, I am naturally drawn to guiding my students to make choices rooted in their own creativity and work from that point. Years into my career, I began vocally teaching a very accomplished and renown psychologist and psychodramatist, Dr. Nancy Kirsner, who was herself working towards a certification in Positive Psychology. It was not long until we were both cross-pollinating our ideas about pedagogy, the voice as embodiment of ‘self’ and other hypotheses regarding the supportive and positive ways we worked with our students and clients.
I was as equally fascinated with the world Nancy was teaching me as she was with my world of creative artists. We began looking at the VIA Classification of Strengths (Seligman and Peterson, 2004); a research-based self-report strengths assessment that rank orders your character strengths from 1 to 24. Science and research demonstrate that those who work, live and play in their top/signature strengths experience greater flourishing/happiness and creativity, less anxiety and more self-confidence. My personal VIA results quite literally struck a chord in me as I saw how my personal values reflected my music making, life and career choices. The wheels started turning for us and ways this could potentially help musicians and performers, especially at the educational level.
We started informally experimenting with a population of graduate classical performance majors I was teaching at the time and the response was overwhelming. They reported that very few (if any) teachers had dealt with the more internal picture of their musical choices and motivations and no one had ever taught them from their own personalized strength profile. As the students became aware of their strengths, they began to make connections to different ways they applied them to both their musical and everyday lives. They reported feeling less nervous to take chances and surer of their own artistry.
Eventually we decided to create a more formal pilot study using a population of contemporary voice students and teachers, which we recently wrapped up in January. The initial findings by way of three measures (an anxiety test from Psychology Today, Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion and Seligman’s PERMA flourishing assessment), journaling and feedback were very exciting.
One easy exercise to incorporate into your teaching is the ‘Musical Best-Self Story’. You can do this with your student or pair students up in a larger setting. We had our participants in dyads. Partners took turns in the role of the ‘storyteller’ and ‘strength-spotter’. We created Character Strength Flash Cards that we laid out in front of each pair before they began. For two minutes, the storyteller described a performance that went really well; whether that meant extrinsic excellence or an internal feeling of ‘flow’/total absorption into what they were doing. The ‘strength-spotter’ listened and then began to pull the cards representing the strengths they heard enlisted and describe how they heard these in action. For instance, “I heard you use the strength bravery because this was a performance everyone was nervous about. I also heard you use leadership in the way you gathered everyone right before you went onstage and made sure they all had their beginning pitches…”. At the end, partners switch roles and the process begins again.
As this exercise unfolded, the storyteller became more strength-aware and got to see their own success story through someone else’s positively focused lens. Oftentimes, we don’t recognize our own most natural strengths because we are too close to ourselves and we take them for granted as ‘common’. This is called ‘strength-blindness’ in positive psychology. Most remarkably, students recognized how their signature strengths seemed to show up for them in those moments of excellence again and again.
At the conclusion of our pilot study, students reported feeling validated, less anxious, less concerned with judgement and safer to express themselves in a group setting.
This study is currently in the stage of analyzing the pilot data. There is also a plan for a larger study and they are already working with professional organizations and schools on Character Strength training. For more information or to get in touch, please visit www.positivevoices.weebly.com or email us at positivevoicescs@gmail.com
Dr. Raina Murnak is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Voice and Performance Artistry at UM’s Frost School of Music. She’s a NY trained professional singer and vocal coach with over twenty years’ experience teaching and performing cross-genre on stage, television and in the studio. She gives master classes and private instruction as a thought leader on Stage Presence, Movement and Positive Strength-Centered Pedagogies. Murnak is the Program Director for the Frost Summer Institute of Contemporary Songwriting. She received her BA and MA in Voice/Classical Composition from SUNY Stony Brook and her DMA in Music Theory/Composition and Vocal Pedagogy from Frost.