Podcast – Episode 3: Fake it ‘Till You Make it
Written by Ségolène
Today marks the beginning of a series of episodes to guide you on your Vocal Quest:
Time to find Your Voice.
Now, because in my eyes the voice is a lot more than just the sound we use to communicate, we’re going to divide our search in multiple steps. We need to cover the different aspects of what “finding your voice” means, and you’ll quickly realise that as well as finding our sound, it also means finding yourself.
Some people just know from the get go what they want to be. Some people know straight away how they want to be heard, what type of personality they want to exude, what type of emotion they want to embody. However, it’s not always crystal clear for everyone.
If you’re trying to figure out what your voice is and most importantly, how to access it, you need first to understand that it’s so much more than the language and the words you’re uttering.
In order to find your voice, you have to look into who you are as a person, what you are passionate about, what image or emotion you’re trying to embody. You have to identify what vocation you’re after, what path you want to walk.
Be it in art or life or work, if you don’t know what vocation you want to go after, if you don’t know what your vocation should be, it’s time for a little introspection.
If you’re trying to find your voice, find your vocation, and you’re interested in a few things, consider yourself as a temporary cover band. You know what a cover band is. These groups of musicians you hear at weddings, celebrations, or that you find online
that take well known songs, but sing it their way.
It’s a great way of exploring the vocation, the realm that you’re after, studying how others have done it before, and experimenting. Seeing how you would have done it.
In order to get to your own voice, you have to experiment first.
So, take something familiar, play with it, and then see if you feel ready, inspired
enough to move on to create something new.
It’s not about copying. It’s not about “faking it till you make it”. It’s going for the full experience of trying and trying and trying again until you find truth in what you’re creating and what you do.
Because ultimately, what you want from your Voice, is for it to embody YOUR values and YOUR truth.
It’s not something you can manufacture. And, similarly, you won’t ever be able to just manufacture a voice, honesty or confidence. You either have those or you go on a quest to acquire them.
So let yourself freely play with what YOU already know.
Let yourself look at it through the lens of YOU.
Have fun taking what already exists and experimenting with it using YOUR own tools.
You can lay strong vocal foundations by giving yourself the gift of introspection and reflection. Playing around with your values, your beliefs, your vision of creation and combining them with something that you love and feels familiar is a formula conducive to the release of your expression.
Let’s rewind to our cover band and the “fake it till you make it”.
Now, the cover band is not faking being an artist. The cover and is not faking being a musician. The cover band is taking something that already exists and adding a twist, experimenting with how they think the song could have sounded. “Faking it till you make it”, which is an advice still too often thrown out there to supposedly assist you in your confidence building, is a completely different beast and not one I would recommend to invite in.
In a video he posted about a year ago now, Gary Vaynerchuk, also known on social media as Gary Vee, breaks it down very accurately:
Faking it will not give you the Freedom of Expression,
of Creation, that you’re after.
Faking it will not give your voice resonance or power or confidence.
You can put on the confidence-jacket, however, your speech will be empty because you will not have gone through the experience. You will not be bringing flesh to whatever it is you’re trying to create, to express or be.
If you’re faking it, everything that you give life to, everything that you create, everything that you give will be empty, because:
You can’t fake values.
You can’t fake honesty.
You can’t fake truth.
Give yourself the gift of honesty. Ask yourself the right questions:
What is it you want to embody?
What values do you want to share?
What do you believe in.
List the things you’re good at.
List the things that you enjoy doing.
Your values lie somewhere in between.
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