Stop Chasing Perfection - Start Singing For Connection. With Melissa Forbes

What does it take to be an effective singing leader? 
Why is community music is so vital for social health? 
How can positivity counteract our innate negativity bias?

In this powerful follow-up with Dr Melissa Forbes, we talk about how singing transforms lives far beyond the stage. From rethinking the deficit mindset of traditional music training to leading groups for people with Parkinson’s, Melissa challenges us to see singing through a new lens: 

Connection, not perfection.

Whether you're a singer, teacher, coach, or someone who just loves voices, this episode will shift how you think about music, leadership and human connection.
#musicleadership #positivity #mentalhealth 

00:00 The singing skill no-one talks about
05:09 Performative versus Experiential music
07:28 What makes a great singing leader?
09:52 Singing for health and Parkinson’s choirs
15:02 A moving story about the power of choirs
19:04 Negativity bias & deficit mindset in music training
22:36 Helping people see beyond their limitations
24:46 Melissa’s three-word mantra

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Transcript

0:00

One of the key skills of a singing leader or a music leader is they could be the most shit hot musician going, but if they act like that in a community hall in front of a group of people with Parkinson's, you are gonna lose them within a minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to present as one of them. You have to be on their level, you have to create that safe space for them to have the courage to open their mouths and use their bodies to make sound. That takes a lot of courage. And for people who don't do it who think they can't, it takes a lot of trust built up by that music or singing leader to, to, to get that happening. So, you know, it's a complete attitude shift really. This Is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. Hello and welcome to This Is A Voice Season 11, episode 13, the podcast where we get Vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. And she's back. Hello. There we were connecting together. Let's talk more about that. I guess I'm talking from a jazz perspective where there are a lot of, there is a lot of prance, not prancing around, but you are proving how good you are in a, in a way. And there's just no place for that in community music. love this. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's just so liberating. It's something very, yeah. So we're not saying, we're not saying that we, we don't value expertise. No. And it's, it's not about that at all. This, but there's something very interesting about this because it's, it's like a, a profile thing, which is there are some people who are absolutely in their element on a stage with a dark auditorium. They can't see the audience. They just do their thing. Very interesting working with an opera company I've worked with for 25 plus years, and one of their specialties is that they do close audience work. And when I say close audience work, I mean in their laps that close. And so when they audition, the audition process is fascinating because they say in the audition letter, before you even arrive, if you are not used to seeing the audience from four inches away, don't come. yeah, Because if you need that separation between you and the audience, you're not gonna work for us. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if, if you are really comfortable being that close with the people that you are performing with or performing to, then great come along. And I think that the same thing applies, which is there are. It's almost it is almost like profiling. If you, if you know yourself well enough, you know how you will react in a situation like that. And if you love being with people and you love being close and seeing their reactions and involving them in what they do, mm-hmm. Then singing leader is probably quite a good thing for you because you're gonna have that, you're gonna have that instant interaction. And as a musician you may not even know that you like that unless you try. Mm-hmm. And, and oftentimes if you are really almost exclusively operating in that performing space and you're doing large venues, it, it's very hard to feel that, that sense of connection with individuals in the room. Yeah. We don't know anything about them. I, I guess there's something ephemeral about it for sure. But it's, so much more based on relationships when you are in a room where you can see ev, you can see into the eyes of every person and, and get their energy directly from them. It's a totally different relationship between you as the musician and the people in the room. Yeah, absolutely. This is just a, a kind of slightly random tangential thought, which is I'm thinking about, and I'm sure you must have them in Australia as well, first of all professional choral singers. I was, and that was one of the things I did, I was a paid chorister. And some of the, the big orchestral works that require often people who are very keen amateur singers, but they're put in a position usually where they are directed and schooled to be performative. And I think that is very different from what we're talking about here because I sometimes hear horror stories about conductors, sorry, conductor people. you know, That's not the best way to get the best things outta people's voices. Hmm. This is a very different experience we're talking about. And it doesn't mean that you can't get some phenomenal results. You've just got to look at what Jacob Collier does in 20 minutes with, 5,000 people in the audience and suddenly they're all singing and harmonizing it, it's just phenomenal. mm. I had a rant there's, sorry, there's a different, it's almost like a different purpose because again, we're back on performative mm-hmm hmm. Versus experiential. Mm-hmm. Hmm um, the choral societies particularly in the uk the the big choral societies are very much geared to the performance. hmm. But we are talking about, 'cause I mean the, the, the choir leaders that we work with tend to be in the experiential Yeah. Yeah. Groups where the, the whole purpose of forming a choir or leading a choir or leading a group of singers is that they work together with them. It's, it's about being there. It's not about preparing for a concert. It's a very different, if you're a classically trained musician, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. if they choose it, That's right. You're a classically trained musician, normally the point is that you lead to a performance of some kind. Hmm. That's what your training does. That's what, that's what you, you are led to. Hmm. And the thing about a lot of the group leaders that we are working with is that there is no performance. It's an experience. It's just turn up and sing, turn up, and, and find. Yeah. There's a great community musician in the UK called Dave Camlin and I've relied on his work a lot.'Cause he thinks very deeply about these things and he describes it as it is a performance, but it's more about performing the relationships. It's not so much about presenting an aesthetic product, but that the performance aspect really comes into the space and the relationships that you are forming and using musical as the music, as the kind of glue that holds that all together. And I, and I really like that. And, and I also think that in my interviews with music leaders. do feel like they are performing too sometimes, when they're trying to teach a particular skill, that you really have to put those performance skills on display, oftentimes in a group to communicate what it is that you want from them, because you can't use notation. You can't use the usual things that musicians the, the shorthand kind of stuff that musicians would rely on. You have to somehow embody that, that's a whole different kind of skill, but it also is a way of performing as a musician for a very different audience, of course. But, yeah, it's, it's just performance in a completely different context to stage audience. Nice. I think that's a, a, a very nice distinction. Absolutely. It leads me to a question that I've been wanting to ask all the time you've been talking, which is From your interviews with group leaders, choir leaders there specific skills? Are there, is there a tick list of things that you go, what do these people need? What do they develop? What do they discover they find? What do they find? look, I think that there are, and I've, there's a number of articles out there that kind of outline what those skills are. They're the usual skills of you need to have strong musical skills. Need to be, I think. Socially, quite an aware person. You need to have good interpersonal skills. My book basically focuses on one aspect of this, which is leadership skills, which I think are probably some of the most paramount skills that you need to have. But there's all sorts of things like you need to be well organized. You need to be able to deal with local councils and local organizations, to set groups, up to get funding. There's so much involved, even evaluation skills. If you've been funded to run a program, you might have to then do the evaluation for the program. There's just so much. It's you, it's almost like the musical skills are just the entry point. And then there's all of this other stuff that opens up that you need to be able to either learn on the job, or acquire through being mentored or whatever. And of course there's no training really for this Mm. Mm-hmm. in any formal sense. Some people would say that's a good thing. Other people would say it would help. Most people that I've talked to learn on the job, and I think for some people that can be quite a risky proposition. Particularly if say you are leading a group it's a singing group for people with mental health challenges and you have no experience of working with that particular cohort. Yeah. That's a lot to take on for somebody who's inexperienced in mental health work, for example. Yeah, I think there's, I've got a, there's a whole article that I've written on this actually. It's called, Pivoting from Music Performance to Music on Prescription. Ooh, lovely. Yeah. And there's a big table with all of the skills that you need and then the particular skills that you need to work on if you're working more in the health and wellbeing space. Yeah it's a big question and whether we train people to do that or not is still up in the air because mostly there's no formal training available. Can we link to that article in the show notes? It's open access. Great. Excellent. It would be very interesting if, first of all, I agree with you that learning it informally by connecting with colleagues and collaborating, just doing some informal mentoring is a great way to do that. But wouldn't it be good if there were more courses? I don't know if there are any formal, education courses on community singing leadership. I think there might be some, i I've a vague idea about that. Have you come across any? I don't think at the tertiary or the university level, there's really much at all. I think there's two schools of thought, in a way, there's it's particularly from the community music side of things, that's always been a very much a grassroots kind of activist, almost semi political kind of movement. So there are people in that camp that would be like, we don't want to formalize what is, what should be I guess a responsive contextual practice, which I understand, but I do think once you get into more of the health space I feel like formal training is quite important and. I think there's a lot of people out there who are just making it up as they go along. And I don't say that in any disparaging way. They don't really have any other choice. And who would really benefit from at least being forewarned, is forearmed, as we say, like having at least some idea of what you're getting yourself into. If, for example, you're working with people with Parkinson's, like, working with Parkinson's singers is not like working with a choir. I can tell you now. Because Parkinson's, you have quite compromised vocal function. So in terms of the sound that you're able to make, in some cases it's minimal, right? So how do you work with a group that can't really create a lot of sound? Also, if you have Parkinson's, eventually you'll have facial masking, like the muscles in the face will, won't react in the same way anymore. And so you get this very flat affect. And again, as performers, we're used to to get some reaction out of people and seeing that engagement, whereas you don't get that so much with Parkinson's. And so these are things which you might find out eventually, but just knowing going in what the particular, the health challenges of your particular group would be, I think is actually really important in that health and wellbeing work. There's the Singing for Health Network in the UK that's doing great work to try to support people with this stuff. So I need to give them a shout out for sure. It's very interesting because it's almost like there are two aspects to this, and one is the formal. And I'm using that in inverted commas, and the other is the creative. And the creative is very much led by the group leader, which is what's the tone of what we're doing? What's the focus, what's the emotional impact that all of that, what, and from that comes, what's the repertoire? What are we gonna sing? How are we gonna sing it? All of that. But then there's the formal stuff, which is if you are going to, you've already mentioned things like funding and council permission and stuff like that. So it's almost I'm, I, sorry, I'm seeing a. I'm seeing a work possibility here. Okay. I'm seeing a guide to. Yeah. And I'm just thinking, because you were referencing Parkinson's and it is going on, I think some things are going on at the Snape Maltings, Aldburgh where people are getting together there They have training there, actually. So that we've got the practitioners, who've learned on the job and who've created some type of a methodology and have a body of knowledge. Obviously there need to be links with medical professionals in certain situations to understand what expectations and limitations. And if we can get that space working more, then I think it's a really powerful thing. Also it's gonna feed down to those of us, who are working mostly in the one-to-one situation. That's, there's going to be cross-fertilization, which I think is something we must talk about before the end of the podcast. We're gonna interrupt the conversation for a second. We know that singing teachers often feel isolated. You keep giving your best in every lesson, but sometimes you walk away thinking, did I even help them? You are not alone in feeling that way. We work with teachers and choir leaders from all over the world who felt exactly the same. That's why we created our Teacher Accreditation Programme. It's not about squeezing you into someone else's method. It's about uncovering what you already bring to your teaching, your values, your voice, your context. You need to feel confident and grounded in the way you work. You'll get practical training you can use straight away in the studio, real feedback on your teaching, and one-to-one guidance from us throughout. And it's fully online so you can do it from anywhere in the world. And it's interactive. You'll be supported at every step of the way, not just during the program, but afterwards too. Our Registered Teacher Community stays connected. If you've been feeling stuck or second guessing yourself, this is your chance to move forward. Book a discovery call with me. Let's talk about where you are now and where you want to go next. Click the link in the show notes. You do not have to do this alone. I mean, I wanted to pick up, Gillyanne, on, how we started this particular thread of conversation, which was about this this global crisis of connection. Because I think that regardless of who's in the room for the leader, there's one common element that singing leaders can work on, and that is the sense of building, a sense of social connection, of belonging, social cohesion, et cetera.. And so that's, why I framed my book in that way. So the subtitle of the book is Positive Music Leadership for Social Health. yes. I think regardless of who's in the room, we can all benefit from more more positive relationships in our lives, having a place where we feel like we belong, we can seek support if we need it, can feel a sense of agency, all of those really important psychological resources. And so I think that I want musicians who might be curious about this work not to be scared off by the seeming complexity of it. I think the exciting part is that musicians are so perfectly placed to actually really build that sense of belonging in a group. Music is the thing that kind of brings us all together, but it's just a really fantastic thing to witness someone say with Parkinson's, I'll use that example'cause that's what I'm familiar with. Someone with Parkinson's who really doesn't leave the house, doesn't want to leave the house for anything but the singing group. That's the thing. So we just had a member pass away just a couple of weeks ago and she, you know, in the last few years, the only thing she really left the house for was to come to the group because the group had become something really valuable to her. And it wasn't really about You know it gets to a point where it's beyond the music, it's about the people. Yes. Yes. About the relationships. It's about, oh, that's a place where I can go where everybody knows me. They don't care that I've got Parkinson's. It almost becomes irrelevant, Mm-hmm. Her husband, who's her carer, can talk to other carers. They felt, they feel seen and heard, in those spaces. music is the thing that enables that to happen in a way that I think is just really interesting. I think there are people running carers choirs as well. Mm-hmm. Because, you know, we need to support them because I think that, the average person is simply not aware of the amount of care that goes on unpaid, largely in people's homes and the toll that it takes on them. Oh yeah, and carers are so susceptible to becoming depressed, It's a very isolating, it can be a very isolating experience and that can lead to feeling lonely and ultimately feeling depressed. Yeah, carers choirs are a fantastic in initiative, I think. Yeah. so interesting that music is such a leveler and you said that phrase early on it levels social norms, it levels, abilities, it levels understanding, it's all sorts of things. yes. In the right, with the right setup. Yeah. Yes. I think, right? Because we also know, because we are all being trained that there are certain music contexts where it's very much about heirarchy, and you are not good enough so you don't belong here. You don't sightread. Yes. You're, you don't sightread therefore, you are not a choir. You're not a, an orchestral choir singer. Yeah. You're not gonna be included in that, or you've lost your top notes because you are in your late sixties, so you are getting a bit wobbly. You have to leave. Yeah. I mean there's just so much of a deficit mindset in that world. Look, maybe I'm being unfair, I always felt like it was about the things that you can't do. And that takes us, oh, we talk about that a lot. Oh, but that, That's about the things you can't do, not the things you can do. Yes, Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. And that takes me to something really important that you talked about in the book, which is negativity bias. Baumeister and Leary amongst others. So we have this negativity bias, it's innate, yes. for, good reasons. And we're hardwired for social connection. Yeah. And how do we navigate those two things? And it seems, 'cause they're opposites what you're talking about here. Yeah. Go. Go. I think that the negativity bias is really interesting and revelatory to understand. Has been for me. Of course we are hardwired to be scanning the horizon for threats. This is like an evolutionary thing. And so when we were out on the Savannah, this was like a really important thing to, to be good at, is like being able to perceive threats and act protect yourself or whatever. And so that's, that, that's the evolutionary reason why we have this tendency to go for the negative or focus on the negative. But positive psychology doesn't say, oh, we, we are just gonna ignore that. We're just gonna forget that because that would be ridiculous. It's about understanding, ok, we do have this innate negativity bias, so we actually have to put a bit of effort in to really bring some positivity into our experience to balance that out. And of course, in modern society, we aren't faced by anywhere near the same kind of physical threats we were back in the in the day. So a lot of that negativity is now directed towards mental states like anxiety Yes. And back to what we were talking about before, like a deficit model as opposed to a strengths-based model. If you're working with a community group, you're not there thinking now these these people can't sight sing, or they can't read music, or they can't, X, Y and Z. None of that comes into it. You focus all the time on what can they do or what can I what are they able to learn? And so I'm a cockeyed optimist, that is who I am. I'm such. and so that speaks to me so much more being constantly focused on. Oh, you're not good at that. You're not good at that. You've gotta get better at that, et cetera, et cetera. And I felt that that kind of mindset was much infused into my development as a musician. So making that switch and, you know, again it's it's not ignoring the negative. I work with people with Parkinson's, they have extremely difficult lives and it would be insulting to ignore that. Yes. and just pretend that everything was fantastic. And so you have to balance that with helping people believe that they can achieve things and showing compassion and understanding of the challenges that they face and not, I think it's really important actually not to ignore the more challenging aspects of people's lives. Yeah. There's something very interesting about the negativity bias, which is if you see a challenge that somebody is having that challenge in with a negativity bias becomes the only thing you see. Mm-hmm. and it becomes a fact and there's nothing you can do about it. And that, that's it. Thank you. Bye. And I think with the positivity bias, you see it and you assess it and you go, how can we work with it? How can we work around it? Where are the spaces that we can go to that will still include that, but we can still move on. Yeah. And I think that what a really great singing leader or music leader will do is help people see themselves beyond their limitations, right? So if you're working with a mental health choir actually my last interview on my podcast was with a singing leader who worked with people with mental health challenges. And over time she learned that her job was really to help people realize that, doesn't matter how many times in their lives they've been told they can't do stuff. Her job was to help them realize that they can do stuff. And in this case it was say, perform in public for people. And the transformation that brings in people is really profound because they might've gone 50, 60 years of their life being told that they're nothing but their illness and that they can't achieve anything because of it. And then they're up performing and getting people dancing in their seats and standing up and giving them ovations and things like that, I mean that's profound, I think. That kind of outcome for people. Yeah, really helping to transcend those negative labels is a big job, I think, of the singing leader. Yeah. And hence you talk about positively energizing leadership and developing those skills. And I will say that as someone coming from, more mainstream singing teaching, and working with singing voice trainers and with choir leaders, I would absolutely recommend the content of your book to anybody because I think there's information in there that we all need. We should ask you when the book is coming out. Yes. I believe it will be in October. That's what I've been told. That's brilliant. We've whipped everybody up to a frenzy and how good this book is and everybody's gonna want it. And now we tell them it's not available till October. Yeah. But in, in a way, I, it takes me to, I think you've said it already, if there was a call out that you wanted to give to people, you know, the singing teacher space And even the word teacher and, let's not get started on the master apprentice model because there's no need in this situation. What would your call out to the singing teacher space be with regard to what this book has to tell us? Three words. Connection, not perfection. Love that. Ooh, love it. Yeah. I'll have that on a badge. That's very nice. I think that's where I've landed with all of this. You know, at the heart of what I'm talking about is that fundamental need to connect with other people. Human to human, heart to heart, to be really seen for who you are. and I think that adopting a positive approach facilitates that really beautifully. Yeah, Wow. Melissa, we are so delighted to have had the opportunity to connect with you on this subject. Absolutely. I think is super, super important. Yeah. Wow. likewise. We think we should, is this a wrap? We think we should probably invite you back to do another one. Oh, yes. There's more to talk about. There is a lot more to talk about. Great. Let's do it. So we'll see you soon. Bye. This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.