Be a Voice, Not an Echo

These days I am trying to get some downtime. When I get home from work I need to turn off the notifications, unplug from the internet and different apps and do my best to switch off my constantly thinking brain…It is not working that well so far and I am still experimenting. 

One of the things I am exploring are cheap and dumb TV series and reality shows.And today I watched videos on Youtube featuring the best bits from The Voice audition.

Not only it did not turn off my brain, but those video compilations brought chain of different thoughts and I ended up typing this post… (watching The Voice is now successfully crossed of my “brain switch off” experiment list).

The first thing I thought of was how stressful and even humiliating that might feel. Standing there, singing and looking at the backs of jurys’ chairs and being at their mercy… Doing your best to impress with your voice and performance.

Those singer wanna be-s are trying to prove themselves. Justify their right to sing. Seek permission and acknowledgement. Get verified. Be accepted…

Will they like it? Will they turn? What will they decide?…

You don’t even know who are you competing with… were the ones before you better?

Then I realised… hey, that’s exactly what happens in life too… we all are trying to impress someone. At a job interview, our boss, that girl in the pub, our friends… we all have people who we’d like to turn around and accept us.

And then, just like all those singers we fall into the competition trap. The trap, where there will almost always be someone who is (slightly) better.And then just like in life some of the competitors are way better than the jury that choses.

And probably that is not fair at all…but then life is not fair either…

Have you you noticed who in the Voice do best?

Who are those who get the “wow” from the audience? The standing ovations, the admired looks and the dropped jaws?

Yup… those who are waaaay better than everyone else. Waaay better than everyone before and after them… than the jury… than most of the singers we keep hearing on spotify… than anything we’ve listened to lately…

In life it is the same… if you’re THAT good in whatever you do, no one will care if you’ve got a diploma or not and the potential employers will be on the stage trying to impress you so you choose them…… 

but then if you are THAT good, probably you won’t need an employer either. You’ll just go ahead and do your own thing in your own terms.

When you are THAT good — you won’t have a competition.

Your only competition will be the better version of yourself.

Have you noticed what many on that Voice stage do wrong?

Nope, it has nothing to do with the voice pitch, how they sing or how they move on stage. In fact in has nothing to do with music or singing at all.

They chose the wrong as we call in marketing “target audience”. What I mean is they are trying to impress the wrong people. They focus on the jury… and what they should do instead is…get under the skin of the main audience…

Because if they manage to provoke their tears and have them mesmerized it would not matter what will jury do. Even if they do not turn around the singer has already won. Jury’s reaction will be already irrelevant at that point!

So be true to yourself, don’t even get into competing with others, be amazingly good at what you love doing and wow the right people… and then you’ll have others compete for you!