Perfectionism Is Hurting Your Singing
The most technically perfect performance I have ever heard was also the most boring, and I have thought about that a great deal since. Perfectionism does not just make singers miserable. It makes them worse.
Over-analysis makes a voice rigid
A well trained singer thinking about six things at once produces something correct and lifeless. Every vowel where it should be, every note supported, absolutely nothing happening.
The technique is supposed to disappear. If I can see you operating it, it has failed. The audience is not listening to your soft palate, they are listening for whether you mean it.
This is why I sometimes take technique away from a student for a few minutes. Not because it does not matter, but because it has started to get in the way of the thing it was meant to enable.
You are allowed to be bad in my lessons. That is not a nicety, it is a technical requirement. Nobody learns while performing for approval, and a perfectionist in a lesson is performing constantly.
Perfectionism stops you practising
If a practice session only counts when it goes well, most sessions do not count, and eventually you stop starting them.
I see this constantly. Singers who will not practise because they are not in the right frame of mind, or their voice is not at its best, or they have not got a clear hour. What they are actually avoiding is evidence of imperfection.
Fifteen ragged minutes is worth more than a perfect hour you never begin.
The imperfections are often the point
A touch of vocal fry. A breath in an unexpected place. A note that is not quite centred. Those are frequently the moments that make somebody feel something.
Sand every one of them off and you get a performance that is impressive and forgettable. I would rather hear an interesting voice that is technically rough than a polished one with nothing behind it. The first can be fixed in months.
The second is much harder, because somebody has already trained the personality out of it.
I do not repeat something until it dies. If we run a phrase so many times it loses its meaning, or you start getting frustrated, we stop. Endless repetition is how a perfectionist turns a lesson into an exam.
Aim for better, not for right
Perfect is not a target, it is a stick. There is no version of a performance that cannot be picked apart afterwards, so a perfectionist never gets to finish anything satisfied.
Better is a target. Better than last month, better than the take before, better at the specific thing we have been working on. That is measurable and it is achievable and it does not require you to be miserable.
How to practise when you are a perfectionist
Set a time, not a standard. Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes whether it went well or not, and it counts either way. This single change fixes more practice problems than any technique I know.
Record more than feels comfortable. Perfectionists avoid recordings because recordings are evidence, but evidence is exactly what corrects an over-harsh internal judgement. You will almost always sound better on the playback than you did in your head.
And stop before you are tired rather than after. A session that ends while it is still going well is a session you will want to repeat. A session that ends in frustration teaches you that practice feels bad.
What I would do in your lesson
I would probably ask you to sing something deliberately without managing it, which perfectionists find genuinely uncomfortable for about a minute. Then we listen back. Almost always it is freer, more interesting and more in tune than the carefully controlled version.
Book a consultation, £25Working on this on your own is slow. In a live one-to-one online singing lesson I can hear what is actually happening in your voice and fix it in real time. More about how I teach, or how I work with singers who have ADHD.
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- Stop Comparing Your Voice To Other Singers
- The Voice In Your Head That Says You Cannot Sing
Matt Thompson trained at the Academy of Contemporary Music and has taught singing for more than 25 years, from complete beginners to recording artists and performers with international careers. He teaches live one-to-one online singing lessons from a mobile studio, and has ADHD, which is why every lesson comes with a recording, a written summary and a clear plan rather than something you have to remember. Read his story.