Jeanie's Blog

Voice Science or Vocal Pedagogy? You can’t win either way.

You need both but you can’t get married to either.

William Vennard, Marilyn Horne’s teacher, was one of the first people to do voice research with Bell Labs. His book, one of the best (and my personal favorite), Singing The Mechanism and The Technic, is clear and precise. Written for classical singers at about 1962, it is  comprehensive and practical. I have read it so many times, my first copy fell apart and now my second copy is looking dog-eared. Every serious singing teacher should read this book (and many others), more than once. Vennard successfully combines what was known about voice science in his day with the long tradition of classical vocal pedagogy as passed down over the generations. The book strikes a balanced tone between the two.

The folks who use “voice science” to sell their wares are not, in the truest sense, scientists. As someone who was studied in one of the world’s most prestigious music acoustic labs by the “founding father” of vocal acoustic research (my words, not his), Dr. Johan Sundberg, I understand voice science very well. I do not call myself a scientist any more than I say I am a jazz vocalist or a rock singer, even though the video posted on this site has me singing in those two styles. (I am a classical soprano and a music theater specialist). I do not use the science to show that I am “right”. I have videos of my larynx and vocal folds and show when I teach, and other research videos also, but I do not use them to claim that what people are seeing is “the right way”, I just show them so participants can watch the anatomy and physiology as it is operating in a live person or in several people. I have incorporated my knowledge of science into vocal pedagogy and I teach as a singing teacher, not a voice scientist.

If you looked at the video of my throat recorded while I sang, and you knew anatomy and physiology, you would see the same things I see. You would also see different things in other singers’ throats whose sound is similar to my own. Are their throats “right” and my throat “wrong”? Of course not! Would watching the video help you do what you see? Probably not, unless you were very unusual.

There are, however, teachers of singing who use research they have done to “prove” their methods are scientific. They have videos showing what their throats or vocal folds are doing to make a specific point about their own teaching principles. It is important to understand that their videos do not prove anything other than they are videos. That’s not science, that’s TV.

An ethical scientist is not for sale. A scientist does not do research by “custom order”. If you enter into research to prove something, it’s not research….it’s marketing. Research has theories to test, ideas to explore, not preconceived goals to prove.

Paying no attention to science is a good way to get lost in vocal study. Understanding voice science can help make whatever kind of training you get make sense. If it doesn’t make sense, either you don’t understand what you are being taught or it’s wrong. Knowing voice science (in isolation) doesn’t mean you will know how to apply it to yourself or to a student as a way to improve singing. You can be an expert in science and sing badly and teach poorly. Science can explain things to us but it cannot teach us how to make the science into practical, applicable behavior changes. It cannot make you sound great when you sing, but knowing it might prevent you from singing in a way that is truly terrible. MIGHT.

You Can’t Win Either Way – Be Careful

Find the middle path, otherwise you can’t win either way. What Mr. Vennard wrote in 1963 is still valid as basic vocal information, but it applies mostly to classical vocal production. If, however, you want to re-invent the wheel when you start singing or teaching CCM styles, stop. That isn’t necessary and it doesn’t make sense either. If it doesn’t feel good and sound good, stop. Singing is still more important than science. Don’t get them confused.

 

From Wikipedia:

Occam’s razor (also written as Ockham’s razor, and lex parsimoniae in Latin, which means law of parsimony) is a problem-solving principle attributed to William of Ockham(c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle can be interpreted as stating Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Occam’s Razor In Singing?

There are very complicated methods of learning to sing. They have multiple  requirements, they are complex and elusive and, perhaps, challenging. They are convoluted, obtuse and when the participants uncover all the hidden secrets, they are part of a special, privileged group that knows more than all the others. They have their own special code terminology and phrases and they do certain maneuvers that others cannot do. A secret society. Cool, to those who are in it. Strange to those who are not.

There is nothing “Occam’s Razor” about that kind of training for singing. 

Oh dear.

No, actually, the simplest, most direct way is always the best way until an even simpler way is discovered. This principle operates in all of science. A straight line is the shortest route between two points.

Somatic Voicework™ has few principles: locating three distinct vocal qualities or textures (chest, mix and head), singing undistorted vowels (IPA /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ /ae/) and standing erect with minimal effort so that the inhalation can be deep and full in a quiet chest (rib cage) and the exhalation can coordinate the movements of the ribs with those of the contracting abs. We gain control over exhalation pressure (managing volume) and varying between breathiness and nasality (or brightness) for tone quality in various vowel configurations. That’s it.

Learning to work with these principles can be a slow process, because, if done well, these few simple principles can encompass all of what singing is in any style. It allows the natural voice to emerge over time and the singer to discover what it is about his or her voice that is unique and special but also to explore what style or styles of music appeals most. It also allows someone to take the voice far past where it goes on its own but without hurting either the vocal folds or the muscles of vocal production overall and without singing in a way that feels imposed from outside. These principles are tied to honest vocal expression, musical expressivity, and personal satisfaction. They help to eliminate struggle, efforting, and discomfort and promote vocal health.

Somatic Voicework™ never, ever asks for anyone to move any structure within the throat on purpose. It does not assign any special terms or words to the sounds people make, other than those mentioned above. It does not ask for the throat to remain in an immobile position nor does it advocate that all sounds are some version of speech. Countertenors are not singing in a speaking voice quality but they are almost always  singing freely and well. How is that done? Over time. It honors all other methods that respect the knowledge of the past, when singing was passed from one individual to another without science to help us understand what we were doing, and incorporates present moment respect for what we have learned in recent decades from science about vocal production and health.

If you are a student of singing or a teacher and someone tries to convince you to tilt your thyroid cartilage, or constrict your aryepiglottic sphincter or retract your false folds, or anchor your body in order to breathe, or to put your larynx up or down, or lift your soft palate as if it were your pinky finger………ask yourself, “Why would anyone want to bother with that?” Who could have sung better than Leontyne Price or Rosa Ponselle, who could have given us all a better impression of longevity in singing than Ella Fitzgerald in the past or Barbara Cook or Tony Bennett right now? Do you suppose any of them deliberately constrict anything or retract anything in their throats? Do you think they would understand a request to do something like that?

Just because people can look inside the throat (with a fiberoptic tube) when they sing doesn’t mean that what they see is good. If the person looking has a  squeezed, tight, forced or swallowed sound, but thinks that that is a good thing, and decides to turn what they see into a method of teaching singing, does that mean it’s a terrific  idea? Think, dear readers, of simplicity and comfort, of conditioning and freedom, of joy and sharing. That is the easiest way to go.

And remember that what we feel when we sing may be very different from one individual to another, even if the actual physiological behavior is exactly the same. And we might feel things in the same way when the vocal behavior is different one person from another. There are many muscles involved in making vocal sound and they can combine in multitudinous ways to produce a similar acoustic result. Why would you want to try to imitate the physical behavior of someone else’s throat? Why?

What about your ears? What if your singing is just unpleasant? Should that be ignored because you have gained control over your larynx directly? I think not.

The body likes to move. It likes ease of movement. It likes activity. It likes being strong. Strength is acquired through resistance but resistance is not any kind of deliberate squeezing or restriction of natural movement.

Occam’s Razor In Singing?

Always follow Occam’s Razor and take the simplest, easiest road to your goal. Your heart is the starting place and your throat is the destination.

Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method — the Occam’s Razor way to learn to sing!

 

If you are in the midst of a career one thing you certainly do not want to do is totally change the way you sing because someone told you that is a good thing to do.

Do you have a real fear of change?

If you want to be an ethical singing teacher, you need to be able to make whatever sounds the student needs to hear. Talking about the sound is never going to be as good as making the sound. After all, we learn to speak by the age of about 2 simply by hearing our parents and caregivers talk to us.

That means that if you are a CCM singer — you do jazz or blues or gospel or rock — and you want to be a true master of vocal function, you will have to learn and master a classical song and a music theater song well enough to perform them with the appropriate sound quality and stylistic characteristics in front of an audience. The audience, furthermore, needs to think that whatever style of music you are doing in each moment is your home base style. That means no accidental bleed-over.

Most teachers of singing are afraid to let go of what they do because they do not want to lose it. OK. I admit, it can be scary to look at what’s on the other side of the fence, particularly if you are deeply invested in what you learned and how you use it. I am not afraid to make any sound that human throats make and that is because I wanted to make every sound that humans make, but in organized ways that are codified by the musical marketplace. I know that if I am going to sing repertoire, I need to put myself in that sound long enough to do a song and do it well. If you would like to consider yourself to be a vocal master, then you must be able to get into and out of every style well enough to make it fly. So, if you understand how to do what you do, and if you are willing to make sounds that your students need to make even if you don’t need them yourself, and if you are willing to trust that you might have to temporarily let go of the known to go into the unknown, then I encourage you to dig deeply into your singing skill set and ask yourself how much you want to increase your mastery of your throat, body, mind and heart. It’s scary but you won’t get lost. You might even find something really valuable that you didn’t know existed. It’s up to you.

Parlor Tricks  — that’s all they are.

I have encountered the phenomenon of “moving the structures inside the throat deliberately” many times in the past.

No method, no matter whose it is, should be teaching anyone who wants to sing well to move any structure within the throat  or deliberately stop those structures from moving. Read that sentence again.

Go back to Garcia, to Lamperti, take a look at Vennard, Reid, and Richard Miller. Read Oren Brown, or Meribeth Bunch Dayme, or Daniel R. Boone. Read medical literature, speech pathology literature. Every single reputable, reliable, well-accepted source has said the same thing for over 150 years — leave the throat alone! 

Once people could see inside via fiberoptic examination, they could observe what was happening during singing. If you were a lousy singer, and your throat was constricted when you sang, you would see that constriction. But, if you didn’t think you were a lousy singer but instead thought you were great, you might decide that what you saw was also great and that everyone should do what you do. In fact, that exact scenario has happened more than once. If you were such a person, it follows that you might then say you had done “scientific research” to support the fact that others should sing just like you. Then you could sell that idea all over the world. All you had to do was make a nice package and away you go, teaching all over the world.

Other people who sing, and who wanted to learn how to sing in a new or different manner, wouldn’t know the difference one way or another, making them easy marks. They could easily be duped, buying whatever was told to them by the “scientific research” person, ignoring the fact that his or her sound might be horrific. It is no surprise that people will go along with anything if they can be convinced that it is “correct”.  Caveat Emptor.

Let me say very emphatically. It is NEVER EVER good to deliberately move the structures in the throat for their own sake. Yes, you can learn to constrict the muscles inside, you can learn to lift the soft palate, you can push down on the tongue to hold the larynx low or somehow hold on inside the throat itself. These maneuvers are parlor tricks, perhaps useful for parties, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with free, authentic singing.

Singing is a heightened form of human expression meant to carry emotional truth to the listener. It is meant to be harnessed to full and free inhalation and exhalation which is controlled by coordinating the sound with the airflow. Exercises that maneuver the muscles of the throat so that people can deliberately control or restrict the muscles of the throat are pointless. Exercises that allow singers to learn to let go, sing freely and develop personal musical expression are vital. There is a huge difference between them.

Be aware that there are a lot of methods out there. There are a lot of ideas about how to sing rock, pop, gospel, jazz and other styles (including classical styles) and many of them are simply bad news. They cause tension, restriction, limitation, forcing, holding, squeezing, distortion, and imitation. They  produce “instant” results that do not hold up over time. They stand in the way of emotional truth in music and they serve only to inhibit natural behavior in the throat and body. Nothing in the physical body does well when the body is deliberately restricted and cannot move or when it is forced to make movements it has no business making.

Some people are terrified when they sing and they want to be taught to hold onto something in their throats so they feel secure. There are many methods that will cater to those desires. Somatic Voicework™ will have nothing to do with that. We leave the throat alone and allow it do move and ride on that movement. Vocal exercises exist in a musical universe, not someplace where people get up and sing exercises for an audience. If you want to see how that works, go to www.somaticvoicework.com and click on the sidebar and listen to me sing.

Exercises exist to help singers be musical, accurate, and expressive. The next time you go to a cocktail party and someone offers to “move her soft palate” in order to entertain you, or says she can “retract her false folds” to impress you, or offers to pull her larynx down, or put it up into position #1″, excuse yourself, walk away, and get a breath of fresh air. You will need it.

Why would anyone have fear of training?

I have written here before about people who are afraid of training their voices lest it make them sound different. There are those who think that training somehow is an admission that you need help, in the sense of not being “good enough” (a very ignorant point of view, indeed). There are those who think that training consists of having someone else listen to you and tell you how to “relate” to the song, such as what is found on The Voice or American Idol. (NOT). There are those who think that training means that you sing everything in an operatic voice regardless of what the music is or how it was meant to be performed in terms of style.

There is a recording out now that promotes opera singers doing the music of John Denver. Long ago he made a recording with Placido Domingo called “Perhaps Love” that was quite successful. It is a very good example of two men singing in the same pitch range in very different vocal qualities. Denver’s voice was completely natural and Domingo’s very suave and sophisticated, although, to Placido’s credit he scaled his voice down to match Denver’s (probably without electronic help, back in that day). I have not heard this new recording, but I can’t help but wonder what it will be like with all those opera singers. Who knows, maybe they can adapt their voices even more than Placido did.

I come back, again as I have in the past, to say if a bunch of CCM singers got together to record Puccini and Verdi arias in their own style of vocal production, how would the classical world take that? Would classical people rush to purchase the record? Perhaps now, as opposed to decades ago, they would. Tastes have changed quite a bit in recent years. But would they just laugh at it?

Going back to the idea of training, functional training should be aimed at sound for its own sake, separate from repertoire but with the idea of the style of the repertoire in mind when the training is about half-way to a professional level — perhaps after two years. In the meantime, learning classical songs, whether art songs or opera arias, will not add anything to the ability to sing rock, pop or gospel, although it wouldn’t necessarily be harmful. It could be an enormous  waste of time. Yes. There is something valid in fearing that training the voice will make it  “sound different” but if it is done properly it will simply make the person sound more authentic. Of those vocalists who have gone outside their primary sound, who has been really successful in the marketplace?

Sometimes it seems that all the opera singers in the world want to prove that they can cross over to other styles. Most of the time, they are not too successful. A few, like Eileen Farrell, and Leontyne Price, made recordings years ago that were excellent,  but they were wise about their choice of material and the arrangements.

Fear of training is real and sometimes, depending on the kind of training and the length of time over which it takes place, it is valid. There isn’t really a fear of “no training” but in some people there probably should be!

 

New Year, New Directions

Each new year begins with hope and anticipation toward new directions. Maybe it will be better than last. Maybe it holds adventures, and surprise, gifts and blessings. We all wish for those things, and for peace and health. We cannot, however, know what the year has in store, plus or minus. All we can do is be as accepting of each moment as it comes and allow it to roll through us and through our lives as gracefully as possible.

There is always suffering in life (until you get to sainthood or bliss consciousness) so the thing to do is greet suffering with equanimity and aplomb. If you allow it to enter in and see it for what it is — being out of control — you can lessen its impact by not having it overtake you and become who you are. Sometimes this takes considerable work. The easiest thing is to get stuck in the sorrow and make it your reason to exist. It is possible to build a world on avoiding your suffering by making others suffer. In fact, most of what doesn’t work in the world is based on those attitudes.

We are living in a very frightening time but we do not have to add to that fear by being afraid in our own lives. We can reside in a mode of personal peace and gratitude, address the various kinds of discord that arise as they do, and release whatever is not serving the present moment to make it calm and peaceful. Sometimes great sorrow is the best way to learn and grow, to see things in a new way that ultimately brings you to greater wisdom and insight.

If there is only one energy here in this universe (as we understand currently) and it is all energy and matter, sub-atomic particles and waves of light, and nothing is outside that universe; if we are made up of star-stuff; if our DNA is closely related to that of some other species (it is) and if we know that babies do not come into this world full of hate, then we have plenty of reasons to focus on that which we share and to ignore that which makes us different, except to honor those differences and see them as a thread in the infinite tapestry of human being-ness.

So my wish for those who read this post in 2016 is that you have the blessings you desire, that you sing from your heart, that you honor all life on this planet – human, animal, and planetary – and that life opens to you 362 more days of amazing, fantastic discovery.

Ethics? Who talks about ethics?

We live in a society in which ethics is rarely discussed. Often people don’t really know how to answer when asked if a particular person’s behavior is ethical.

Some people confuse ethics with obeying the law. Some people think it is about doing whatever one wants. According to the dictionary ethics is that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and the ends of such actions.

The issue then is — what is “good” and what is “bad” regarding motives or end results? What, exactly is ethical behavior? Some people are not taught what might be good or bad in an organized value system grounded in a society, a culture, a religion or a broad moral philosophy. In fact, many people are not taught those things and are left to operate on their own (as in the above example) or to act as if ethics do not matter at all. This is compounded when there is no punishment for acting in an unethical manner. You can be unethical without breaking a law and you can often be unethical and get away with it with no repercussions of any kind.

Even in a profession whereby an attempt has been made to establish a code of ethics (see AATS, NATS and NYSTA), there is no actual punishment for violating that code once it is established. It’s an honor system. Sometimes, in the rare case wherein someone gets caught doing something unethical, that individual can still proceed as if  he or she has done nothing wrong. If they were worried about “ethics” they wouldn’t have behaved badly in the first place. Assuming they get caught and there is no punishment, why should they change anything at all? I know of at least one instance where exactly that scenario  happened. The man violated ethical standards, falsely advertising that he had a doctoral degree which had never been conferred, was reprimanded by the above three professional organizations but now, years later, is a well-respected member of the profession, acting as if nothing happened. Were there consequences to his deceptive actions? None whatsoever.

If there are no consequences,  what, then, is the purpose of behaving in an ethical manner?

You cannot escape from yourself.

Every time anyone does something that is unfair, unkind, untruthful and/or deliberately hurtful to someone else, and does so knowingly, the perpetrator is paying a price, even if he doesn’t think so. If you lie to make yourself look good to a superior so you can get a raise, if you withhold the truth knowingly and this will cause someone else to be harmed, if you pad your credentials because you think no one will check (and no one does) you are, nevertheless, placing a blemish on your own soul. You can only do that so many times without falling down a deep hole and finding it nearly impossible to get out.

Every action has consequences. If you act without regard to what those consequences might be, and if you do something you know to be deliberately hurtful to another in the process, you are not only tarnishing your own reputation (even if you think you are making yourself look better), you are allowing yourself to align with those who do not care one way or the other about things like cheating, stealing or even, ultimately, breaking the law.

Your Word Actually Does Matter — A Lot

In this life, you have only your word and your reputation. You have only your own integrity. If you lie you have no integrity and that, in turn, in good time will seriously damage your reputation, and, actually your dignity. If you become known as a liar, as someone who tries to manipulate others for personal gain, if you become known as a fraud — a cheap, weak person who will flatter someone to their face and gossip about them behind their back —  your own image will be permanently tarnished. Of course, some people know that and do something unethical  anyway. Poor them.

I am at this moment aware of several individuals who have behaved in a manner that has to be called unethical but it is my assumption  they are rationalizing their own behavior, justifying it or diminishing it as being of no importance. They do not have the integrity to responsibly own their actions and the repercussions of those actions and likely assume, incorrectly, that they will be able to proceed without  consequences to themselves. These individuals are not ignorant, nor blind, and they are not unsophisticated. They are, sadly, behaving in a very self-serving way and do not want to admit that anything they are doing has any negative consequences in the outside world. They are wrong and in good time they will discover that. In addition, their actions are being seen and noticed by others. Sooner or later, there will be a price to pay.

As long as you know you are behaving in an ethical manner, you will be able to get up everyday for all of your life and look into your own eyes with clarity and calmness. If you keep your ethics slate clean you will have nothing to regret — ever.

Integrity – Either You Have It or You Don’t

The most important thing in your life is your own integrity and only you can mess it up.

Cult Following?

It has been hilariously suggested to me that I have a cult following and that Somatic Voicework™ is about me. “Gee whiz”, as I used to say as a kid, “give me a break!”

If you have 44+ years of experience teaching singing (and how many people do?) should you hide in your studio and keep what you have learned to yourself? If you have had decades to study, to explore, to investigate, to experiment, to try and to test, to validate, to question and to change, it would stand to reason that a lot of what eventually shows up after all that will be useful. If the information gleaned from such exploration turns out to be valid why not share it? If you are working with anyone else who has had either less experience or limited experience and who, perhaps, doesn’t sing a variety of styles, and who also, in that case, would be unable to conclude what is useful on their own without any guidance, wouldn’t it be unkind not to share information with that person?

The reason Somatic Voicework™ is successful is that it is useful in the voices and minds of others. I am not in the studio with 1200 people all over the world, people who remark that they are having great success with their students. I am not in their studio. No. The value of the work is that it is transferable! Who cares that it came out of my personal experience? Only those who see me as some kind of big deal guru with a cult following. Every time I write that I just want to laugh out loud.

There is actually an “anti-Lovetrian” movement in some places, not because those who teach using Somatic Voicework™ are doing anything negative. On the contrary, it is because they are very successful and their students are successful that they have attracted attention. In one college there are so many people who have gone through the training that the voice department chair doesn’t want anyone else to go through it. She hasn’t asked herself why so many of her faculty have sought it out or what it is about it that would make so many diverse individuals want to learn it, she just doesn’t want so many Somatic Voicework™ people there because……it won’t look good! For heaven’s sake, how stupid!

Trust Your Intelligence

We live in a time full of craziness. People don’t know whom to trust or where to go to get real information. They are suspicious. That’s fine. The world needs skeptics. The world also needs people to learn how to trust their own intelligence, common sense and their eyes and ears. Unlike investing in Ponzi schemes, the return using Somatic Voicework™ (or any other method to learn something besides singing), is in the doing. You can see, hear and feel when your voice works well.

People respect me for how I share what I have learned. I am not now nor have I ever been interested in having a cult of personality. To those who reject the work out of hand because they are afraid of being called a LoVetrian or a “follower” of JL, I say, think again. Those who are using Somatic Voicework™ successfully will tell you themselves, directly, that after they learn it well, the method works just as well in their teaching as it does in mine. That’s enough.

There are people in this world who can do something easily and well for no good reason other than they can. Singing is one thing that has a certain percentage of people who succeed because they sing well, sometimes very well, even though they have not trained to be singers or, sometimes, even though they have not had a strong background in singing at home or in a school setting.

They don’t know that there’s more to talent than talent.

Such talented individuals are at risk. They do what they do by osmosis and they have nothing to hang onto when things go off into unknown territory. They discover by accident that it is possible to have problems and that they do not have the means to solve them on their own. That is a frightening scenario that can rapidly go from bad to very bad.

Guiding someone with natural talent to keep what she has while also adding skills is a very particular kind of training to provide. It isn’t productive to take someone with a nationally recognized career and reconstruct what she does just to give her information that will ultimately be helpful to her. It is important that whatever works be left alone while new information is integrated into the singer’s lexicon slowly, particularly if the new information is quite different in direction from established patterns.

As a young teacher I didn’t understand this well and would often move in to make necessary adjustments in a way that was too quick. Many decades ago when I worked with amateur vocalists I was eager to make changes and at least once ended up making it impossible for the vocalist to sing in the flawed and habitual manner but not in the new way immediately either. I well remember having to apologize for being over-zealous and learned to go much more slowly particularly with willing students who practiced and followed my instructions. With talented singers who already have careers it is essential to be very cautious with even the most mundane corrections, lest you inadvertently cause more harm than good.

If you are correcting technical faults you can only do so effectively over a period of months or even years as it takes time for the voice and body to assimilate these adjustments in a deep way, allowing the mechanism to settle into the new behaviors so that they become automatic. Rushing absolutely never works and only forces the vocalist to manipulate the results, sometimes trading one kind of entanglement for another.

Vocalists can learn to take responsibility for their innate talent.

Age is a great leveler. Even very talented people discover through life experience that sooner or later something is going to go wrong. They learn that taking responsibility for their innate talent doesn’t mean they don’t have to develop equal responsibility for understanding  their natural abilities and how they work when they do. The younger someone is when they encounter a problem, the more likely it is that they won’t encounter that same problem again down the road, as long as they paid attention to what fixed things in the first instance.

For both singers and teachers of singing, do not be fooled by those with great instruments, powerful expressive skills or the ability to perform. Go underneath those things and make sure the vocalist finds out what there is to know about how human beings produce sound and how we store auditory and kinesthetic information in our minds. Explore what works and understand why it does. That way the talent will be sitting on a strong, solid foundation that can last a lifetime.

Leadership requires courage.

It requires that you do not worry about whether or not you are going to be liked for your decisions.

You cannot lead without taking a stand and holding it. No one ever lead a charge by saying to the troops, “I hope this works. Let me know how you feel about it and maybe we can try another way next time, if you make it.”

Doing things by consensus makes leadership difficult. The more people, the more difficult. Getting three people to agree on something is hard but getting 30 people is extremely challenging. Getting 300 people to agree on something is nearly impossible unless (and this is the kicker) you involve them emotionally. Emotional fervor can be enough to get masses of people to all go in one direction, even if that direction is foolish. Remember WWII?

In order to lead you have to know where you are going and how you are going to get there (even if you have to adjust that pathway as you proceed). You need to have a vision of what you want to accomplish and not let anything stand in your way.

Leaders risk failure, they risk ridicule, they risk scrutiny, they risk being ostracized. They are often seen as being “too” something: disturbing, egotistical, overwhelming, over-the-top.

Meek individuals might look up to someone who has leadership capabilities but, if they have to deal with the person for a while, they can also end up resenting the very characteristics they at first admired. No one who has “made a name” for him or herself has done so by being “nice” and “cooperative” at every moment. When you get to a certain level of visibility or responsibility, what comes with the territory is resistance, resentment and pushback. Only the very wealthy and powerful can hire “spin doctors” to fix the damage done to their reputations by those who were jealous, resentful and envious.

Leadership is even more complicated if you are female.

The image that women should remain in the home, baking pies, making babies and smiling at the hubby, persists in our culture, regardless of whatever strides have been made (and many have). Powerful women are rare and the statistics are available to prove how few women survive to rise to the highest levels of our society. Women, unless they have protection available in the above mentioned form of wealth which can be used to hire outside support, or connections with men who have power who can “lift them up” are trained early to be “cooperative, kind and polite”. These qualities don’t help to win a battle.

Yes, there is a middle ground between being a crazed maniac who makes enormous noise and says “my way or the highway”, and someone who is quiet, shy, introverted, and stays at home rather than interact with others in any but the most limited manner. That middle ground, however, isn’t always easy to locate.

Most people will look the other way when approached by a leader seeking change. They realize that such a person will disturb the status quo and shake things up. It is easier to run away, do nothing, and cluck about the situation than to jump into the fray. It is easier to criticize any individual who takes an unpopular stand, in the face of great opposition, even if the cause is obviously based on gaining the greater good. Going back as far as you like, anyone who came along to change “the way things are” has been attacked, jailed, or sometimes (think Joan of Arc) killed, even though later the person became revered.

If you would be a leader in your profession, your social group or your community, you have to stick your neck out, take a stand, go forward against opposition, and hold a clear vision in your mind of where you are going and why you want to get there. You will have to be strong enough to face nasty opposition and even situations that could imperil your health and well-being, carrying within you the deep conviction to go for the long haul, even if you are completely alone. You have to find a way to do things that have integrity, honesty, and decency at their core, even if it seems that holding to those values is incompatible with getting there. You cannot ever sacrifice doing it the right way for making a shortcut for the sake of convenience.

Leadership is developed.

Most people who hold positions of leadership are not leaders. They fall into circumstances that allow them to rise to the top of the heap by happenstance. True leaders emerge, not from the whiners and complainers, not from the quiet and reticent, but from the battlefield, bruised but not defeated. You will know one when you see one, but look hard as they are few and far between.