It's not about what you say

Well, it's not all about what you say. It's not even all about how you say it. It's also about you listen, and how you prepare. Relationships require investment, and the currency is your intention. How you choose to focus your energy and intention can have significant impact on the quality of the outcome of any relationship.

“To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand - highly developed qualities of character.”

- Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Singing is an output; creating a sound of your own. It's fun, empowering, and an emotional outlet. It can be easy to just focus on yourself and what you can do. Group singing, however, requires both output and input - singing in a group is as much about listening to others as it is about making your own sounds. Singers who don't listen are the ones whose voices stick out, who get out of time with the rest of the group, who sing the wrong notes; and they are probably completely unaware of the negative impact that they are having on the overall sound - rather annoying! You can probably think of analogous situations in your professional or personal life, not necessarily involving singing but people with similar lack of self-awareness.

“99.9 percent of a musican's job is to listen”

- Violinist Jennifer Koh

Producing a good net result as a group is about relating to each others’ sounds, and reflecting and adjusting your own, in order to give your contribution in a way that is helpful to the overall outcome. This requires not only awareness of others', but also self-awareness. It's a constant feedback loop - listen, reflect, adjust, create, listen. From group singing, we can learn listening skills that are applicable to, and can help improve, all the relationships in our lives.

In an earlier article, I discussed how practising well is the key to learning a new skill. One way to practice with intention is to practice indirectly. Another word for this is "preparation". My good friend Chris Bruerton, a member of the world-renowned Kings Singers a capella group, introduced the phrase of "desk work" to me - something that I had unknowingly been doing for years. I was not very diligent about practising as a child, so I found an efficient way to learn without playing my instrument. Musicians don't need to be near their instruments (or be singing out loud) to prepare; they can mentally go through the sheet music, spend time working out how to approach a performance in terms of emotion and preparation for each phrase, (in the case of singers) check and practice pronunciation of foreign languages, and so on.

So how does desk work happen? In an idea world, you plan time to sit with your sheet music, and look at the connections between your voice part and others, notice the connections between one note and its neighbour, and you review the parts that you found tricky when you last played the piece - where did you go wrong, how can you avoid that mistake next time? As the Kings Singers are on the road touring the globe around 7 months a year giving 120+ concerts (they would easily meet the 10,000 hour rule), there's not always a lot of time for singing rehearsal; but there is plenty of time spent on planes and trains where they will do desk work. For 10-year old me, sometimes it was done in the car ride to my piano lesson... but even that was better than nothing!

How could this apply to what you want to do well? For cooking, for example, it could involve reviewing the recipe and mentally walking through the steps to ensure you know what's coming and that you have the right ingredients and equipment to hand. For a workplace situation, it could involve planning your 1-on-1 meeting (whether you are the manager or the direct report): mentally walking through how you might deal with various questions or topics, reflecting on your own biases and reactions, how to frame issues with a learning perspective, thinking ahead to actions and commitments, and so on.

When you communicate, it's not just about your output. As well as being fun and great for your wellbeing, group singing can help teach us listening and relating skills, and instill in us a sense of discipline to invest time to mentally prepare well for important conversations. These are just some of the skills that are important for developing positive relationships through good communication.