If you Want Your Projects to Succeed, Learn to Sing

As a teenager and young adult, my favorite hobby was singing. I joined over half a dozen choirs over a period of 15 years, ranging from a local church choir to advanced amateur groups. I've never been really great at it, maybe just above average but it was fun. During that time, I had a chance to talk to trained singers and I now realize that their lessons have a much wider application than I originally thought.

Anatomy

I'm glad I learned to sing after I had biology classes at school. My singing trainers started off by "feel your lungs unroll to the bottom of your belly", then "your vocal folds are at the bottom of your neck" or "open the mouth at the top of your head when singing a high note"... I'm glad they are not my doctor. Joke apart, they were right: my breathing was stronger, I could sing loud without ending up with a sore throat, I could reach notes that I never suspected I could reach... My body was still the same but this new vision made me reach unexpected highs. Why on Earth should unlocking your knees relax your throat?

It is a matter of vision: think that your lungs are in your breast and you will tighten the thorax, reducing the available space. The vocal folds are in the middle of the throat: if you focus on them at their actual place, you unconsciously push them upwards, increasing stress. When singing a high note, you unconsciously bend the head upwards, stressing the vocal folds. Lock your knees and your whole body will be tense. If you adopt this different vision, the breast will relax and you will control the air flow with  the abdominal muscles, instantaneously gaining capacity and power. If you think you vocal folds are at the bottom of your neck, you will push them upwards to the middle of your neck... where they actually are but you will also intuitively increase the air pressure under them, thereby gaining the power you were seeking. Think that your mouth is at the top of your head and you will bend the head downwards, opening at the same time a number of resonators in your head (I mean physically, not mentally). Why do singers always smile? Try it by yourself and you will feel some high frequency resonators that start vibrating in the cheeks. Singers don't do anything just by chance: the secret is to focus on increasing your capacity, not on avoiding a problem. Treat your body in such a way that effort is only left for the fortissimo, when you have run out of other options.

Professional singers go through a number of steps: they learn to relax, then to refocus their vision, strengthen the control, fine tune resonators, increase power, and finally brush off all the work to make it sound natural. Pavarotti was decried by his peers because he started singing professionally before finishing this last phase and he made himself famous for the brilliance of his voice. Most of the others sing with a softer, more natural sounding voice, which is what makes their concerts pleasant and rich in emotions.

Lesson learned

Success is not just about doing things right: it is about understanding the consequences of our acts, take advantage of the effects, which will eventually fulfill our goals. As in singing, if you train your team to reach a certain throughput, they will tend to it, and any increase in demand will turn into stress. Train your team to discover their real capacity and the same demand will turn into a challenge. The attitude is what can turn a failure into success.

I have a - often criticized - habit of answering my team members' questions with other questions. It sometimes takes a little while before they understand the reasons behind it but, basically, I don't want them to execute blindly my orders. Strictly speaking, I don't have the bandwidth to make every single technical decision in the projects and, at the same time, I don't want to slow down the project by micromanaging everyone. On the contrary, I believe in empowering the members, give them autonomy, teach them to think and propose solutions instead of simply presenting problems. They will eventually come with questions but these will be more advanced issues requiring more attention. Meanwhile, I have educated them to think the way I do so that they can come up with answers we can easily agree on.

How about unrolling the lungs to the bottom of the belly? Technically, you lower the diaphragm to leave more room to the lungs. Ask a young singer to lower the diaphragm and he will naturally compress the thorax, which is counter-productive. Ask the same person to feel the lungs at the bottom of the belly, and he will relax, move the shoulders backwards and open the thorax. Same person, same goal BUT different order and different outcome. If you think about it, it works best when you lie to the person and it is all about perception. It happens to us all the time in our projects: depending on how you present the order, you see different results, and if you make the group feel they can achieve the goal, there is a good chance they will. The secret resides in showing to the group members where you want them to be by the end of the project, and not only where they are at the start. Some will succeed, others will fail but all will grow.

Before you start your next project, make sure that your group takes a deep breath and knows to visualize where their lungs are.