​After years and years of: believing I don’t have a good voice, declaring that “my singing is so bad I don’t even sing in the shower,” fearing the person standing beside me in church might be traumatised by my voice and forced to change seats, and lastly … I definitely don’t sing in the car when I have a passenger! But then…. 

In December last year all that changed… and I had my first singing lesson.  Surprisingly I wasn’t nervous or anxious about it … the appointment had been in my calendar for a few weeks  … so there had been time to get used to the idea. But I did have some fleeting thoughts as I was driving there: 
“Why aren’t you trembling with fear?” 

“You do know you’re going to have to sing solo in front of your teacher don’t you?”  

“What were you thinking in signing up for this?”  

Maybe I was numb with fear? But in any case, I prayed a “God help me!”  prayer.  I sang, I conquered, and I even learnt some stuff. 

1) The way you hear your voice and the way others hear your voice are different. Because the singer is hearing it from ‘internally’ as it moves through the nasal bones. The listener is hearing it externally separate from the nasal sound of the singer’s experience.  

2) Record yourself and listen to your sound, it will sound different on the recording to that of hearing yourself live.  For the above reason … because what you hear from your head, and what you hear on a recording are different.  
It’s about recognising what’s off key (and correcting it), and what is actually not off key but your own unique sound.  And learning to accept that as your sound. 

Life can be like this: 
1) The way we see our own life and the way others see our life are different.  While many have watched it or seen portions of it from an onlookers perspective , there is only one who has lived it, breathed it, felt it, loved it, feared it, and totally been inside of it like no one else can know. But in any case appreciate it from both sides. 

2) Sometimes we need to take a recording as such because how we see day to day life in the now, and how we see day to day life at the end of a season, are two completely different perspectives of the same experience. 
As with a song recording, in reviewing the ‘life season’ recording we can learn to recognise where we went ‘off key’ in life (and make the necessary adjustments or corrections), and where we were actually ‘on key’ with our own unique (albeit different) life sound.  Then it’s about learning to accept our life ‘sound’ as our own.  

Different doesn’t necessarily mean bad.  We weren’t made to all have the same sound. How boring that would be.  
Sing your song (and your life song) with a sound that is all your own …  and sing it loud!