Live Office Hours: Why I Don’t Teach Breathing Exercises 21|06|24

Live Office Hours - Why I Don’t Teach Breathing Exercises

The one where we get into:

➡️ how we have learned to embrace the “diagnose & prescribe” pedagogical philosophy, which leads to

➡️ looking at singers as a series of systems that need to be fixed

➡️ which leads to us prescribing exercises to fix specific systems, rather than

➡️ working from discovering coordinations of the whole singer and building on them.

➡️ so singers learn that their bodies have specific things wrong with them that are hindering their singing development and that

➡️ the role of the voice teacher is to tell them what to fix and how, so

➡️ singers learn that their own instincts and sensations can’t be trusted and that

➡️ the teacher is more of an expert on their bodies than the singer is.

We also discussed:

✅ ideas about how to not tell young or inexperienced singers what to do

✅ what missing an opportunity to use feedback-based directives looks like (ie when I offer the singer information about their experience that they didn’t first offer me)

✅ examples of how to implement the ‘Find Over Fix’ pedagogy principle in the voice studio

✅ how to use ‘Upstream Directives”

✅ how ‘Offering Options’ is different from ‘telling them what to do’

Oh! And in the final 15 minutes or so, I waded (somewhat inelegantly) through Desmond’s ( @desmondxkirkland) loaded question about knowing when to refer a singer to a therapist.

#shoutouts to:
❤️ Cate Frazier-Neely ( @catefnstudios ) and
❤️ Jess Baldwin ( @truecolorscreativity) re examples of voice pros who use lots of different modalities in their work, and to whom you may wish to refer singers if you feel they need more support (or a different kind of support) than you are willing/able to offer.