2. A playful, unselfconscious, fearless attitude
Taking chances is one of the best ways to push boundaries and improve quickly.
At the risk of making this sound like a self-help pamphlet, I’d like to say that I can’t stress this one enough. While doing regular vocal exercises is indispensable for significant improvement, so is having fun with your practice. Your voice teacher can explain technique to you and give you music to work on, but he or she probably only sees you, at the very most, a couple of hours a week. If he is only giving you feedback based on what your voice is doing at a given moment, and not what it can do in general, his advice is necessarily limited. My most successful students play around with songs to see what their voices can do at home. Often, one of them will come in with 6 different possible ways she found to hit a note and then ask me which one I prefer. Unsurprisingly, tinkering students like this will improve faster than ones who wait for voice lessons before thinking about how they might improve a song.
It is not only playfulness, but also a certain fearlessness that these students have. No matter how talented and hard-working a student is, if she is unwilling to sound silly and make mistakes while she tries new ways to sing, it will be a long haul before she breaks out of her current habits.
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