datamusicata

I was at the Durango Song Expo (www.durango-songwriters-expo.com) meet and greet the other night and there were many fine songwriters and musicians there.    I was talking with one of them about confidence and belief in oneself and realized that we haven’t talked about that much here at datamusicata.

Belief in yourself is the beginning of the whole thing.   You have to believe that you can do it.   You have to believe that you can and do bring something unique to the party.

Your journey as an artist is discovering that uniqueness and employing it in your art, but it all begins with belief.

And the belief doesn’t come from the audience, it comes from you.    The audience/public can certainly reinforce it once you’ve done the work but it begins with you and then it emanates out of you.

It begins in you.

And I believe that the way you create and sustain this belief, this confidence is to do the work.   You learn everything you can about your craft, your instrument, your tools and you work on it and at it more than you do anything else in your life.

The more you work on it, the more prepared you are to deliver it when the time comes.

I’ve talked about taking lessons before and I can’t stress it enough.  It doesn’t matter how old you are or how experienced.  Lessons will make you better, provide you also practice what you have been taught.

And you have to go out on that high wire.    No amount of practice makes you a good performer.   Being on the stage is where you learn to be on stage.   You have to play thousand different stages and situations and out of that will come experience and confidence that you can handle whatever shows up.

That being said, you can’t get there without the belief inside you that you can do it.   That’s where it starts.

And how do you believe in yourself?    I don’t know.

How do people believe that there’s a God and a heaven; Allah, the 86 virgins for martyrs?   Folks just do.   They decide to believe it.

If you can believe in that, you can certainly believe in yourself.   Make the commitment to yourself.   Say it out loud.  Write it down.   Put it up on your bathroom mirror.   Do whatever it takes to make that belief grow inside of you.

And it the words of Winston Churchill, “never, never, never, never, never give up.”