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Students With Confidence Issues (All Teachers)
Ok, I’m at my wits end with a 16 year old student lol. I’ve been teaching him since June last year and he has always had confidence issues. I’ve managed to get him to come round to doing his grade 1 because he can sing but he always believes he can’t, no matter what I or anyone else says to him!
What worries me is that at the weekend I persuaded him to do a little performance in front of about 20 people, it was the 1st one he had ever done but he backed out and ended up just playing guitar and I sang instead. It took me nearly an hour to get him into the room and one of my ex-students was trying her best to help me too.
I’m now really worried that he will go in for his Grade 1 at Xmas and will then panic on the day and back out as I will not be able to go in that room to help him, because singing in front of one person is harder than a group I would say!
What can I do to make him believe he can sing and get more confidence in himself? -
3 Replies
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Tough one – but he needs to practice that ‘being judged’ moment. Maybe at the end of each session you can make a video of him, so that he can practice singing in front of a camera? The feelings you get in front of a camera are a sort of diminished version of on-stage fear – so it would be a kind of stage fright vaccine. Worked well with a couple of my goons.
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Thanks! I’ll give it a go when he next has his lesson 🙂
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Ok here is an update! He’s decided he isn’t going to do his Grade 1 anymore, he still thinks he doesn’t have a good enough voice to do it. So fair enough, I’m not going to push him if it is not something he wants to particularly do right now. I suggested the filming to him and he seems up for it.
His mum has had a chat with me tonight as he won’t open up in lessons to me, he wants to focus on tones and develop a ‘nicer’ sound. I was going to take him through Estill’s 6 tones for singing anyway but can anyone else suggest anything I could do? He gets embarrassed very easily and I was struggling to get him to do ‘sob’ tones tonight…I just said if he wants to improve his tones he needs to sing all of these different ones! We’ve already covered opening up his throat and relaxation.
We’re also going to look at getting his tongue out of the way so I’ve photocopied some sheets for him and explained it all to him, whether he will find the courage to practice it I don’t know…