Fear is just a four letter word

The lovely Emily Jane wrote a blog recently on facing your fears. She has taken a huge step in facing her fear of singing in public and has started taking lessons. She went into it with much trepidation but came out of her first lesson with unexpected confidence in her abilities (you should read the story in her own words, it's pretty awesome).

I too, have a huge fear of singing in public. In my car, in the shower, in my room...never a problem. But ask me to sing you that song that is stuck in my head and I'll just spout words. With encouragement from some of my friends, I have been participating in the choir at my church and have been enjoying it a lot, but singing in a group is safe. No one could pick my voice out of the crowd and I took comfort in that.

I had a bit of a wrench thrown at me this weekend and was challenged to confront my fears. I was scheduled to play the bass this weekend and we actually had a really low-key kind of set up planned; it was essentially an "acoustic" set with just Jason leading and playing guitar, Chelsea singing harmony and playing rhythm guitar and me on the bass. As we were practicing today our sound guy, Sean, pointed out that the particular song that we were doing would be better with 2 back ground vocalists. Jason just looked and me at said "I'm cool with it if you're cool with it." At first I wanted to cop out and try to convince them that Chelsea's voice was enough, but Emily's situation popped into my head. I'm never going to move forward or improve if I don't take the risk of doing something completely outside of my comfort zone regardless of my chances of crashing and burning.

Practice went okay despite a few fumbles trying to get used to singing and playing at the same time, and Sean, Chelsea and Jason were very encouraging...but I was still literally shaking; I felt like it was so bad that everyone would be able to see my hands shaking.

Walking out on the stage before service kind of felt like a death march and starting the first song was almost agonizing, but after we made it through the first song I started to relax a bit and I just let the music flow. The second song was easier and by the third I was feeling pretty good. It wasn't until the third song that I realized that my microphone wasn't even turned on. Nice work, Steph. It just goes to show you that sometimes we worry for nothing.

We have 3 more services tomorrow and I'm actually looking forward to tackling the nerves. If I mess up, that's just a lesson learned, right? Right.


It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson