Finding Our Own Voicing

It all comes down to the wiggle of a sound wave - so how do we resonate on our own frequencies?

It occurred to me last weekend that I did not know how to have a morning my way.

For the vast majority of these 31 years, I’ve been guided by what I thought I should do in the morning - like getting up, exercising right away, etc. Or, I’ve been guided by a partner, and followed whatever they were doing; what time they’d get up, what coffee they’d be drinking, when and what they’d eat for breakfast, if we’d go on a walk or a run or not, again, etc. All of this would have been just fine for your average co-dependent who can mold fully, but it turns out I am not that average co-dependent, and remain internally stubbornly individualistic. None of it worked for me.

Essentially, I’d been a we for so long that I literally didn’t know how my body liked to wake up in the morning.

Everything started looking up, though, when I decided not to drink coffee for a few mornings over the break.

I felt great.

I’d always known coffee somehow made me more tired, but I liked the ritual of it, so I’d ignored that intuition and kept on pouring. But now on a few weeks in without coffee (paired with likely many more factors like less screens over the holidays), I’m sleeping great. I’m feeling awake when I wake up. Who would’ve known!

I’ve been keeping in mind something I read something last week - that it’s important to visualize what we want, not what we don’t want more of. More feeling good, not less feeling bad. Simply not choosing to pour a cup of coffee gets easier in this lens.

So, in the spirit of all this, I’m experimenting with - what does my morning look like? What feels fulfilling and awakening? And trying to notice what works, and what doesn’t. Turns out I do like to move right away in the morning, but in low-key doses, and it all hinges on getting myself to want to stay out of bed. This has been my Achilles heel, but I have a plan. And am having lots of fun experimenting with it all post-New Years, when these things tend to happen.

Congruently, the ReVoicing the Future podcast team of Natalie Morrison, Julia Olsen, and I are preparing to give a session at NAMM 2025 about building toolkits for success in the music industry, both on an individual and a community-wide level.

Many of these same themes are popping up in that talk (and I don’t think I’m giving TOO much of it away with this here - count this as a tease!).

This morning as we released some promotions for the session, I found myself musing back on the poignancy in the name of the podcast itself while brushing my teeth (at a time that I now know works for me to brush my teeth), and the concept of revoicing itself - playing a chord in a different order, emphasizing the different voices within it, in order to make it sound completely different - same chord, but a new, unique resonance. We named it this to emphasize our uplifting female voices on the podcast, which so often were not heard in the chord of the industry, but a certain universality of this idea occurred to me during that teeth-brushing.

These toolkits for success we’re going to be sharing in our session are really all about figuring out how to express our own particular voicing, so that we’re resonating on our own unique and most natural frequency, the unique authentic chord of ourselves.

In the absence of that, we get dissonance, which sometimes is an artistic choice, and sometimes just grating - and either way, the difference is intentionality. We often choose dissonance so that the resolution of the next chord played is all the sweeter, like the times in life where we’re working ourselves to the bone for something - we know it’s a season, so it’s OK that it’s not sustainable, that it feels off.

Consonant or dissonant, all comes down to, as the late dear keys player Don Lewis once put it, “the wiggle”; what we as musicians know, and the world of physics has proven. That all existence can be broken down at its most granular to that wiggle, the vibration and rhythm, of a sound wave.

Knowing what we do about the musicality, what a gift then to apply this as a guide to help us live.

To remove the guilt of what we should be doing and to ask instead, what notes should we as individuals be playing, to sound like us? What a gift to give onesself to find one’s own unique voicing, one’s own frequency, and then to play it out with intention in this life.

There are many more solid barriers to this for folks other than my “perfect morning” metaphor, of course, and still many even smaller. That is the good work to do to remove those particular barriers, for us and for others, especially those unique to our music world.

Because when we achieve this, things flow, life doesn’t feel so heavy, and it feels maybe just like the wonderful delight that it is, whatever delight means to the individual.

That is my definition of success. A life lived at one’s own particular frequency.

So, my quest to find own particular wiggle, my voicing, continues.

What feels natural, what do I want more of, not less? Try that next.