Everyone Knows How To Sing

Everyone Knows How To Sing

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You will give your overall experience of life a huge boost by acknowledging one simple fact: you know how to sing.

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There was a time in your life when you sang full-throated and loudly, with no self-consciousness or concern for whether you “knew how” or not. You may have only been 4 or 5, but it was still you. The only reason you now don’t sing, do it badly, or even think you can’t, is because someone in your past suggested to you that it was hard, rare, only for the talented, etc., and it caused you to think that you might not actually be up to the task. And you had never even thought that before.

It’s clear that everybody knows how to sing because everybody has sung. All we ever need to do is remember who we were when we did that. It’s never a matter of knowing how, it’s always a matter of not knowing how not to.

If you know how to sing, but don’t know that you know, what other forms of expression fit that description? They contribute greatly to a person’s quality of life. If all forms of expression are held as intrinsic to our humanness and put us instantly in touch with our authentic selves, they also bypass the thinking circuitry of the brain and give us direct access to our creative selves.

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In the same way, everybody knows how to make music, how to tell a story, how to act out a scene, the list goes on.

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This occurred to me many years ago when I was talking to a friend of mine who was an artist; cartoonist, to be specific. Cartoonists have always impressed me in the childlike way they depict the world, and being able to translate any character—human or otherwise, and any setting, requires a great artistic eye and flair. I asked him one day when he knew he could draw. He answered, “I always knew. Everybody can draw, but only some of us never learned how not to.”

That answer always struck me as being very profound. It’s true that we are all more than we think we are in any number of ways. The only question is, what keeps us from knowing?

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The answer to that question will reveal many self-imposed limitations we have all put on ourselves, and open up a whole new world of possibilities for your life.

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A new awareness for you to consider: as you converse with others, listen to your words when you speak of yourself. If you ever find yourself saying that you can’t do something, or any other statement that limits your experience of life, it’s a good clue that it is nothing more than a self-imposed constraint; something that was suggested to you at some point in your life and you came to believe. What if it weren’t true? How would that change you? Challenge those statements with all your might.

So, this isn’t about singing… necessarily. It’s about the innate freedom we were all born with to express ourselves and experience life in myriad ways, many of which we have denied ourselves in adulthood through artificial limitations. It that sounds like you, maybe it’s time to be sing again.

Published by Dave Young