Hitting a plateau with your vocals is easy if you find yourself slipping away from good habits like practicing regularly and checking in with your goals. We're at the beginning of March so now is a good time to look back at the goals we set for ourselves at the start of the year and check in with how we're doing.
Are you still on track? If yes, great! Congratulations on your progress! If not, here are some things you can do to get back on the wagon.
Re-evaluate your goals
What are your short term, mid term and long term goals? Based on the last couple of months are they still within the realm of possibility for you to reach them? Do you need to make adjustments?
Remember that short term goals are equally as important as long term goals. You won't get to the long term goal without the short term milestones to keep you going. It's also good to celebrate the little things! It keeps you motivated and your trajectory moving upwards and forwards instead of stalling out. For our EVI Now users, this is a good time to start using (or revisit using) our Practice Scorecard introduced in Course 31: Level up your vocals.
Speaking of practicing...
What has your practice schedule looked like?
Remember that it's about the number of days put in, not the number of hours in a single day. Consistency is key. Even if it's five minutes here and there, it's better than nothing! Life gets in the way sometimes but you can make exercises work for you in small increments if that's all that your schedule allows. For example: use exercises from our warm-ups to get your voice going throughout the day, even if you have to fit in between tasks!
If you do have the time though, put our Practice Scorecard to use and try to tackle some of those short term goals! Maybe now is the time that you try to tackle something new you haven't done before!
Switch things up!
It can get monotonous doing the same thing over and over again, so don't! Try something new. Pick a new technique you want to work on, try working on your range or a tackling a hard section of a song you've always wanted to be able to do! Whatever it is, break things into the smallest of parts and build from there. It's easy to get discouraged if you just jump in all at once and expect it to work on the first try. Sometimes you get lucky, most of the time that's not the case.
Use the resources available to you!
Whether that be our free content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, or our courses with EVI Now or if you want to take lessons with David directly you can use these resources to get you back to being excited about your voice again! If there are other resources that help you get excited too, throw them into the mix! Whatever it takes to get you back to being excited about the possibilities moving forward.
For our EVI Now subscribers, have you gone through all of our courses yet? If not, maybe now it's time to start checking out those lessons again! If yes, what techniques or concepts are you struggling with? Is there a lesson or exercise that you should go back and revisit?
Check out our Tips for using EVI Now post to help get jumpstarted if you need some more motivation. You can also conveniently access this post from the top of our EVI Now courses page any time you want.
Remember to be kind to yourself
Check in with yourself to see how you're doing. This applies to vocals and just life in general. Obviously our goal here is to help you find your voice but we also know how personal vocals can be. If life is hard right now, picking more achievable goals is going to be better overall than shooting for the stars. There's a time and a place for that and maybe that time is not right now. There's nothing wrong with taking a break entirely if you need to.
We hope that you're all having a good start to 2023 and that you're well on your way to accomplishing your vocal goals! We have a lot of new things in the works behind the scenes here at Extreme Vocal Institute that we can't wait to share soon!