I met a young girl at work and she invited me to her concert. I watched her perform delightfully as she was moving with grace, the place was filled with such a high energy and the resonance from her voice filled it with excitement. I enjoyed being there. Right after the concert I met her and asked her about the lyrics book on the stand that she kept moving towards. I asked her would she be willing to attempt a 45 minute procedure with me that can enhance her ability and confidence to remember the lyrics of even the new songs that she is performing.
The young girl was thrilled, but she said she has never heard of any singer get over their dependence on lyrics book, however, she is willing to give it a try. The next days she performed ten new songs at Music Academy for the first time in her life without the aid of lyrics book and has continued to do so ever since.
When I share this experience, most people have this curious question 'How did he do that?' But what fascinates me more is another question - 'Why work on that particular challenge?’
I offered to work on this particular change because I saw the potential of that change to be generative. And it is self-explanatory when you look into what happened next in her life. She was recording in a studio with a very famous music director who tells her that there is some major shift in her, that she is picking up nuance faster, her takes are reduced and she seems to be enjoying the music more. This young girl is the popular playback singer Megha (Harini), and her take on the whole thing is that the change allowed her to be free of her focus on the lyrics and utilize her conscious attention on the subtle nuances of the song. This led to her recording with fewer takes, with more depth and artistry and with small incremental progress that was an auto-pilot. These small incremental changes added up prominently enough to show in her abilities within a few weeks. After this experience she also started singing more in foreign languages and she believes that her whole experience as an artist has evolved.
This is why I chose to work on that particular outcome for her. It was not just the challenge she was overcoming that I saw, and further to that, also the incremental changes in her capabilities, beliefs and experience this progress will open up for her. It's quite radical to think that an artist's performance can accelerate so fast with a subtle improvement as the one mentioned. However, in the world I work in, this is reality and it only proves the heritage we have as humans to learn new things and how sometimes when we have everything, it is just a little ‘something’, a seemingly unconnected piece, that makes all the difference.
So, I like to conclude by saying “The kind of changes that will accelerate success in your life are the kind of changes that are generative.”
