Great Questions and Good Intentions for a Brilliant New Year
As the year winds down, many of us are looking back at the past year and forward to the next. Even major corporations take the time to reflect, putting out “rewinds” and “wrap-ups.” As singers, speakers, and general voice users, taking the time to look back at your successes and plan your future goals can help take your voice to the next level.
Being Intentional
Our voice physically comes from our chest, throat, and mouth, but it starts in our minds. As singers, we need to learn how to hear pitches in our mind’s ear before singing them, and many of us use visualization and movement to improve our singing or speaking and manage anxiety. As mentioned in our previous article, self-doubt and anxiety can make singing more difficult or even impossible. If you’re certain you won’t be able to hit a note, you won’t hit it, regardless of whether or not you have the physical capacity to reach it.
All of this means that intention and being in a good headspace are vitally important to singers, speakers, and voice users as a whole. We need to be intentional in the moment to use our voices, but setting broader intentions and goals is also important. They can deepen our practice and give us something to work towards, helping us excel as voice users.
Goals vs Intentions
While goal and intention have similar meanings, there are some important differences. Goals are results we strive to achieve, while intentions are guiding principles or values. In other words, goals are a destination, but intentions are a journey.
We can succeed or fail in achieving our goals; they’re specific and measurable, and usually have to be reached within a set timeframe. Whether we reach our goals or not isn’t entirely in our control. Life happens; kids, work, family, friends, and health can all impact our ability to achieve our goals by the deadline we’ve set for ourselves.
Failing to reach our goals can be incredibly discouraging. For many, it brings up feelings of shame, and some of us become avoidant, giving up on our goal altogether rather than adjusting our timeframe or expectations.
This isn’t to say that goals are bad or not worth setting. Having goals to work towards can give us motivation and meaning. They’re just not the end-all, be-all.
In contrast, intentions aren’t something we can succeed or fail at. They don’t have to be achieved within a limited time. While goals exist in the future, intentions are about how we live in the present. They’re the path that guides us to our goals, and helps keep our choices and actions aligned with our values.
While you can have intentions without goals, and vice versa, they work best together. For a singer, this might look like setting the goal of mastering a challenging song by the end of the year with the intention of being kind to yourself. In practice, this would look like monitoring your self-talk as you work on your song. When you struggle with a difficult passage, rather than seeing it as a personal failure or thinking something like “I’m bad at this” or “I’m never going to get this right,” return to your intention: being kind to yourself.
How would this intention change what your practice looks like? When you get frustrated, you might pause and tell yourself, “I did my best today, even if it wasn’t perfect. I’m putting in the time, and I’m making progress. I’m going to take a break and come back to this in a few hours/tomorrow, when I feel calmer.”
Making Space
Reflecting and setting goals and intentions can take as much or as little time as you need. Zelda likes to spend a couple of hours during the first weeks of December to journal and answer questions, but do whatever works for you. Maybe you’re able to spend thirty minutes a day for a couple of weeks reflecting and thinking about your next year. Maybe you can give yourself a whole weekend focused solely on contemplation. Or maybe you only have one hour on a single Tuesday night. Whatever time you’re able to set aside is perfect.
What is important is that you take the time to reflect before you set your intentions and goals. Looking back allows us to see what is and isn’t working. Taking the time to recognize these patterns can make our next year even better than the last, ensuring we don’t repeat the same behaviors that led to our struggles in the past year and lean into the ones that helped us excel.
As you reflect, make sure you spend at least as much time focusing on what went right as you do on what went wrong. Many of us tend to focus on the negatives, but progress requires more than just stamping out mistakes. Think of it like this: a beautiful garden requires weeding, but it will never grow without watering and sunlight.
Setting Healthy Goals and Intentions
After you’ve reflected, it’s time to set your goals and intentions. In this section, we’ll share our tips to get the most out of your goals and intentions. We’ve mainly focused on goals because they’re more likely to trip you up than intentions. You can’t fail an intention, but you can fail to reach a goal. While we often attribute success or failure to our individual efforts, the goals themselves are the biggest factor in whether or not we reach them.
Be Positive
When you’re reflecting, it’s fine to examine where you struggled or missed the mark. The same can’t be said for goal and intention setting. Limit your goals and intentions to things you want to do, not things you don’t want to do. For example, you might set a goal of “Improve my pitch accuracy,” rather than “stop being flat all the time.” If you catch yourself writing negative goals, it’s worth taking time to examine how you talk to yourself as a whole.
Be Realistic
As you look towards the open horizon of a new year, it can be tempting to set lofty goals. Goals that encourage us to stretch beyond our comfort zone can be great, but unrealistic goals can delay or even set back our progress.
The difference between a reachable but challenging goal and an unrealistic goal is achievability, and specifically, how much control you have over that achievement. If all the stars need to align or you need to completely restructure your life to reach your goal, you’re probably going to be disappointed in the results.
As you’re making goals, ask yourself these questions before you commit to them:
Does this goal require someone else to achieve? If you need other people to behave in a certain way to reach your goal, you can’t really control whether or not you succeed. If you have a big goal that relies on other people, like playing your first tour, break it down into the parts that you can control - sending out a certain number of booking emails, posting on your socials a certain number of times per week, putting together a set list - and make those your goals instead.
How does achieving this goal fit into my existing schedule? On rare occasions, we might have the opportunity to fully devote ourselves to our passion, but most of the time, we have to fit our personal goals into already busy schedules. Be honest with yourself about how much time you have in a day and what you can and can’t do to make room for your project.
If your goal is to practice every day, for example, keeping up with an hour a day would be difficult for most people who aren’t full-time professional musicians. Instead, consider setting the goal of practicing a minimum of ten minutes a day; if you still manage to practice for longer than 10 minutes, that’s amazing, but you won’t have “failed” if you can’t always set aside a full hour.
Can this big goal be broken down into smaller goals? If you’re considering a big goal, it’s worth taking some time to write out what steps you actually need to do to achieve it. In the previous example of playing a tour, there’s a lot to do before you can take to the stage. If you just set “play a tour” as one goal, you may underestimate just how much time and effort you’ll need to put in, and ultimately set yourself an impossible deadline. Taking the time to research all the various tasks involved in planning, booking, and executing a tour allows you to create smaller, achievable goals, making you more likely to succeed at your primary goal.
What will I do if I don’t achieve my goal? This may be the most important question to ask yourself. Sometimes we reach our goals, sometimes we don’t. Many of us reflexively give up altogether when we feel we’ve failed at something, trying to avoid the negative feelings tied to failure. It’s an understandable emotional response, but we grow more by adjusting our expectations and carrying on than by walking away from our goal.
Have a conversation with yourself before you start working on your goal. Make a plan for what you’ll do if you miss your deadline or if things aren’t going as planned. Schedule regular check-ins with yourself on your progress and give yourself the grace to adjust your timeline or the scale of your goal if you need to.
Maybe your goal is to write, record, and release a song a month for a year. After the first month, you realize it’s taking longer than expected to finish producing the song. You can give up, or you can pivot. Maybe you decide to just write a song a month without recording any of them, or you simplify your production to just a piano or guitar and your voice, or maybe you record your favorite songs at the end of the year and release them all at once. Even if the outcome at the end of the year isn’t what you expected, you’ll still have improved your skills as a songwriter and musician - something that wouldn’t have happened if you just gave up.
The Questions
As you’re reflecting and planning, having a set of questions to answer can be an excellent guide. Below are the questions Zelda uses for her own reflections and planning, refined over many years of practice. You’ll notice that these questions are focused on the positive, moments of success and gratitude, rather than failures.
Reflections
As a singer or speaker, what was my biggest achievement this year, and what am I most proud of?
As a singer or speaker, what were my biggest challenges, and how did I overcome them?
As a singer or speaker, what is the most important lesson I learned?
As a singer or speaker, what moments brought me the most joy?
As a singer or speaker, how have I grown as a person, and what new skills have I developed?
As a singer or speaker, what am I most grateful for this year?
As a singer or speaker, what did I do for my physical and mental health, and how does using my voice fit into this?
As a singer or speaker, what were some things that I wished I had achieved or attempted, but something stopped me?
Intentions
As a singer or speaker, describe the kind of year I want to have.
What do I want to achieve this year with my voice?
What voice skill gap do I want to work on closing or shrinking this year?
What would I like to learn or invest in training with my voice that I’ve been putting off?
What do I want to do more of with my voice?
What do I want to do less of with my voice?
What is the one FUN thing I want to do with my voice?
What will committing do for me as a singer or speaker?
What is one action step that I could do today - or put in my calendar to do - to progress my singing or speaking intentions?
These questions are just a jumping-off point. You can create your own questions to answer or do some freeform journaling. Some of our friends even create a collage at the beginning of each year. Whatever helps you reflect and gets your inspiration and creative juices flowing is perfect.
Give Yourself (Or Someone Else) a Gift This Year
As the year winds down, we hope that reflecting and setting intentions bring a satisfying close to this year and an inspired start to the next. If you want help setting or reaching your singing goals, get in touch! As a special for the holiday season and the new year, Zelda is offering a 20% discount when you book five lessons before February 1, 2026, for yourself or a loved one who’s looking to love their voice. Reach out via email with the subject “I want the 20% off deal to Love My Voice,” and we’ll help make your intentions and goals happen for you in 2026.