When my 14-year-old niece EP was visiting from the UK last month, she took a singing lesson. (Here’s a picture of a singing lesson from the olden days. I put it here because I like the singing lady’s hat. Our lesson obviously looked nothing like this thank goodness.)

The teacher is a friend of mine (a top professional who coaches singers for Broadway auditions). And I got to sit in on the lesson.

It didn’t take long before the teacher told my niece something she didn’t know. Believing herself to be an Alto, my niece told the teacher: “I’m hopeless at high notes!”

“You’re not an Alto,” the teacher told her. “You’re a Soprano!

At the beginning of the lesson EP struggled to hit a G. By the end of the lesson she was singing a top C Sharp no problem. “And I think you have higher notes in you!” the teacher said.

That was the first thing that struck me: if you don’t know your voice how will you know what you can do?

Hmm.

And then here’s the other thing. The teacher was encouraging my niece to open up and relax and not to force it, and said: “When you sing in your true voice, your voice has natural vibrato! When you force it and try to get your voice to be like someone else’s, the vibrato vanishes. You need to sing in your true voice.”

You need to sing in your True Voice. Hmm.

Have you found your True Voice?
And are you singing in it?
Or are you forcing it and trying to sing in someone else’s voice?

My prayer for my niece is that she will always sing in her True Voice–every day of her life for as long as she lives in all that she does.

It’s my prayer for me. And for you, too.