Teaching Confidence: How Great Teachers Build Bravery in Singers – Voice Science

Have you ever gotten up to perform and felt like your whole body was shaking—not from excitement, but from sheer terror? Me too. It hasn’t happened in a while, but what’s interesting is that just minutes earlier, I’d been on the same stage, singing just fine. So why did that moment feel so different?

One of the most common requests I get from students is, “I just want to feel more confident when I sing.” Timothy wrote an incredible episode a few weeks ago about how to sing with confidence. But how do we teach confidence? How do we support someone else—a student, a friend, a family member—as they build it for themselves? And what can a shaky moment on stage teach us about what confidence really is? That’s what we’re going to unpack today.

The Anatomy of Confidence

Confidence, at its core, seems simple enough—it’s the belief that you’re able to do something. Whether that belief is earned or not, though, makes all the difference between healthy self-assurance and plain arrogance.

In singing, we see people on both ends of that spectrum. It’s easy to assume that natural talent makes someone confident, or that lack of ability causes insecurity—or even that certain personality types are just predisposed to one or the other. But over the years, I’ve come to a different conclusion: experience is the defining factor.

A singer becomes confident as the evidence piles up—as they prove to themselves, over and over, that they can do it. Timothy talked about this beautifully in his episode. Experience also humbles overconfidence. It’s painful to crash and burn on stage, but if the singer gets back up and tries again, they eventually earn real confidence—the kind grounded in truth, not bravado.

And that’s the key word here: earn. Confidence isn’t gifted; it’s earned in small victories—tiny votes of evidence in our own favor. Our job as teachers, friends, or family members is to make space for those small victories. A moment of understanding. A lightbulb click when something suddenly makes sense. Those moments are the difference between believing you’ll fail and believing you might succeed.

I once had a student that, like many, wanted to sing higher. It was a source of embarrassment that they couldn’t. After every attempt they’d nervously laugh and apologize for “failing.” Week after week, we worked patiently until one day they sang a C5—not the highest note, but a record for their adult life. Eyes wide, they said, “I can’t believe that happened. I sounded good!” One success doesn’t erase self-doubt, but it starts the process. Every week after that, we moved closer to the goal—every week, a little more confident.

I have a rule in my own teaching: over time, I should make myself obsolete. My goal is to create singers who can refine their own voices—who no longer need me to tell them they can. It’s easy to underestimate how big those “small” wins are. To an outsider, singing for a few minutes on stage might not seem like much. But for some singers, that feels as monumental as performing the Super Bowl halftime show. So, how do we create those small, safe victories—the kind that build trust in both the singer and the process?

Designing Safe Risk

Building confidence requires a singer to take risks. And most of those risks come down to one thing—the risk of failure. Cracked notes. Missed pitches. Sounds that don’t match what they were trying to do. Even when the stakes are small, those risks rarely feel small—because the voice is personal. It’s part of who they are. When something goes wrong, many singers don’t just hear, “That note was off.” They hear, “I’m off.”

So how do we take that fear and replace it with adventure? How do we turn risk into curiosity? We start by creating a space to play—and then we add just a touch of challenge.

There’s a learning concept called the zone of proximal development. It means progress happens when something is just hard enough to be exciting, but not so hard that it feels impossible. That’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for as teachers: not huge leaps forward, but small, achievable challenges—tiny votes that say, I can sing that phrase, or I can match that pitch. Each time a singer succeeds, even in the smallest way, they collect evidence. And that evidence slowly reshapes their belief in themselves.

Of course, learning to sing also means making a lot of “ugly” sounds. Quacking like a duck. Cackling like a witch. Puppy whines. Lip trills. Twang. Ring. There’s no shortage of strange noises in a healthy studio. For most teachers, that’s second nature—we lost our embarrassment about making weird sounds a long time ago. But our students haven’t. So one of the best things we can do is join in. Laugh. Make the same silly sound. Model that playfulness. When they see us risk looking foolish, it gives them permission to do the same.

The other big step we can take is to model curiosity. Instead of saying, “Do this,” we can ask, “What do you think will happen if we raise the larynx a little?” or, “What might change if we adjust that vowel?” When we frame learning as an experiment, the outcome becomes uncertain—and that uncertainty makes failure feel safe. After all, it’s not their failure anymore. It’s our experiment.

Transferring Ownership

Of course, the goal isn’t to make students feel confident with you—it’s to make them stay confident without you. That’s where the idea of self-efficacy comes in: the belief in one’s ability to figure things out.

All of this works beautifully when you’re in the room—guiding, demonstrating, cheering them on. But what happens when they go home? When they’re standing at karaoke night, or auditioning without you there to anchor them? How do we make sure the confidence doesn’t just disappear?

The answer lies in transferring ownership. Confidence built only in your presence is borrowed confidence; our goal is to help them own it. One of the simplest—and most powerful—tools for that is asking questions. Lots of them.

In lessons, we tend to focus on what needs improvement. That’s natural; we’re problem-solvers. But confidence grows when we also highlight what’s working. I like to end lessons with two questions: “What are three things you did well today?” and “What’s one thing you want to improve?”

Those two prompts do a few important things. First, they shift the student’s attention from dependence on your feedback to their own evaluation. Second, they help you track what matters to them. And most importantly, they make the student say aloud what’s going well—something most singers almost never do.

The first few times you ask, expect silence. You may need to model it: “I thought your tongue height improved,” or “Your support seemed more engaged than last week.” Over time, the silence shortens, and you’ll hear them start to notice details on their own.

As their understanding deepens, you can start responding with questions instead of answers: “Interesting—what made that note feel easier?” or “Why do you think that vowel worked better?” Now you’re shifting from coach to collaborator.

They won’t always get it right, and that’s fine. Because every time they try to analyze, they’re proving to themselves that they’re capable of figuring it out. And that realization—that they can identify, adjust, and improve without you—is the real win. When that happens, confidence stops being something they borrow from you in lessons and becomes something they carry into every song, rehearsal, and stage.

Common Pitfalls

Even when we understand all this, it’s easy to get in our own way. Teachers, parents, even friends—we all want to help. But sometimes, what feels supportive actually slows confidence growth. The good news is these mistakes are easy to spot once you know what to look for.

There are a few common pitfalls that even the most well-intentioned teachers, family members, and friends fall into.

Over-praising. We all want singers to feel good about what they’re doing, even when maybe it wasn’t their best effort. So we say, “Great job! That was amazing!” But here’s the problem—most singers can tell when you’re not being fully truthful. And when that happens, they stop trusting your feedback. They need to know you’ll tell them the truth—kindly, but honestly. That doesn’t mean saying, “That was awful,” either. It just means finding the middle ground: “That wasn’t your strongest take, but your vowels were clearer than last week.” Honest encouragement builds far more confidence than empty praise ever will.

Over-correcting. It’s tempting to fill every silence with feedback—after all, that’s what we’re paid to do as teachers. But too much instruction can overwhelm and distract, especially for novice singers who already doubt themselves. Our job isn’t to fix everything at once; it’s to find the few adjustments that will make the biggest impact. That keeps them in the zone of proximal development—challenged, but not crushed.

Rushing skill development. With the best intentions, we sometimes push too hard, too fast. We want them to feel progress, to see results. But speed can sabotage stability. Without strong fundamentals, growth collapses under its own weight. And if the student never gets to feel successful along the way, confidence never takes root. Take a breath. Slow down. Celebrate the small wins. That’s where confidence quietly grows.

Confidence in Context

That moment I mentioned at the beginning—the one where I was shaking on stage after having just sung minutes earlier—I finally figured out why. It wasn’t another song. It wasn’t even singing. It was a piano solo. Same recital, same audience, same stage—completely different skill.

I had spent years building confidence as a singer, but I hadn’t earned that same confidence as a pianist. And that’s what struck me most: confidence isn’t a blanket trait you can carry from one area of your life to another. It’s contextual. It’s specific to the evidence you’ve built in that domain. My experience as a performer hadn’t failed me—I just didn’t yet have the proof that I could succeed at this new thing.

That realization reshaped how I think about teaching. Confidence doesn’t mean fear disappears; it means you’ve built enough trust in yourself to navigate the unknown. And that trust only comes from experience—from the small, repeated wins that show you what you’re capable of. That’s as true for teachers as it is for singers.

Confidence, then, becomes a shared process—not something we possess, but something we practice together. Every singer you guide, every student who trusts you, gives you evidence too. Teachers build their own confidence right alongside their students, one success at a time. That reciprocity is what keeps this work alive.

That’s why we built VoSci Academy—to help singers and teachers alike build confidence that’s grounded in knowledge, experience, and evidence. Inside, you’ll find the same science-based approach we talk about here: guided exercises, practical tools, and a growing library of lessons that help you understand your voice—and trust it.

If you’ve ever wanted to not just sound confident but feel it—to understand why your voice works the way it does and how to make it reliable—visit voicescience.org to learn more about VoSci Academy.

Thanks for spending time with me today. Until next time, keep singing—and keep singing smart.