A few weeks ago at one of the summer programs I work with, I got to talking about failure with the students. I get the sense that young performers think that those of us who've "made it" have always been perfect and never messed anything up at all, which couldn't be further from the truth! We’ve all had
those moments when we do something wrong and it really brings out that insecure little voice inside our heads that says “Maybe you really AREN’T good enough,
maybe you should just give it up.” Or the worry that the one person who's hearing you now holds the deciding vote as to whether or not you'll have a career.
Failure is a part of learning—and how you react to failure is much more important than failing in the first place. It's difficult to succeed without having first understood failure. And if you have an "epic fail", then that's the chance to also succeed epically!
That moment came
for me when I was about 30—I had an audition for a pretty important opera house
in the States, a fairly informal audition, just me and the head coach. And I’m
here to tell you, he ripped me to shreds. Seriously, shreds. He hated the way I played La Bohème, he
kept asking me specifics about Italian and German diction rules—I
was pretty lazy about learning those rules in college, so I was going off of my
ears rather than rules, and he called me out on it for about an hour. I walked
out of there completely demoralised and humiliated, convinced that I was the worst vocal coach in America and that there was no hope for me to ever work in the opera world. I can honestly say, that one hour of my life shook my
confidence for years.
But that night (after a good cry) I started translating the libretto for the next opera I was scheduled to play, and kept doing that for every opera I worked on. I cracked open my diction notes from grad school and pored over the diction books I could find. I made my Italian cheat
sheets of open and closed words that crop up on a regular basis. I made it my business
to be absolutely secure with the diction as well as the music, to know what the rules are and when breaking them is allowable. And eventually,
I moved over to Europe and was able to listen to native speakers and how they sound,
and applied what I was hearing to the rules I had studied. In the end, diction has become the
one thing that really sets me apart from other coaches. And then I started a
podcast, which forces me to continue to learn the rules, and hopefully makes it
fun for other people to do their homework! Now people send me lyric diction books to edit and review, and I am fortunate enough to constantly learn more about lyric diction through these opportunities.
I could have let that little voice in my head beat
me—the insecurity, the voice that told me that I would never be good enough, the one that said that if that head coach hated me,
then it was hopeless and I should just give it all up. But instead, I let that
little voice remind me that while I may never be perfect, I can certainly
always work to be better. So instead of being scared of failure, use it as your
marker! Embrace it and learn from it. Let it be
the thing that drives you to always study and practice and work hard and continue to learn, rather
than something that paralyses you and keeps you from trying in the first place. 
And if you need more encouragement along these lines, check out the NPR podcast "How I Built This". You can hear how many of the most successful business people in the US got their start and built something incredible—and how most of them failed several times before starting the business they are known for today!
--Ellen
