Happy Mother's Day!

As Mother’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about expertise. (After all, moms end up being experts at such a variety of tasks, don’t they?)

A while ago, I told a friend of mine who’s an occasional web surfer about this blog. She didn’t really understand the concept of a blog (why would you write one and who would read it?). I told her blogs are like super niche magazines on the web. (Probably my publishing background talking.)

“To write a blog, you take an area about which you have a lot of knowledge or experience — or unique or unusual knowledge and experience — and write about it for other folks who are interested in what you do or what you know. Everyone has some topic about which they know a lot more than the average person.”

“So I could write about raising four children under the age of 8?”

Umm … yeah. I’m guessin’ she could blog for a good long time about what she learned from doing that! She has unique, unusual and probably extensive knowledge about raising children.

I’d call her an expert.

…

As you may have figured out, I’m working to become a “spontaneous singing expert.” Since I don’t know a lot of other spontaneous singing experts, a large part of my work is following my mother’s profoundly simple advice … “Figure out what you want to do next.”

Hold a space where spontaneous singing can take place? Find like-minded singers and instrumentalists? (Write a blog? *smile*)

(A liberal amount of my sister’s “fake it ’til you make it” advice is thrown in.“If I were an astronaut (manager, dog-walker, … ahem … expert spontaneous singer, etc.), what would I do in this situation? This approach usually gives me permission to move from “whether” (or not) I should do something to “how” I could do it.)

…

Yaro Starak writes that “Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it.”

Well, I’ve got that covered. I mean there just aren’t that many of us spontaneous singers (aka improvisational vocalists … you say tomato, I say toe-mah-to) out there to start with. In that small universe, the number of folks out there talking about how or why they improvise is even smaller.

(Uh-oh, maybe I’m an expert?)

I mean I sure do talk about it, don’t I? How I feel about it, what I learn from it, and how I struggle work to get better at it. Every week, right here.

(But, still … C’mon, an expert?)

…

Here’s what’s funny. (Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.)

Even though I’m (more than a little) uncomfortable calling myself an expert, I’m perfectly willing to continue learning and exploring and experiencing spontaneous singing (and writing about it here). After all, as my grandmother would say, “You can never have too much education.”

So … I’m willing to be on a path to expertise. To state that I want to be a spontaneous singing expert. (I’m just not ready to be an expert … yet.)

…

Starak continues “If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened.”

Here’s to my future expertise.

…

Apologies to my mom who hates being called “Ma.” Seriously, when I was a kid there was a song and everything. *smile*

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