Edward Atkinson

Directing a volunteer choir often means fixing the same issues: rehearsal after rehearsal. Ever felt like a broken record explaining “stand tall, take a low breath, and open your vowels” ten rehearsals in a row?

Constant repetition eats into precious rehearsal time.

What would you spend your rehearsal doing if you never had to repeat an instruction? You could focus on refinement, on shaping sound, on cultivating beauty, on creating magic!

You can eliminate repetition instruction. The answer lies in:

-- understanding why volunteer singers do not create permanent skill growth with a once-a-week group rehearsal and

-- tools you can leverage to create the permanent skill growth outside of rehearsal.

Why Volunteers Don't Grow With Weekly Group Rehearsals

The problem isn’t the singers; it’s the system. Without a way to reinforce core instruction outside of rehearsal, a singers' growth relies solely on what happens during a 90-minute rehearsal.

Which involves un-personalized, un-reinforced group instruction.

Group rehearsals pull very few of the levers that stimulate neurogenesis (which is the creation of neural stem cells that then mature into neurons...also known as: skill formation!).

The small bit of neurogenesis that is actually stimulated during group rehearsals is lost in the intervening days before the next rehearsal, with no reinforcement and encoding.

So what if, instead of just a group rehearsal, your choir system massively stimulated neurogenesis? And resulted in incredible skill growth for your volunteer, untrained singers? To do that, your system would need to include:

-- Rapid, accurate feedback loops
-- Personalized instruction
-- Daily reinforcement to access overnight brain encoding
-- Layered lessons that keep the singer squarely in the challenging-but-not-overwhelming bucket
-- Novelty
-- Digestible, fun approach to build a consistent routine

And if your choir system had those, you would entirely eliminate the need for repetitive instruction.

Your rehearsals would become free to focus on the higher art of choral direction, not simply remediation.

The Solution: Automate the Fundamentals with Asynchronous, Daily, Bite-sized Trainings

Provide your volunteers with world-class voice training in bite-sized, 5-minute daily lessons. Short, focused exercises that cover the core fundamentals that every singer needs to know, designed to be easy to use for volunteer singers at any level.

It's a vastly improved model of leading volunteer choirs: it's an evidence-based model to create vocal mastery in volunteers who otherwise would not grow.

Here’s why it works:

-- Consistent, Daily Practice: By practicing every day for just five minutes, your singers build muscle memory and develop their technique steadily over time. Neural stem cells do not mature into permanent circuits unless there is reinforcement and encoding. Encoding happens every night when you go to sleep, but encoding can't happen without reinforcement!
-- Offload Core Instruction: Instead of spending precious rehearsal minutes explaining the same concepts, use asynchronous training to handle the repetitive instruction. Just imagine the level you could take your choir to, without repetitive instruction.
-- Flexible, Fun, Accessible: Singers can complete the lessons at home, on their own schedule. This flexibility makes it easy for busy volunteers to stay consistent with their training. This is crucial to adoption by your singers.
-- Group discussion: Some singers taking asynchronous lessons can feel unmotivated. A weekly group discussion sharing insights and learnings completely reverses this dynamic: singers are drawn into a compelling shared experience.

By leveraging asynchronous lessons, you’re not replacing yourself as a director—you’re freeing yourself up to do what only you can do: inspire your choir, refine their performance, and guide them toward the deeper meaning of the music.

Only for those seeking excellence

If you’re ready to stop repeating yourself and start achieving excellence, consider exploring the new model. It worked for my choirs, and over 200 others.

Try Choir Snacks for free. If you like it, continue it. If you don't have a budget, just send me a message and we'll work it out. Or if you want to create your own asynchronous trainings, go that route!

When your singers thrive, your choir thrives.

And when your choir thrives, it becomes a powerful instrument of beauty and grace.

Your volunteer singers deserve to be in THAT choir.

Try it, love it, or just blame the sopranos!
www.choirsnacks.com

It's hard to develop excellence in volunteer singers. So I made Choir Snacks: world-class voice training in bite-sized, 5-minute daily video lessons to develop vocal mastery. Choirs on Choir Snacks so far are from Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, California, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and about a dozen other states. Let's get all 50 states!

Choir Snacks Level up your volunteer singers with asynchronous training from internationally award-winning teachers.

Hi friends,

Last Christmas (2022), I made 4 crazy decisions:

🍺 Give up alcohol for a year
🧁 Give up all sweets for a year
💪 Go to the gym 6 days a week for 30 minutes minimum

The 4th decision was a firm commitment, and also maybe the most important one:

⏩ Don't stop, under any circumstances, taking the actions necessary to achieve each goal.

I've been reflecting on this 11 month journey, as it almost comes to a close, and so far I have 3 big takeaways.
👇
👇

1. A big part of my success came down to NOT doing something

First of all, I failed plenty along the way. I didn't get 100% consistency (who does??!). But every time I fell off the horse, I got back on it. That was big. But even more crucially, I never over compensated.

Let's say my daily calorie intake goal was 1,800, but then I got ravenous and ate 2,500. The next day, I didn't adjust my goal downwards, to something like 1,000 calories, out of a sense of guilt or shame that I had failed or a desire to stay on track.

Nope, I just kept the goal at 1,800 and moved forward with the day.

Didn't exercise one day? I did not try to exercise twice as hard the next day. Instead, I simply worked to achieve the original goal of 30 minutes a day.

🔑 Not overcompensating for failures has been a huge part in helping me to stay consistent over time.

Since huge goals take months and years to achieve, one bad day doesn't really move the needle much anyways. But staying consistent, never getting de-motivated, and totally avoiding the cycle of shame and overcompensating? That has a huge effect!

I've since incorporated “don't overcompensate” into other areas of my life too and it's definitely a tool I will continue to use.
👇
👇

2. Mirror talk was weirdly effective in overcoming fear of failure

I was full of fear of failure before I started. I've been chubby my whole life, since I was a kid. And then overweight. And, eventually, obese. The idea of really tackling this, and not stopping no matter what, sounded like I was setting myself for abject failure and disappointment. Put simply, I did not want to face my fear of failure. I did not want to make these commitments. Why would I, when it felt like I had a 90% chance of failure, which would only make me feel even worse?

So I engaged in mirror talk, which sounds self-obsessed and yawn-inducing-ly self-centered. Thankfully, it isn't!

🔑 Standing in front of the mirror, looking into my own eyes, I named my bad habits. I called myself out for being lazy, undisciplined, and everything else that was holding me back. I also made my commitments there, with absolute firmness and sincerity of spirit, over and over again.

​David Goggins calls it “mirror accountability.” I like that.

One reason I believe it's so effective is that if there's one person you absolutely cannot fool, it's yourself. It also helped me to take my own commitments more seriously.

And the great side effect is that it diffused my fear of failure. For whatever reason, the more I engaged in mirror talk, the more my fear of failure subsided and was instead replaced with a sense of determination.

I don't know why, but it worked! And that's what matters.
👇
👇

3. Any achievement I make is meaningless unless I give it away

I’ve lost 65 pounds.

My daily energy is massively greater than it was before.

I’m more confident.

For the first time in my life, I had to buy new clothes for the right reasons.

I can also do pull-ups for the first time in my life.

I think more clearly.

All of that is truly incredible! But.

Weirdly enough, none of that is what’s been on my mind as I’ve been reflecting. Which has been confusing to me!

What I've really felt, upon reflection, is that there is something gnawing at me from the inside.

And it took me a few weeks to figure out what exactly that is.
⬇
⬇
⬇
🔑 It is a sense that achieving these goals means nothing, unless I give away what I’ve gained.
🤔💭🤯

What’s the purpose of more energy, more focus, and more confidence?

To sit around and feel proud? (Barf.)

What could possibly be more deadening to the spirit than such inward focused energy?

I am feeling a strange sense of urgency, that if I don’t take the gains and give them away, it will deaden me.

And so now, as I close out the remaining 6 weeks of my year-long challenge, this is the real question I need to answer:

❓What is the right way to take the gains of 2023, and give them away? The energy, the clarity, everything else: how do I use that to have a positive impact on others?

That question is gold.

And in a month, I hope to have a good answer!

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

Hi friends,

When I was 4 years old, I sang at church more loudly than most adults.

When I was 6 years old, I strutted around, pretending to be an opera singer with big vibrato.

When I was 11 years old, I joined my first choir, absolutely giddy with excitement at the chance.

Then, I was given a label: soft, girly, gay. Other names too, that I won’t dignify in print.

Only because I joined a choir.

When you’re young, experiences like that cut deep.

I quit that choir, almost immediately.

My love of singing turned into shame, and I hid it away for almost ten years straight.

I want to share what it took for me to overcome my negative beliefs, and go from a place of “singing makes me want to crawl into a hole and hide for 100 years” to a place of thriving and joyful singing.

The answer was coming to a belief far more powerful and true than my narrative of shame.

I’ll share the belief in a minute.

But first:

Singing feels more vulnerable than being naked in public.

Singing feels like you are opening up the core parts of your identity.

Singing feels like you are taking your armor off. And to let it all out, you have to let others in.

Wait….is all of that true?

All of that is inward focused thinking.

That thinking is all about me. (Singers, amirite??)

What if you flip it? What if it isn’t about you and your identity?

"What if the best singing is gift giving?"

When I give a gift to a friend, I don’t feel self conscious or feel like my identity is threatened. Because I am thinking about the other.

I just: give.

Gifts are about generosity. They’re freely given.

Which brings us to that new belief:

“The best kind of singing is gift giving.”

This statement changed my relationship with singing. It was and is more true and powerful than any of my negative (and false) beliefs.

I've cultivated that belief over the years, and my inner narrative slowly turned from shame to something quite simple: give your voice as a gift!

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

P.S. I credit Marie Roberts (Mercer University) as the first person to teach me to look at singing as gift giving, and it's stuck with me forever.

Hi friends,

🚬 A friend of mine is a doctor who smokes. That kind of thing used to surprise me, but it doesn’t even register as a blip anymore.

We’re all just humans! And we humans, of course, are full of contradictions.

I’ll confess I’m personally a mess of contradictions. (Although, I like to think a bit less that way than I used to be!)

I’m not too worried about it, honestly. But I do try to change some of my contradictory habits.

🍔 Like how I used to religiously snack at night after the kids went down. This completely undid one of my good habits, regularly working out.

Late night snacking is a sticky habit I tried to break more than a few times. But the sleep deprivation and irregular life schedule of having a few kiddos made it a really tough one to kick. Who doesn’t love a bowl of cereal once the house goes quiet?

🏆 So after 4 years of failures, thanks to insights from a Huberman Lab episode (link in comments), I’ve succeeded in finally breaking the habit and replacing it with a new one!

Here is what I learned that helped me breakthrough:

✍️ WRITE OUT what you will do immediately before and afteryour new habit, and rehearse it in your head.

Example: new gym habit? Write out: getting out of bed, putting on your pants and shirt, putting on your socks, putting on your shoes, grabbing the car keys, starting the car, driving to the gym, walking in the door, picking up a weight.

Then visualize, in great detail and without fast forwarding in the mind, going through each of those steps.

The better visualized and written out all the many actions that have to happen before the actual habit, the more likely you can follow through.

Keep visualizing every day, as part of habit formation.

⏰ Choosing WHEN you’ll work on new habits has a massive impact on your ability to follow through. Divide the day into three 8-hour blocks:

First phase is for all the tough stuff that requires precision and motivation.

Next phase is for stuff that doesn’t require as much.

Last phase (evening): don’t try to make habits here! Focus on rest. It’ll make your phase 1 of the next day that much better. (Being ambitious in the evening is a fool’s errand.)

🚫 Don’t over compensate. Ever.

Failed one day? All good. Just get back to it the next day, without any adjustments. Over compensating for errors will not help you succeed in habit formation.

There’s a great deal more in there if you want to dive deep (whole episode + the show notes below), including a granular look at what it takes to break bad habits. But executing actions based on those 3 insights alone were enough to help me kick a number of bad habits, including late night snacking.

I hope this is helpful to you if you’re working on forming or breaking habits!

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

I earned $1,064,023 by working the university system.

Let me show you how:

I went to Mercer University for my undergraduate degree and Indiana University for two graduate degrees.

The cost of attending Mercer is $59,482 a year and the cost of Indiana University is $53,860 a year.

I spent 4 years at Mercer ($237,928), and 4 years at IU ($215,440) for a total of $453,368.

At 30 years of paying that back at a 6.8% (the standard student loan interest rate), the total in interest payments alone on that cost is $610,655.

Meaning that the actual cost of that education can be summarized as $1,064,023: the principal ($453,368) plus the interest ($610,655).

More than a million dollars.

Education costs are bananas. It could even be potentially argued that student loans are destroying as many futures as colleges are improving!

I was given an unfair advantage, though. Early in life, I was taught how to work the university system. Using those skills, I was able to turn mediocre scholarship offers into full ride offers. These are life changing skills.

Both at Mercer and IU, I received less-than-wonderful scholarship offers.

And then both at Mercer and IU, I was able to work the system to turn those into full ride offers, completely covering all costs.

It was a royal pain in the butt. The scholarships for each of my 3 degrees took many, many months of work.

Which sounds like a painful process until I remember: that’s months of work, to earn $1,064,023. It was the best return on investment I’ve ever had.

I’ve been looking for more ways that I can have more impact with my teaching. So I am taking all of my lessons from the full ride scholarships, and putting them into a course to teach you to do the same.

Professionals going back to school, grad students, parents, and high schoolers: this one’s for you.

I won’t solve the student debt crisis. But I hope I can help a few thousand people like you go to school for free, and have an impact that way.

If you are motivated to avoid a lifetime of debt and want to learn how I did it, I want to share that with you. It’s tough, and absolutely worth it. In my case, worth $1,064,023.

If you’d like early access when the course goes live, sign up for Growing https://www.edwardatkinson.com/newsletter, my free newsletter. I’ll be announcing it there.

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I got a quote on repairing the windows on my house. The quote? North of $1,000 to scrape, treat for rust, and paint.

So I looked into doing it myself: it will cost me about $90 in materials and 5 hours of work. That equates to me earning $182 per hour by taking some initiative.

So now I’m working on repairing some windows!

I have always run calculations like that, to decide if a project is worth the time and effort.

But recently, that's all changed.

My oldest son is now 4 years old. He can climb ladders, scrape, and paint along with the best of them. (Well, maybe not the best...)

Sure, I can “earn” $182 an hour doing all the work myself. But that doesn’t really matter to me anymore.

Now, I get to do the project with my son. He shines with pride as he accomplishes a challenging task. And I get the soul-deep satisfaction of sharing an experience with him. Together, it will probably take us 15 hours instead of 5! And we’ll definitely drop some paint and break some things along the way.

And that’s wonderful.

While it’s important to measure and quantify, none of that matters in the grand equation.

Here’s to messy, memorable shared experiences!

Have a wonderful week!

-Edward

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this is excerpted from Growing ==>

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At 35, I want to create a beautiful future for my two kids.

But at 25, I wanted to be Luciano Pavarotti.

At 15, I wanted girls to notice me.

At 5, I just wanted cake.

Letting go of old beliefs and desires makes room for something new. Which is such a blessing: how else could we want different things at different ages?

Letting go, usually, lets something much better and more meaningful come into your life (see: my own progression from cake to kids).

You can’t become “The Better You” unless some part of “Today You” dies. And while that’s often tough, it unlocks something powerful as well.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the process of letting go of old beliefs and desires is so very slow, that it’s basically indiscernible except in retrospect.

🗝️ But noticing that you are *always* changing, whether or not you chose the change, is one of the secret ingredients to growth.

Instead of just letting your transformation happen slowly over decades, without much of your input, what if you **start writing the script** for your transformation?

What if you fire the writers and become the author?

For me, that looks like

- enthusiastically making mistakes
- trust my instincts
- try more things
- worry about outcomes much, much less
- don’t worry about pleasing strangers
- thank God that I’m alive
- daily meditation
- fast frequently to improve internal freedom so that I can choose growth more often

It’s a lot more fun to hop in the driver’s seat.

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

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