the real pain of being out of your comfort zone

Late last year I decided I would return to a real love of mine, singing.

Now, I'm no Kiri te Kanawa, but I can (generally) hold a tune and have a decent range. Most of my previous forays onto the stage have been in musicals - the role of Rizzo in Grease was a highlight, but I've also done Madam Dubonnet in The Boyfriend and a variety of chorus parts in Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - for example. I've sung jazz, and rock, and the idea of being on stage doesn't frighten me.

So far, so good. But this time, I wanted to do something a bit more serious, and more stretching. The choir I had in mind to join performed "classical choral pieces" - Elijah was first on the list, followed by The Messiah. So this was a significant change for me.

I'm not a scaredy-cat and I happily threw my hat into the ring, emailed and called to ask if I could come along. Please do, said the charming lady on the end of the phone. We do auditions at the end of the month, she added, where we'll test your voice to make sure you're in the right place in the choir and give you a sight reading test.

"Sight reading test?" I quavered.
"Oh yes, we do quite challenging work and we do need a reasonable level of sight reading to make sure you can keep up," was the brisk response.

"I see....." I trailed off.

I've never learnt to sight read and frankly, faced with a bunch of dots on a treble clef my brain goes to mush. Any sense of timing, tone - and any common sense, come to that - just evaporates and I become a wavering, weak and timid soul who squeaks, rather than sings.

This conversation took place in August - rehearsals for Elijah started in September, the concert was in November. Stiffening my spine, I immediately sent off for books from Amazon to help me learn to read music. When these didn't seem to help, I started to work with programmes on the internet which gave you the notes and then played the tune. When this didn't help and with start of rehearsals coming ever closer, I began music lessons. Two weeks to go before rehearsals began and I was having two or three lessons a week.

The choir lady had suggested that I come along to a couple of weeks' rehearsal before the audition, ("Just to see if you like us, dear") and in this time, I had an additional four lessons. And what a torment they were! My poor, beleaguered teacher spent much of the lesson passing me tissues to mop up my despair and soothing my fury that the information wouldn't go in. She gently told me that things would sink in, if only I would relax and go with my instinct.

The day of the audition, I hadn't slept well and I didn't eat all day. I felt physically sick, and arrived, a good 20 minutes early, for my ordeal. By this time, I'd talked myself both in and out of choir membership, forgetting one fairly important thing - I actually have a good voice, and I can sing.

I fluffed the sight reading - not dreadfully, but I fluffed what your average six-year old learning the recorder would play after a glance. The conductor suggested gently that I ought to continue with the lessons - and then accepted me as a second soprano. I was shaking by the time I left the hall. In mid November, I was with the choir, singing my first classical concert as a second soprano.

This post is not about my success - it's about my suffering. This was a very different environment for me - serious music, the focus completely on the voice, where skills were expected and in which I was poorly-tutored. I felt ill for a good week before the audition and a sort of stunned relief for a couple of days afterwards. I was, classically - out of my comfort zone.

As a communicator and trainer, I often have people in front of me who are being exhorted to "do something different", and I'm there to help them. My involvement is often to demonstrate how easy it is to do something different and that all you need is faith, and to buckle down.

Having sweated for at least six weeks to try and grasp even the basics of sight reading, I now have a pretty clear idea of how "being out of your comfort zone" doesn't just affect you mentally, it can also affect you physically. My confidence plummeted and my appetite waned, I didn't sleep, and I felt nauseous. Is this, I wondered, how people feel at work when they're asked to change what they do, who they do it with, and learn new skills into the bargain?

And this was something that I really wanted to do - imagine how it would feel if you were being put through this anguish for something you disagreed with, but needed to do to keep your job. Reflecting on this experience, I hope I'm now a little more patient and understanding with employees who, as a result of organisational change, are being asked - or forced - to do their jobs in unfamiliar ways. My "tick list" of change now reads:

• try not to set timescales - they make people nervous and nervousness does nothing to improve learning capability
• be patient - can you truthfully expect people who've behaved in certain ways for ten, 15, even 20 years to do things differently in a matter of months?
• some people (me included) learn best from other people - reading books or e-learning may not produce results, increases frustration and knocks confidence
• the impact of trying to change is mental AND physical - what's in place in your organisation to help with this?
• people who lead training, change agents and leaders of the change programme - they've had time to reach a level of equilibrium. The people in front of them, worried about their role, their competence and their rapidly diminishing confidence probably have not. Cut them some slack and recognise that any resistance may not be to inconvenience you. It's because they didn't sleep last night and they may feel sick to their stomach.

Finally, not being able to demonstrate a particular skill may not matter. I can't sight read (very well, yet) - but I can sing. I find my own ways of keeping up with the rest of the choir, listening to music files for my part from the internet, and learning it by rote. If the criteria for acceptance for my choir was just the sight reading, I wouldn't be writing this. But the conductor had the end result in mind.

It's a shame that more organisations don't think like this.