Top 5 Reasons to Sing Out Your Stress

By: Linda Dessau

When people find out that I'm a music therapist, the comments I hear most often are "I wish I could sing!" or "Oh, I love to sing, but I'm not good enough to do it in front of anyone". Some of these people tell me that, as children, a parent, teacher or someone else told them that they should just mouth the words because they didn't have a good enough voice. 

Singing is our birthright! Singing is a natural and pure expression of how glad we feel to be alive, and the way we show our love of music. Here are my top five reasons to sing out your stress:

1. To connect with your body: We sing with our whole bodies. Because singing is so connected to closely with breath, singing helps us "be in our bodies" and let go of the thinking (or worrying) we do much of the day. Singing can be a joyful activity and can release endorphins (those feel-good chemicals that the body creates). 

Setting Goals: Your only recipe for success

By: Innocent Mwangi Gathungu

Goals are like signposts. As long as you can see these signposts, then you know you are heading in the right direction. When you set goals, you eliminate the possibility veering off the track and derailing into failure. When a train veers of the rails, the entire locomotive is derailed. Looking at the rails, one does not see anything special in them; just a solid mass of steel. But that simple mass of steel ensures that the train remains on course and that everyone on board reaches their destination safely and on time.

Goals are like rails. Without them, our claim to success will never find expression in reality. Just as a train must stay on the rails to complete the journey, our dreams, our ambitions, and our desires must find expression in goals that are clear, realistic and timely.