Meet Luiza Girardello

We were lucky to catch up with Luiza Girardello recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Luiza, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
It’s interesting you ask that, my latest release is a song quite literally called Resilience. In it I explore my background coming from a very conservative country with a nepotistic power structure, the upbringing that made me a perfectionist and made me have a really hard time taking any risks, and the physical and mental health complications from going through chemotherapy and confronting mortality when I was a young adult and diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of my remission from cancer. It threw my life upside down and made me have to reconsider everything. I had to seriously ask myself if I died tomorrow, how I would spend my time today. It made me realize that I was avoiding what I actually wanted to do by doing things that were somewhat related but didn’t feel like a real risk. My rationalization was telling myself that If I never fully tried, I would never truly fail.

I wrote my first full song in between chemotherapy sessions, and everything started to click. I realized that I had to own the fact that I wanted to write and perform my own music. Things still got a lot worse before they got better, especially when it came to my mental health. But I came to believe that if I hadn’t been thrown so far out of alignment, I wouldn’t have been able to see how I was avoiding what I wanted and to self correct.

On my song, Resilience, I talk about and the alchemy of turning hardship into growth, and to commemorate this surviving and thriving of the past decade since having cancer, I am donating 100% of the proceeds from the song sales on Bandcamp to OCRA, the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a singer-songwriter and a music educator, I’m originally from Brazil and have been in the US since 2018. A lot of my music draws from personal experience and topics like mental health, connection and moments of unconditional presence. I combine a lot of my influences which go from Alternative Rock, Jazz, and Brazilian and Latin Music. My music is available through all major streaming platforms, as well as for purchase on Bandcamp, and my debut album is going to be released later this year.

As an educator, I teach music creativity and expression. In a practical sense, that means incorporating vocal technique and songwriting into the lessons, which I tailor based on each student’s specific goals and needs. I recently finished my program at Berklee College of Music with a dual major in Vocal Performance and Songwriting and minors in Teaching Contemporary Voice and Effortless Mastery. I draw from this and previous education to plan my lessons, and there are times when what is needed the most is improvisation and drawing from everyday life experience.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
On first hearing this question I was a little thrown off, because I tend to see myself as someone who is early in my journey and haven’t accomplished all I want, so it feels off to be put in a place of giving advice.

But thinking about it, I think the advice that I would give (and that I try to follow myself as well) is to avoid the urge to compare where you are to the other people in similar journeys, because it’s very helpful. The whole “compare and despair” thing is real. What I try to do is comparing where I am not to where others are (be them “behind” or “ahead” of me) but to where I was yesterday, or last month or years ago. Even when there are similarities, no one has the same journey as us, and all of the turns that could be seen as “wrong” ended up giving you more informartion about what you truly wanted and where you want to go.

So the three most important qualities, at least in my experience: the ability to appreciate your own journey and progress, being able to avoid comparison to others, and possibly the hardest, being able to hear rejection (to a project, an opportunity, or wherever it may come from) and to keep going.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
There are so many different kinds of advice out there on to deal with stress and with feeling overwhelmed that even that can be, honestly, overwhelming.

But something I’ve been thinking a lot about and practicing in different ways over the years is to, before dealing with the actual practical problems that are stressing me out, to address the feelings that are coming up with them. Sometimes this looks like meditation and sitting with my thoughts or with my breathing for a while. Sometimes that looks like going to the gym for a bit and moving my body.

We tend to think about solving the problem before self-regulating because it would make sense that, when the problem is solved, we’d feel calmer. But that is rarely the case, at least for me. Counterintuitively, when I start with the practical without at least a few seconds of focusing or relaxing or grounding, I just start going through my whole to-do list and the anxiety is still there, even if when I finish all of it (which, let’s be honest, rarely happens in the span of one day).

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Luiza Girardello, E. Roman, Chris Beyer

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