11. Depression, Coming Out, and Religious Trauma: Countertenor Lucas Coura's Journey

Today's interview is with my incredible client Lucas Coura, who is a successful countertenor and voice teacher and has the biggest heart of anyone I know!

TW: suicidal ideation and depression. If you are struggling, please text or call 988.

Lucas shares his story of overcoming significant challenges including growing up as an immigrant, religious trauma, coming out as gay, struggling with depression, and hospitalization for his mental health. Despite all the struggles he faced, Lucas has achieved success as both a countertenor and a voice teacher (his students get scholarships into grad school- he's amazing!)

If you have ever struggled with depression, don't miss this episode!

Connect with Lucas:

@dudesingslikealady

https://www.lucasludwigcoura.com/

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Success Through Scars. The podcast where we turn our most painful struggles into our greatest success stories. I'm Annie Calvineso, a multi passionate entrepreneur, business mentor, and professional singer who's overcome anorexia, CPTSD, depression, and anxiety. Each week, you'll hear powerful stories of resilience from people who have transformed their deepest pains into testimonies of strength. If you're feeling lost or broken, but have big goals, you're in the right place. Whether your scar comes from a traumatic past, a break up, A near death experience or a mental health struggle, remember this, your scars are proof that you survived, and scar tissue rebuilds and repairs itself, and you come out stronger on the other side. I hope this podcast can bring you the hope you need to keep going. Let's walk this journey of finding success through scars together.

Annie: 0:57

Hello. Hello. And welcome back to another episode of success through scars. Today we have my wonderful client, Lucas Cora. Lucas is an incredible voice teacher who specializes in technique. He's a countertenor, and he has literally the biggest heart out of anyone I know. I'm so excited for you all to hear his story today. Because I think Lucas is really a testament of someone who has Been through a lot of struggle but has not let that define him and has gone on to have a really successful business despite struggling with mental health. So I cannot wait for you all to hear his story. I think it's going to be very relatable for a lot of you listening. So hi, Lucas. Thank you so much for joining me.

Lucas: 1:36

Hi, thanks for having me.

Annie: 1:37

Of course. So can you start from the beginning with your story like with the things that you went through in childhood and your hospitalization and just share a little bit more about your early days?

Lucas: 1:48

Sure. Yeah. So, wow. All the way back. It's sometimes a struggle to think, okay, what are the important points, get this distilled in a way that makes sense. So, first of all I'm an immigrant. I was born in Brazil. My family moved to the U. S. when I was two years old, and classic immigrant story, seeking the American dream, seeking financial prosperity, seemed to be a very elusive thing, I'd say, for our family. And then, as I grew up in a very religious household, and it was very important and defining in my childhood. It's how I discovered music. Right? My parents were worship leaders at church mom's a singer, dad plays guitar. And so it was a huge part of how I grew up, and I got to about seventh grade, and this was 2007. My dad worked in construction at the time, and We started to get the sense that financially our life was falling apart a little bit and around the same time my brother came out and that Set apart this chain reaction where he got pulled out of school. He got put into a private school and everything just started to roll together in terms of my dad's business starting to fail because this is 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis. Nobody is doing construction in a financial crisis. And all of a sudden we had to move to Florida. And that was awful. Man, I was dragged kicking and screaming to the state of Florida. And in a way, the church that I found or that we found when we moved to Florida was life saving in that I felt completely alone. I was a sensitive and I don't want to say effeminate, I didn't fit in very well already living in New York by New York standards and then moving to Florida was just, wow there's nowhere for me that feels like my existence as a human even makes sense until I found this church and it's a place where, I'm a very analytical person. I'm a very sensitive person, and so if you give me a biblical text, I can probably find some insight in that to share, and so that was attractive to that sort of group of people. It gave me a sense of belonging. I went into church leadership pretty quickly. I was co leading small groups with younger students, and Join the worship team, right? So it was a place where I felt like I was seen and known for who I was and Simultaneously, that was very conditional in that what was starting to become obvious was that I was not straight and I had seen the way in which that Devastated my family when my brother came out. And so I thought okay, I can't do this to them again So that sucked and I'll fast forward a little bit to when I finally came out. I was 21 in my undergrad, and I don't think I'll go into the details of the guy that I met or, the, but suffice it to say it was pretty catastrophic. It turned out that this person who it seemed like he was Flirting with me, trying to put the moves on, was straight and completely kidding. And I had gone home and come out to my parents, and come out to my girlfriend at the time, and pretty much blew up my life all to sit across from this dude at a Sonny's BBQ and be like, Hey, this is how I'm feeling. Were you serious? And have him basically say, No homo, bro. It sucked. Yeah. And so that was, I think when the weight of it all really started to take its toll. Prior to that point, I had been seeing a therapist, but it felt very much like I was living my life off of a script. And I knew there were marks that I was supposed to hit. There were things that I was supposed to say and do. Behaviors that I was supposed to exhibit in a manner of speaking, right? But none of that felt very real or authentic to me. And it came down to, what can I do to please others? What can I do to give other people what they want? But don't ask me what I want, because I'm afraid of the answer. So, that kind of defined my life for a little while, and then when I finally came out, I was in a place where it was hard to date, because I was still in Florida in undergrad, and it was a small college town. There were a couple of gay people at my school. I honestly didn't know very many. And, it seemed like people tended to pair up pretty quickly, so it was, I was still feeling very very just painfully single and lonely and sad. And some of that changed when I finally moved to Boston, but what I found was that sense of, my life is for pleasing others. Persisted, even as I was pursuing relationships that felt more authentic to me. My programming was still to seek ways to make the other person happy before I made myself happy. That continued until I want to say my first, well, it was my first year of grad school that I met somebody who I fell pretty dramatically for and he was not looking for anything serious and made that much pretty clear but it in some ways felt like a culmination, right, because it seemed like what was being teed up here In all of my romantic interactions, be they with men or with women was that I was not going to be able to ever get what I wanted out of life. And so the best that I could do was to give somebody else what they wanted, and Eventually, the weight of that was so heavy and the thing I think that killed me the most and the thing that probably resulted ultimately in my hospitalization was that all of this was going on during a pandemic. And so there was no way to practice that conventional wisdom of, Oh, if you want to get over somebody, get under somebody, right? That wasn't going to happen because that was a risk to my physical health and the physical health of everyone around me. And of course I was in music school. We were hybrid. So I was still singing in front of people and spraying my damn pathogens everywhere. Right. That was happening. So it was something that I had to be aware of. So it was really hard. And then one day I had a psychiatrist at the time, but I wanted to participate in this clinical studies. If I can get compensation for trying out a new drug or whatever. And they sat me down for the interview and they started asking me about my depression and about my suicidal ideation. And. All of those things, and I was answering the questions, obviously, very honestly. And the woman just looked at me and she said, you're not in the right place right now. You're not a candidate for a clinical study. Your symptoms are clearly escalating. And you need to get more intensive care now. Right now.

Annie: 9:39

Wow.

Lucas: 9:40

And so that was a shock, because, I thought I was managing fairly well. And of course, if we speak in terms of, again, that programming of what am I doing for others? My grades were still good. I was still doing well enough in school. It hadn't gotten to the point where I was in any way underperforming. In fact, in some ways it felt like approaching music with this level of emotional intensity going on in my life, I was able to bring a lot of. authenticity and a lot of Genuine connection to the characters that I was playing the things that I was trying to accomplish artistically and so It was a surprise to me. I think that no actually going home and having to go through substantial effort to not harm yourself is not like a typical use of a tuesday night Like that's not You know what your life should look like.

Annie: 10:42

I think people get that wrong about depression, too. Look at Robin Williams, for example. People would have never known that he was suffering so much. And depression doesn't look like someone just being sad and moping around all the time. You can't tell when someone has depression. It's silent. Mental health conditions are silent. And I talk about that a lot when I talk about my eating disorder, right? No one could tell. You could tell physically on someone, but mental health disorders, especially, you really cannot tell. And yeah, the fact that you were so high functioning probably made it easy to hide it from other people. So can you tell us I know you had a hospital visit. What were the events leading up to that? Was that right after this conversation with this clinical trial person, you ended up going to the hospital?

Lucas: 11:26

Yeah, it was right after. I had class that day and everything, I was expecting to leave that trial with a new prescription and hopefully feeling better. And that was not what happened. They put me in an ambulance. They sent me to the hospital. I was evaluated at the ER. They kept me overnight because there were no beds at the psych ward. And then I woke up the next day, they moved me over into the psych ward, and it was at that moment that I was like, okay, this is Clearly what's going on in my head is serious. And at the time, I also remember thinking like, Why does anybody care? Like, why does anybody care if I live or die? I don't matter, was what was going on in my head. And what I was getting from my friends and from the staff at the hospital was, Stop that yes you do, and we're going to care whether you want us to or not, so, you just, you better come to accept that in one way or another, right? And so that I think was really powerful for me, and they did get me on a new medication that was really extremely helpful. I still take it on a way lower dose now, thankfully but it was clearly, a missing piece in my care. And then after that, there was a lot of other treatment that had to happen. So I went through something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Or TMS for short, which is just a treatment where they put some magnets on your brain and they give these little pulses and it helps to One of the things that I found a lot both in the context of struggling with mental illness and, this is still something I experience today. I will understand something intellectually before it really drops into my heart. So You know, something even as simple as saying, My life has value and I deserve to live. Right? Something that you can say out loud. Something that people who are in circles where people talk about mental health, everyone knows that factually. Right? It's something that's easy enough to say, but that you don't truly believe. And the TMS is supposed to be a type of treatment that helps you to really come to understand those things on a heart level rather than a mind level. And then probably the most important treatment that I got was dialectical behavioral therapy, because that was very skills based. And for me, I think one thing that kept happening through the course of my treatment was I would get to a point where I would take medication, I would manage the symptoms, right, so I'd get to the point where I was feeling better. But it turns out, if you keep living the same way, right, if you keep with your actions reinforcing the thought that your feelings, your wants, your needs don't matter if you keep putting the needs of others. above yourself, like your body knows that you're bullshitting, right? It knows that you're saying, yes, I matter, but if you don't act like it, right? If you don't do the things. That, that asks of you, then the belief that you are continuing to reinforce, to cultivate, to rehearse, really, is that your thoughts and feelings don't matter. And so, what DBT gave me was a framework to basically seek the things that I felt I wanted and needed in a way that still felt ethical and that didn't feel like I was being just this horrible, selfish person for having wants and needs, just something that Religious trauma runs deep, baby.

Annie: 15:17

Yes. Okay. So if I'm understanding correctly, a lot of it came from the religious trauma of you being taught that you need to cater to other people, especially seeing your brother come out and how everyone reacted to that and that it made you feel like what you wanted didn't matter. And then this was further emphasized by the dating world and relationships and rejections and all those things. So I'm curious to hear more about Where you're at now with your business and with your singing career as a countertenor.'cause we know you have a very successful career as a singer, which is amazing. How does your depression today affect those things, if at all? And what tips would you give someone listening who's in a similar position? Someone who wants to be a successful singer, someone who wants to have their own voice studio. What advice would you give that person for dealing with depression? And how did you get to where you are today while struggling with depression?

Lucas: 16:13

Yeah, so starting, I think I'll answer the second question first of how I got to where I am today. With or in spite of the depression. Sometimes I wonder about that, it's not so clean, right?

Annie: 16:27

It never is. I'd love to

Lucas: 16:28

be able to, yeah, I'd love to be able to package it in such a way as well, This makes me who I am and, but then part of me wonders what if my parents, who, when, I have nothing but compassion for the fact that my mom had me, Let's see, I'm born in 94, she was born in 19, so she was, I think, 23. I'm 30, I can't imagine having children, right? So she was doing the best damn job that she could, and I love her into the ground, and so much healing and forgiveness has happened. I still wonder sometimes would life have been better? Would I be farther along now if I didn't have that conditioning? If I wasn't trained from an early age to believe that, those of us who grew up in church here, the heart is deceitful above all things. And we learn from that, that we are not to trust ourselves, that we are not to hold ourselves in compassionate care and light and self love, right? And so there's part of me that wonders okay, while this made me who I am, can I turn this into a story where it was necessary for this to happen? Was it really necessary? I do think that what it has done is it's made me extremely compassionate. To the struggles of others because I have had to learn to forgive in order to maintain relationships with my family. And so, that has meant understanding why they said and did the things that they did in the times that they did it and recognizing that they were coming from a place of hurt and not understanding themselves and just, again, doing really the best that they could. And I do want to emphasize and make super, super clear to anyone listening that was not a one sided thing. There was real significant effort on the part of my parents and other people in my life that I maintain relationships with to also become curious about me. And understand the way that I was feeling and the things that drove me to the places that I was driven. That was not coming from a place of, we need to fix you somehow. There was a point where it shifted into genuinely seeking understanding and there would be no way to maintain a relationship without that. And so, I, I say that because I want to be really clear. That the onus does not fall entirely on those of us who have suffered to forgive the people who have hurt us without effort on their part. Let me just make that super, super clear. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, and then in terms of how it's affected me as a teacher I have this sense of empathy with my students.

Annie: 19:25

Anyone I know, I think you're selling yourself short. For anyone listening, Lucas is one of the best teachers and mentors that I know. You've had students get scholarships to grad school, right?

Lucas: 19:36

Yeah.

Annie: 19:36

That is at 30 years old. You're teaching people that are wanting to go to grad school and helping them get scholarships and you're an excellent technician and you're also killing it in your career as a countertenor as well. So, yeah, what I got from you and from your story and also from knowing you is that, I have to disagree with. The fact that you'd be further along, I actually think going through mental health struggles makes you extremely relatable and extremely compassionate to the point where, yeah maybe you'd be more financially successful if you

Lucas: 20:14

have

Annie: 20:15

those setbacks but you're more holistically successful because you care about people, you care about your clients, you care about the results and, Those are the types of people that I have in my spaces too, cause I'm that way as well. And I see that within you a hundred percent. When I think when you and I first met, I said, you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. And it's so true. All of your clients get amazing results and it's because of what you went through and because of how deeply compassionate you are because of what you went through, that you get those results because you actually care about people and you care about their success and you can relate to them.

Lucas: 20:50

Well, thank you for that. And I think the voice in particular is something that's just so, it is and again, I am a technician, right? So I don't mean to say that you have to heal all your childhood trauma to be a successful singer, at least on a technical level, right? There are things we can do. There are always things we can do. There are people who are profoundly unhealed, really successful singing careers, right? So that's not really what I mean to suggest, when I'm in a voice lesson with somebody, I have this weird thing where I can actually like tap into, and this is going to sound so crunchy, but just. Walk with me for a second. Like I can actually tap into what they are feeling in their body. Yeah. And so like I, when I hear a sound, like I had a student ask me once,'cause he was doing something where his tongue was tensing and I was like, your tongue was tense for that one note that you sang. He said, it's shocking to me that you can hear that. It's actually not just that I can hear it, it's that when I hear it, something shifts in the energy of the space and my tongue starts to tense. So it's like an empathic response that I have, With singers, which by the way is also really fun because it works in the other direction too. There are times that a student walks into my studio and makes a sound that I think is incredible. And then I'm sitting there going wait, how does that feel? And then I tap into that. And then an hour later when they've left the studio i'm practicing i'm like, oh, that's it. That's how they do It's cool.

Annie: 22:25

It sounds like you're clear sentient also lucas

Lucas: 22:28

Yeah could be that Could be yeah, I think it To me what's really important is I felt when I was going through what I went through What I really needed were a lot of tools and I needed them on a mental, emotional level but also very much on, the, when it comes to singing, a lot changed for me when I went to grad school and I started learning pedagogy. Because having an understanding of how voices work, writ large, beyond just, oh, what is my voice like to do, was so transformative for me because it gave me, it allowed me to place myself and my own voice within a larger context, and really start to see everything that presented in my voice as Information and if there were problems that those problems were solvable and that there are predictable ways to cause a voice to respond in a way. that's more advantageous or more in line with what the singer's intending. So that is, what one of the things I say is that I want every student who walks into and out of my studio to not only know what they're doing, but know that they know what they're doing. And unlocking and attaining that level of confidence, I think only really comes when. You have both. I think it's both. I think you need both of the knowledge of what is happening, at least on some level, having a framework for understanding what's happening in your body when you sing, and also the lived body experience. You have to have felt it. You have to have gone through it. And that's the experience that I try to give to my students. And that's really what I felt that I got in my graduate school experience. And I'm so grateful for that.

Annie: 24:27

And that's not what you had though, right? At some point, I know you have worked with teachers that were almost digging into some of the trauma and abuse that you have faced growing up. So

Lucas: 24:41

my first voice teacher that I worked with God lover I walked into my first lesson and by the way, I had at the time just joined chorus and I didn't know anything about anything. And I was preparing for solo and ensemble, which I'm not sure if people do that everywhere, but it was just like you go to. Somewhere in your school district, and they host it, and there's a piano in the room, and you go in there, you sing something out of the 24 Italian art songs, and you sing something out of the first book for XYZ Singers and they give you a rating, Superior, Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor. So I was working with this teacher. Just coaching at first, and she says to me, Oh, well, I'm a good voice teacher and hands me her card. I'm going to go have a voice lesson with her. And first lesson she goes, I really don't know that much about the male voice. All right, here we go. We'll place a D major chord on the piano and off to the races we are. That teacher ended up years later when I was starting to experience vocal problems from that. And I found another teacher. She was furious and she really personalized that and made it about her in a way that was just so, but I knew that, what I felt when I was in lessons with her versus what I felt when I was in lessons with this other teacher. One was at least progressing things forward. The other was just not, I was just stuck. Every lesson just felt like a guessing game and, oh can you make that sound better? Can you resonate more on that note instead of what does that even mean? Right? So it came down to just really not getting what I needed out of that teaching relationship and she would, after I left her studio, she was still the accompanist for the school, right? And so, I went to solo and ensemble, by the way that was the one year that I got a superior at solo and ensemble and she said to me, after she finished playing for me, that I had just become so insufferably arrogant that nobody was ever going to want to listen to me sing because clearly my ego is just way too big. And I just said, okay.

Annie: 27:09

Yeah, she was just mad because you sounded so much better without her instruction.

Lucas: 27:13

Projecting, right? It comes down to wanting to have a clean way of Describing a situation and wanting to villainize this other person. It's not lost on me, by the way, that, this was a very evangelical woman who was my first voice teacher, and the teacher that I left her to go study with is a gay man. And was the first example in my life of a gay man who was a professional, who was successful. And enjoying life, right? The narrative that was in my head at that point was that, gay men get a couple of years before they, die of a drug overdose or die of AIDS. It's so messed up, but That's what was in my head at the time. It's oh, all they're gonna do is drink and go out to clubs and have wild, crazy, unprotected sex and then they burn out and they literally die, right? There was no counter narrative in my life up to that point of a gay man who was successful, happy, had a professional presence, was You know, had a partner, right, was living in that way. And so he was a hugely influential figure in my life, and that's not to say that he didn't have his own issues or that I didn't look back at some of the things that happened while I was studying with him and go, eh, okay, yeah, there was probably a better approach here. But again, I do think that working with him and meeting him at the time that I did was so necessary for me to get where I ended up.

Annie: 28:53

So Lucas, I'm curious to know with all of the success that you have achieved today, I'm sure you still struggle with depression sometimes, right? Like I certainly do. And I'm curious to know how you manage that. having this dual, well actually triple career, because I don't know if you mentioned it, but you still do handyman stuff too, right?

Lucas: 29:13

Every once in a while, yeah. That's more of a summer thing when students go away for the year. But I also have been doing a bunch of theater lately as well. I went to school for opera but have recently developed an interest in going back, because my first love was theater. So going back to that and that ties into the depression thing in that I know myself really well now, and I think that's probably one of the biggest things to come from having gone through the hospitalization, is just deciding that getting to know my own feelings, motivations, impulses, habits. Toxic traits, maybe even, right, just becoming really self aware has helped me to really just move through things more quickly. So for an example of that kind of ties into the theater is that I recognized at one point that something that was really holding me back in my career, both in my teaching and in my singing, is a real just deep sensitivity to rejection. I hate it, I take it really poorly. And so it makes it difficult for me to try to recruit clients. It makes it difficult for me to seek singing opportunities. All because I don't want to put myself out there and hear no. But anyone who's in business or who's a singer knows that it's a numbers game, right? You've just got to keep putting yourself out there and attracting those people to you who are going to be your yeses. And you simply don't do that. by hiding away from rejection. And of course that's true in just about every context you can imagine applying that to, by the way. So romantic, career, personal, all of that stuff. And so what I've done this year and part of why I'm doing so much theater is because I said this year's the year I book it. And I'm going to expose myself to so much of this stimulus, where I have the potential to be rejected, that it has no power over me anymore. But that's the kind of thing that if you asked me three years ago, how I feel about auditions You know, I'd be like, eh, I don't like them so much. But I wouldn't have known, right? I hadn't had the time to really sit with the way that I feel when I'm in an audition space enough to even interface with that thought, right? So it's like really getting curious about your own feelings and learning the person you are and what motivates you in a super non judgmental way because that's the only way that you figure out what your next step is.

Annie: 31:51

Yeah, that's amazing. So it sounds like in your business, you have felt the fear of that and done it anyways in both your business, also your singing career. Do you have any practical tips for. Dealing with both your normal day to day feelings of low mood, depression, and then also when you get into a really big slump or a really big funk.

Lucas: 32:18

Yeah I have a few. So, I don't slump anywhere near as much as I used to anymore. Because I move a lot. So about four years ago, I got really into lifting weights and three years ago I got into practicing Krav Maga. By the way, I am a couple months away from testing for my black belt in Krav Maga. So I'm super excited about that.

Annie: 32:46

That's amazing.

Lucas: 32:47

Yeah, thank you. But I think a lot of confidence, and I don't want to make this about what, but I know you and I are super aligned on this Annie, that it's not about just appearance or, it's about feeling capable. And there's something about, when you wake up and you feel like shit. And you don't want to do a goddamn thing and then you go to the gym and you smash a PR and you come home and you go the world is mine and I am going to do the thing, right? And that I know probably for a lot of people listening sounds impossible and I'm just going to ask you to trust me on this one like I grew up very much like The kid who sat alone at recess because I got too winded from playing tag, right? Relentlessly bullied kids used to tell me that my best friend was the cashier at McDonald's It was like I was not a fitness person until my late 20s, and I think becoming a fitness person was a huge transformation to me that was really Less about what I wanted to look like, and more about convincing myself that I could do a thing, or that I could do anything, right? If I worked hard enough at something that I could see results. And something that I love about fitness is that, when it comes to music, There's no way around it, right? Like we have control over what we have control over business too, right? So like with music, I, I can sing the dam. And this happened to me recently where, I sang an audition and I didn't get the part because they said, we really want to go. With an older actor for this role not in my control can't do a damn thing about that, right? Virtually everything about fitness is within your control. It comes down to How you move your body? How you recover how you're taking care of your own health how you're showing up for yourself? And that is something that's just so liberating because it gives you perspective that even though maybe you can be really great in a sales call. And, the client's financial situation just doesn't allow for them to work with you, and that sucks. That sucks when that's not in your control, right? But there are still things that are in your control. You've got to find those things, right? Because if you spend all of your time lamenting what you can't do, you'll never get around to doing what you can.

Annie: 35:30

So it's really, it sounds to me like. If I could sum up what you're saying, it's really about taking your focus and putting it on the things that you can control versus staying stuck in that mindset of everyone is rejecting me. It sounds like you also have gotten really good at not taking rejection personally, especially in the past year of doing this audition tour that you've been doing.

Lucas: 35:53

It's still so hard. But thank you.

Annie: 35:56

Of course. And then as a business owner, not taking rejection personally, what are some things that have helped you with that? If someone can't work with you, or if you're not a fit for them how has that affected you?

Lucas: 36:07

I think it really just comes down to keep moving. I think it's really easy to get, and we can't help it. Right. Like we get excited and when you're getting to know somebody and it's Oh man, like I really. I really believe I can help you. I really believe I can, this could be a really special working relationship. And then for whatever reason, if it's, oh, I'm just, I'm really busy right now. Now's not the time for me to commit to this. I don't have the funds. I don't, whatever comes up, right? It's so hard not to make that about you and not to go, oh, well, if I were only better, if I had only highlighted this other thing that I do, if I had only, been, or maybe, I need to lower My price or, so that I can serve and you just can't, you just have to move. Yeah. You just have to move, right? You just have to believe that the people who need what you have are out there and going until you find them. That's the whole thing. That's the whole process.

Annie: 37:07

For everyone listening, by the way, lucas went from last year not working full time for himself As a teacher to now, the majority of his income is singing and teaching. And I think you at least tripled your income teaching.

Lucas: 37:24

Oh yeah.

Annie: 37:25

If not, right. So within a year and Lucas did my crescendo club program. It was such a pleasure to work with him. He's actually one of my favorite people I've ever worked with. And I think the thing for you, Lucas. That keeps you moving and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so let me know if this is accurate, but it's because you have a mission based business. It's because you care so much about what you're doing that you're driven by the desire to help people. You're not driven by these external factors of success, which actually is very true, real self worth and having a very high value and having a very high self concept. And. For me personally, that's the exact type of person I like to work with. That's the exact type of business I like to help build. And I know earlier you said, maybe I would have been more successful if I hadn't had these struggles, but I think the struggles that you go through, those are actually, they turn into your strengths because without those struggles, wouldn't have your mission and your purpose, right? So none of it would even, but now having gone through those, you have this huge mission and purpose and you're value driven. And that's why you've been able to create this life where you get to have all of your passions. And yeah, sometimes you still struggle, but you're using those things to help other people, which is really beautiful.

Lucas: 38:46

Yeah, I think, when it comes to what we struggle with and the stories that we tell ourselves around that that's actually our choice, right? When it comes to managing your rejection and moving past that experience, one of the things that I. Internalized or started to internalize in undergrad and that has really stuck with me is that, you know and it comes to what you said about having a mission. And the thing is that if it's not about that, then the ego is going to activate and we can't help that the ego is going to activate, like that's just going to happen. We are going to get into a place where things are going to feel like it's my fault or I'm not good enough or whatever like that. always has the potential to enter into a room, but that cannot stand up against I have something that I need to do. I have something that I need to say. Whether that be, I have music that I need to make, there's a message that I need to spread. There are people out there who need what I have to offer. There is no level of, I'm not good enough, that will ever win. Because I have to be, I have to make myself good enough if that's, if the mission is what's at the center, then I need to level up to the level of my mission. It does not matter where I am now. It matters what I need to do.

Annie: 40:07

That's so beautiful. And I guess I have one final question for you on that same vein. If there's someone who They want to both perform and teach full time and have the similar type of life and career that you have, but this person is struggling with depression and not knowing how they're going to achieve success like you have while they're struggling with depression. What would you say to that person?

Lucas: 40:32

I, well, I have not determined to turn this into a pitch, but more importantly, I'd love to listen. If someone is going through something similar to what I went through I feel like the things that were healing and life saving for me were when people started to sit with me and just go, Lucas, what is what is going on, really? What's going on in your heart? What do you need? Because somebody outside you really can't tell you that, right? So, If it starts with you having to do that for yourself without that external support of somebody sitting with you then I'd say that's absolutely worth doing. But the most important thing I think I have to say to people who are suffering from depression, especially suicidal ideations, just believe me, it's worth it. Just hang in there, just keep, because everything is a solvable problem until you're dead. And if you just decide that it's not worth it to solve those problems anymore, then the world will be deprived of everything that you have to share with us. And I just need you to believe me that it is so much more than you think it is. And it probably feels like you're not worth shit right now. And it's just, that's not true. And. I need you to hang in there for as long as it takes for the healing to come. That's what I'd say.

Annie: 42:03

Forgive me, the tears over here, Lucas The thing is if you would have harmed yourself or done something, the world wouldn't have your light. Right? These people that you helped to go to grad school, all the people that you positively impacted, I know you also work with people that have had. Really bad experiences with other teachers, similar to your experiences with that one teacher. They would not have been affected in the way that they had if not for you. You're a very important part of their story. And for those listening, if you're struggling with depression, you also are going to be an important part of someone's story in the future. And there are people who you don't even know who you're going to affect their life. And they need you in their life to, it's like the butterfly effect. They need you in their life to move things forward for them in one way or another, especially if you have a mission on your heart and you want to share it. So, that was beautiful. You definitely brought me to tears. And thank you so much, Lucas. This was a really beautiful interview. And I know it's going to help people to hear what you've been through and be able to see themselves in you. Where can people find you?

Lucas: 43:11

Yeah. So my website is lucasludwigcora. com. You can keep up with the stuff that I'm doing there. If you'd like to follow me on social media I'm just my name, Lucas Cora on Facebook. And on Instagram, I am dude sings like a lady.

Annie: 43:24

Yeah, and you're accepting new clients,

Lucas: 43:26

right?

Annie: 43:27

I am,

Lucas: 43:27

Yeah. I've got I think three vacancies right now. I'm pretty full. But I am looking to fill those three vacancies right now. So

Annie: 43:35

yeah, only three vacancies.

Lucas: 43:37

Yeah.

Annie: 43:37

Notion me is. out. I love it. So excited for you. So proud of you. Thank you for sharing.

Lucas: 43:43

Thank you, Annie.

Annie: 43:44

Bye.

Lucas: 43:45

Bye.