Hi madgeylou,
After reading your post I realized that I struggle with much of the same dreading/desiring feeling with my own talent. What I have found is that most of this is due to two things:
1) You may be mentally messing this up for yourself. I feel that self-esteem is a big issue with talent. If our esteem is down, the nasty voices in our heads that tell us we are bad, untalented, worthless, a joke, etc and this can really make practicing no fun at all. My solution to the nasty voice was to name it (the april voice is my nasty mental voice name). It helps to name it after something negative (in my case a very awful friend who actually said things that my mind would never have tried). Then once named, really work on eradicating it from your practice sessions. Invision it as a person and shut the door (literally) on it, or just tell it to leave.
If you don't have a nasty mental voice (and are wondering what this crazy person is talking about) then just work on really beefing up your self-esteem. When you start singing and hear it sound really good then tell yourself that. Say "Damn I am so awesome!" or "It makes me so happy that I can sing so well!" I don't care how corney or silly it seems, if you are good at singing then you need to tell yourself that, over and over, until it is not just something you KNOW about yourself, it is something you ARE.
2) I just got finished reading Steve's blogs about self-dicipline and also personal productivity. It might help to read these and define your goals in relation to singing. Do you want to sing for a living or just for fun? Do you want to sing every night or just once a month? Also the personal productivity blogs are really great for realizing how much time you are actually practicing vs. how much time you are holding the guitar in the practicing room hanging out. I realize that most of the time I spend in my sewing room I am not actually sewing or quilting. Most of the time I am psyching myself out metally and when I leave the room it is usually feeling depressed that I suck and not happy at some new project I am working on. In order to be talented we need to work on our talent, not waste our time thinking about it. When I start thinking about sewing or quilting and I dread it, I mentally close the door on that feeling. When you think about guitar playing your focus shouldn't be on how medoicre you feel you might be, but on how good you are getting.
I know I talked mostly about mental stuff and thinking, but I do believe that most of this stuff that holds us back is in our heads.
Cheers,
lcvday
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