Dear readers, if you’ve been with Pride & Practicing for a while now (or any practicing resource worth its salt), you are certainly familiar with the idea that whatever we repeat, we learn. By going over our small, specific hard spots many times, we deepen those grooves of muscle-memory in our brains, until our hands simply know what to do. By playing that one phrase over and over again, it sinks into our minds and ears as a coherent musical thought, not a collection of separate pitches and note values. We discover it for what it is; we learn it as a phrase. By continuing to play that habitual wrong note every time we come to that spot in the piece (THAT spot! You know the one I mean!), we learn that, too! With breathtaking efficiency we teach ourselves to play that wrong note, and it is perfect every time.
Well, today let’s take up a slightly different aspect of this concept. Whatever we repeat, we learn. When we practice, a lot is going on…. It is not just the notes we play, the sounds we produce, the tools we use, the exercises we invent, not even just the intentions we hold. Behind all of that is something else that we may repeat so habitually that we really don’t even know it’s there. Let’s look today at the underlying mindset we hold as we practice. We may find there’s a mental attitude behind it all which is repeated ad infinitum, without us even realizing we have any choice in the matter. If our habitual background attitudes are positive and supportive ones, our practicing will probably go well no matter what we do (even without Pride & Practicing!). And by the same token, if our habitual mental attitudes are destructive, all the practice tools in the world may not be able to surmount our various forms of self-sabotage. Do you have a sense of what I mean? Approaching our material with a belief that we “should” be able to master it on a certain timetable, or with a certain level of competency, it can be quite confronting when our actual experience does not match the idea we had in our mind about how things should unfold.
Sometimes these attitudes might be so deep in us that we think they are part of us, baked in, our personality. We fail to recognize the choices we have. We also may not realize the extent to which the attitudes we hold may color our musical experience: whether we gravitate towards big, hard pieces or instant-gratification; how long we stick with things; how we seek out or receive feedback; whether we are inclined or willing to share in performance; how our playing sounds; and most importantly, the degree to which we enjoy our experience. We would do well to ask ourselves what kinds of underlying mental attitudes we hold. A few examples of the kinds of things we might realize we’re carrying:
Needing to prove something, to others or to ourselves
Compulsion to do it perfectly
A habit of not engaging fully, glossing over without really noticing
Assuming we’re not good enough
Defensiveness
Thinking we know everything already
Assuming others are always more competent or worthy than we are
Not trusting what we hear
Not being open to the reality that there are things we don’t yet hear
I am making the point that whatever we repeat, we learn; and we certainly repeat our habitual mental attitudes, don’t we? Are we repeating them supportively, as we do with practicing a hard spot with intention and skillful repetition, or are we repeating them as we do with baking in those wrong notes that are so frustrating to change down the line? Have they become the water we swim in, that we don’t even know is there?
You might try this: Pull out a journal and respond to these questions briefly. Don’t think too much! Just write. How do I feel about my playing? How do I usually feel before, during and after I play? What do I enjoy about my own playing or my own practicing? If we like this sort of thing, we could go further: How do I usually feel when I’m starting a new piece? How do I feel about performance? How do I feel when I listen to others play? Etc.
If everything we noticed was helpful, positive, open, non-judgmental, then we can stop reading right now and just go practice! Have fun! But—if we realized anything even a little bit painful (I don’t really like how my playing sounds.… My practicing makes me too tired…. I know I’ll never be able to really play this right.… I feel stupid…. Even though there’s something wrong with me, I have to keep trying…. All of the rest of them could do this much better….), then we have some material to work with here. First, we notice the thought or assumption or attitude, which we have realized underlies our practicing. We hold it with all the compassion we can muster. Let’s not try to unpack it or understand where it came from or psychoanalyze ourselves—that’s for some other newsletter. Let’s try just noticing it as a habit that has developed. It’s just there, and that’s the way it is.
Now, let’s remember that we practicers know a little something about habits! Whether the trouble we identify is a wrong note, something in our technique, an element of our musicianship or of our attitudes, we know what to do! If we choose to, we can enter into the time-honored process that we know so well, of noticing what isn’t working, and actively seeking to replace it with something more supportive. What does that look like? In terms of technical or musical issues, we can turn to our practice tools, which are constructed precisely so as to give us a way to replace something unskilful with a more desirable alternative. When we use a good, solid practice tool with rigor and consistency, we can practically feel those new neural pathways getting laid down in our brain! As we develop physical skills, this learning process is so wonderfully visceral and real for us! We replace a wrong note with a right one, and our confidence in that passage grows stronger and stronger. We practice play-and-MOVE and feel ever-increasing mastery as we toss our hand across the keyboard with accuracy and ease. We’ve made changes! We know that practicing works—through intention, repetition and the skillful application of well-chosen tools. What does all this look like, in the case of working with our underlying attitudes?
If we tried that little journaling exercise above, we could start there, by re-framing some of our thoughts in kinder directions (and, importantly, no less realistic or honest!). Instead of I don’t really like how my playing sounds, we could try saying to ourselves instead, I aspire towards playing that I find more and more beautiful. Instead of I feel stupid, we could try replacing self-judgement with curiosity: I wonder what’s here that I haven’t grasped yet? We might ask ourselves, What would be the healthiest & happiest attitude I could take towards my playing? I won’t put words in your mouth here….. but after we give that some thought, we could write down our answer and set it on the music rack, so we re-acquaint ourselves often with our aspirations not only for our playing itself, but also for the quality of our approach to the whole thing.
The healthiest attitude may be a sort of non-attitude, in which we don’t enter into our practicing with a lot of assumptions one way or the other. No ready-made storylines for how this is going to unfold for us…. No bad, or even good—no need to constantly evaluate! In other words, dear readers, an open mind. An open mind, the space in which all things are possible, in which we truly get out of our own way. In which all our ego issues (at least temporarily) dissolve, in which energy and curiosity can bloom unimpeded, in which our musical-human potential can unfold in its natural, perfect way for each of us. We want that, right? And we can have it—at least some of the time!—but on the way there, we may need some reassurance. Our statement of the healthiest & happiest attitude we can imagine may be one thing, yet our actual experience may be colored by unconscious messages of a quite different tone. In order to bridge the gap between a true openness to all possibilities and, say, a deep sense of innate unworthiness, we likely need to walk ourselves through a very gentle, compassionate phase. So, here is another way to work with our attitudes, once we’ve identified them: playing things that are easy, that we really enjoy and that we can play beautifully and with comfort and confidence. Then, NOTICING the enjoyment and pleasure we take in that! We notice it in the feel in our hands, in the sounds we hear, and the enjoyment in our minds & attitudes. Ahhh. Building up our enjoyment muscle, we relax. Then we can more easily open, when the time is right, to expansion of our skills, by which I mean trying to do those new things we’ve spent so much time telling ourselves we should be able to do already. Before we can focus effectively on I can’t yet do that! (with all its attendant thoughts of What’s wrong with me?), that is, we may need to spend some time letting it sink in that I CAN do this. Then, when it’s time to open our ears, stretch our skills and add a new element to the beauty of what we are already doing, we won’t take our shortcomings as such a personal failure, and we’ll be ready to move forward joyfully.
And we could stop right there. But….. it seems a little too pat, doesn’t it? We know it is complicated, messy and murky no matter what we do. We know that our negative thinking, our damaging and destructive core beliefs, just plain old bad moods, will keep coming back. Of course they will! Wrong notes exist. Missed jumps, incorrect rhythms, tense shoulders, lumpy appoggiatura resolutions, inappropriate tempos, destructive core beliefs, squeaky pedals, bangy sound, uneven runs, obsession with whether it’s good enough…. they all exist! But so does beauty, and so does freedom. And whatever we repeat, we learn…..
I find so much truth and wisdom in this post that I think its content could be extended to our daily life. Inherited or built-by-experience core beliefs that create layers between our worthy beautiful self, its aspirations and the environment in which we live. I absolutely agree with Rachel that practicing open mindedness in learning a piece of music is one of the most effective tool to build new skills, physical and mental, that would put us closer to the piece and probably, in the process, to who we truly are. Thank you Rachel for this immensely rich post.
This is an illuminating & useful post. It’s easy to be hard on ourselves in pursuit of progress. It’s difficult to know how we get in our own way & once we are “wised up”, to accept that something needs to change. You showed me how to identify what to change & how to do it. Thank you.