Practice mindset

First in an ongoing occasional series

So much of ourselves goes into this thing we do called practicing! Today’s post is the first in an ongoing occasional series looking at the attitudes we hold—towards our practice, and within our practice. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our background mindsets have a profound influence on both our experience of practicing and on our results. It’s worth becoming aware of our underlying attitudes and worth choosing them with care.

Identifying what our background attitudes are and where they came from: oh, surely that is a matter for a completely different newsletter! A “therapy issue” of the first order! On the other hand…. practice is certainly a form of therapy…. I’ve always known it to be so, and I suspect most pianists and piano teachers can relate…. (Uh-oh! Where is this going??) But for now (phew), let’s just acknowledge that we are not blank slates. We have attitudes and mindsets, whether we’re conscious of them or not. We have baggage! Some of what we carry is, let’s face it, not helpful—and we can replace it with something else. Much of our learning, as adults, has to do with supplanting old patterns with new ones; or, when we’re lucky, it is sometimes about becoming more conscious of what’s within us that is helpful, so that we can actively affirm it and build on it. Approaching any effort to produce change, in our playing or in anything else: if there is only a “no,” without a “yes” to replace it, nothing positive can grow.

Plus, beating ourselves up is no fun and no way to live! And certainly no way to practice.

The two attitudes I’d like to lift up for us today—individually and in terms of a healthy balance between them—are those of confidence and humility.

Confidence! What is it, and how do we get it? What is a healthy dosage?

Sometimes I think it just starts out as a sort of blind faith. Before we can have confidence in our own playing, we need faith in practicing itself. We need a belief that this thing called practicing will work, and work not just for other people but for us! How do we find that? We could look to the experience of others; if the great pianists of the world seem too godlike and unapproachable (though surely practicing has worked for them!), we can turn to others we know whose playing & practicing is farther along than our own. Or, turning to recordings or Youtube (though you know I have mixed feelings about that), we find all kinds of evidence that the piano is playable. The pieces, the kinds of music we are interested in are playable. Granted, this doesn’t necessarily mean playable by us, right now—but it gives us a start, reason to have faith. Our confidence builds on our faith, and faith just has to start somewhere.

Another way to develop confidence: I notice you’re reading Pride & Practicing…. If you lack confidence in the practice of practicing: please, borrow mine! Take it for a while; make use of my confidence until your own arrives. Which it will, if you practice well—and that leads us to the surest path towards developing confidence in your practice: just do it. Commit to your practicing for a period of time, bring your whole self to it, and see for yourself what happens! Practice works. Your playing will grow, and your confidence in your own practicing will grow with it.

As confidence in the process of practicing builds up through our actual experience, of course we sense increasing confidence in our playing itself too. This comes to us naturally, as the fruit of good practice—but still, certain things may help it along:

First of all, don’t tear it down! Let it grow! Some of us, on noticing even a tiny, shoot of something even remotely confidence-like poking its head up through the cracks, may be inclined (whether by habit, core beliefs or any number of Therapy Issues that we won’t go into here) to stamp it out. If we notice ourselves crushing our own spirits in this way, then as best we can, let’s just put all that extra business aside. See and appreciate that little green shoot, maybe water it a little.

Also: give it time! Sometimes we just give up too soon. If we stick with what we are doing long enough, we give practice a chance to work—and, seeing our progress, increased confidence naturally follows. Patience allows the fruits of our practice to ripen.

And we need to invest ourselves personally in what we are doing. It helps to build the habit of asking, always, how do I want this to sound? We take feedback, yes, we hear the ideas of others (humility! We’re coming to that), but we don’t rest until we have a clear internal sense of what we want from a passage or a piece. If we don’t know what we want, we try things, we listen and listen some more, and by process of elimination if nothing else, our convictions take shape. Then, when we hear our playing beginning to sound the way we want it to, confidence comes naturally. We become confident as we come to enjoy our own playing.

Well, Rachel, that is all well and good—BUT BUT BUT! But playing the piano is hard! Some of our pieces are really hard! What kind of Pollyanna pep talk is this? What is with all this lofty speech about nurturing our nascent confidence, when along the way, we just become ever more keenly aware of all that we CANNOT do? What if it’s not our inner demons that squash that tenuous little shoot of “I think I can,” but instead the plain, brutal fact that—as our actual experience shows—we can’t? We can’t, and we know it! There, I said it! NOW WHAT?

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨

Dear readers—dear, agitated readers, this is where we remember once again that practice mirrors life. What I mean by that, this time, is that everything is included! We can, and we can’t. Both are true.

We can’t — play this as well as we’d like.

We can — play it better than we could last week!

We can’t — play this piece up to tempo.

We can — play it with ease, fluency and expression, as long as it’s half tempo…

We can’t — seem to memorize this.

We can — play it very beautifully when we’re looking at the score (except for when the page turns come along).

We can’t — play this piece. But we can — play that one!

Confidence and humility, hand in hand. Both qualities are healthy and both are needed! Alright, confidence, certainly; but we might ask, what is the benefit of humility? How can it be helpful to dwell on our failures and shortcomings? It is because humility is a prerequisite for growth! If we truly want to grow, as opposed to simply demonstrating and justifying our current position, we need that sense that there is something wonderful that lies beyond us. Something of great value that we can’t yet do, don’t yet understand, haven’t been able to see or hear. This is humility, and without it we cut ourselves off from all the potentiality of those wonders we don’t yet know. And we cut ourselves off from growth itself.

The more we practice, the more we can hear. Isn’t this a good thing? Except it also means that as our skills improve, the more we hear how terrible we sound! Ooh, let me rephrase that one right away: how very different we sound from how we hoped. It is a good problem: our ability to listen as we play is growing! Confidence! And… this heightened ability to listen as we play reveals yet more problems that we didn’t recognize before. Humility. We address those problems; they get better, and we hear the improvement—confidence! But our ears open further and we also begin to hear still more subtle issues that concern us… humility. On and on it goes. Humility and confidence: we discover that courage is a bridge between them—and, importantly, it goes in both directions.

When we stay open, listening, paying close attention to our actual experience, this synthesis gives us the gift of a realistic confidence. We are right-sized in our evaluations—not “too big” in our sense of own playing, but also not “too small.” Not too big=humility: we have room to grow in the future; and we are keeping this moment, however disappointing, in perspective. Not too small=confidence: there is much that we can love in our playing right here, right now! We see that the time we’ve spent in the past has paid off and led to this satisfying present moment. With humility and confidence in balance, we stay open; we dare to try, and we can learn from every experience. All of it is included, nothing left out. And as our life experience contributes to our practice, our practice gives to our life.

HAPPY PRACTICING! and if you enjoy & value Pride & Practicing, please support it with a subscription and share with your friends.