The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 105 Dr. Renée-Paule Gauthier & Dr. Kimberly Hankins : The Aligned Musician

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 105. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, violinist, teacher, and high-performance coach, Dr. Renée-Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone. I hope you're doing great. Today is a special episode. I'm bringing you a conversation I had with Dr. Kimberly Hinkins on her podcast, The Aligned Musician. Kimberly is a trauma-informed yoga teacher and breathwork facilitator, helping musicians find freedom while performing through movement, meditation, and breathwork. As a musician's wellness content creator, she works

Starting point is 00:00:56 to remove the stigma associated with playing-related injuries, chronic pain, and mental health-related issues. You might remember Kimberly from episode 87 of the Mind Over Finger podcast, where we discussed the power of mindfulness and breath work in musical practice, performance, and our lives as musicians. And I wanted to share this conversation we had on her show because we had such a great time covering a wide array of other topics, including practicing mindfully, self-compassion in practice and performance, and performance anxiety.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Also, I love Kimberly and her work, and I'm just happy to have more opportunities to bring awareness to everything she does with The Aligned Musician here on the Mind Over Finger platform. And before we dive into today's episode, I'm really excited to tell you about practicing for Peak Performance, my brand new workshop coming up August 13, 14, and 15. This is the workshop for musicians who want to release the shackles of old practice hangups and find the flow that powers new peaks of performance. Together, we're going to cover the mindsets in practice systems that will have you go from uncertain and feeling unprepared to confident

Starting point is 00:02:17 and ready for optimal performance. I can't wait. I'm packing in so much great and useful information for you. You can find all the details for practicing for peak performance at mindoverfinger.com. We're taught from the start to simply put in more hours in the practice room if we want to see success. But you've heard me say this many times, and you already know in your heart that repeating the same tired techniques over and over and getting hung up in the same mindless routines is getting you nowhere and leaving you ever more frustrated and disheartened as all your hard work feels like sometimes a total waste of effort. I get it. Believe me. And that's why I want to invite you to join me in this brand new three-day workshop

Starting point is 00:03:09 where I'm going to share my proven deep practice model for super powerful mindful practice, fast track progress, and rock solid performance, even under pressure. I can't wait and I really hope to see you there. Again, the info is at mindoverfinger.com and I'll have this link for you in the show notes. So without further ado, here's today's conversation. A big thanks to Kimberly for sharing this episode from The Aligned Musician, and I hope you enjoy this chat. Let's go to the show. welcome to the aligned musician podcast I'm your host Dr. Kimberly Hankins and I'm a violist as well as a yoga and breathwork facilitator. I created this podcast to empower musicians like

Starting point is 00:04:16 you to find your own path towards healing and normalize conversations around musicians' wellness. I'm so grateful for your support and thank you for joining me. Dr. Renee Paul-Gauthier is a sought-after performer, teacher, high performance coach whose career has taken her across the United States and Canada as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral leader, and clinician. Dr. Gauthier is passionate about helping musicians unleash their performance potential. In addition to offering peak performance coaching, she gives lectures about practice and performance preparation to schools and organizations, and she hosts the popular Mind Over Finger podcast. The podcast

Starting point is 00:05:07 offers discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, building a purposeful career. She joined the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra for the 2018 and 19, 2019-20 seasons, and she's performed with some of Chicago's finest ensembles. She's a string area coordinator, co-director of the chamber music program, and violin instructor at North Park University. She presents master classes and clinics on the topics of mindful, efficient practice, audition preparation, anxiety management, and peak performance to audiences across the world. Just wow. You've done so much. And a few months ago, I think it was, I was a guest on your podcast and I'm just so excited to have you here today. I'm happy to be here. So fun. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:05:58 Yeah. I know you just reached a hundred episodes on your podcast. So congratulations. I know it's so exciting. When I started the podcast, I thought, you know, we'll see how long this keeps going. And here we go. 100. The first 100. What inspired you to start your podcast? You know, I think you'll probably resonate with this too, is that there is already so much fantastic content out there. There are so many great podcasts and there are so many opportunities for everyone and so many different ways to approach topics and for me I always had lingering questions in my head whenever I would hear someone being interviewed on a podcast and because my particular area of interest is really mindful practice how do we practice more efficiently

Starting point is 00:06:52 how do we perform with more ease more effortlessness but also how do we enjoy the whole process without the grind how do we reconnect with the the why why are we playing music you know at times as a professional musician it can get really heavy stressful and you know competitive and for me there was a real yearning to go back to the reason why I became a musician why I loved it so much in youth orchestra that I was like this is awesome and this you know this is like this is what I want to do. And I keep thinking that there's no reason why professional life shouldn't feel this way also. So I just always had these questions in my head. And then one day I was driving back from the Iowa conference of music educators. I had just spoken about my research

Starting point is 00:07:50 about the deep practice model. And I just was listening to a podcast and had more questions in my head and the idea popped in my head like maybe I should have my own podcast and then right away I was like no no no no like who does that you know and it just kept nagging and nagging until finally I just hopped on YouTube and was like not YouTube Google it was like hey let's just look into it and I got in touch with my good friend Jason Heath and asked him you know you have a a pretty awesome podcast what does it entail and he was super helpful in getting me started and here we go oh my gosh that's so awesome and I resonate so much with what you said about mindfulness when practicing and you know just finding a way to play with more ease not just

Starting point is 00:08:43 physically but mentally and to not let the stress of an orchestral environment I'm sure you're super familiar with that and how we can I think orchestral musicians especially we can get so jaded and so just like you know sick of the same playing the same pieces over and over and over again and so finding a way to just make it new and exciting and fun every single time for ourselves is so important and I just I love your philosophy for practicing I think so many of us go into autopilot we set our timer for however long we intend to practice and then we're only focused on the amount of time rather than the quality of it or the experience of it and so do you want to just share a little bit about that and maybe how we as musicians can find ways to make our practice

Starting point is 00:09:35 time more more present yes absolutely I mean the backstory I tell all the time so if people have been following me they've heard that many times I'm so sorry but is my parents were musicians so as a kid I didn't practice I had coachings every day because my mom would practice with me so my practice was very mindful very guided very specific you know we would target specific goals all the time none of it was mindless and then when I got to college as any college student you know there were times where I would just go in the practice room and clock in and just play and I realized that when I was on hard deadlines I was practicing differently and that I became very efficient with my time and I was getting a lot of results quickly

Starting point is 00:10:25 so I used that a lot and you know I went to one thing for me was at New World Symphony I got to work with Don Green that was very influential for me I discovered yoga I discovered meditation and all of these things I mean right we are the result of our entire environment of all the books that we read of all the people that we meet so all of these things my yoga practice my mindfulness practice all of this started to merge with my musical practice and when I started teaching at the college level I realized how my steed my students desperately needed help learning how to practice better and how do you teach that because the problem is you have one hour a week or more if you want to give some of your time which I'm always eager to do but I'm also busy

Starting point is 00:11:16 and I have a family so you can't just start to give five-hour lessons to everyone and then you're always caught between this situation where do I teach you how to shift properly or do we talk about mindful practice and there's always this choice and there's never enough time to do everything. And this coincided at a time where I was finishing my doctoral studies and doing a lot of research. So I developed an approach that I called the deep practice model. And, and then now there's a whole array of things that I'm combining into what I call the mind over finger system, peak performance system. And, you know, there is certain elements that when we start to incorporate them in our practice that make us have more results so in a nutshell it's a mix of

Starting point is 00:12:09 deliberate practice techniques and we can use all of the wonderful methods that Anders Ericsson elaborated a lot of people have read that study and a lot of people have read those books that are behind me you know talent's overrated a talent code all of that that talk a lot about Erickson's work and his methods. And then there's other methods. Practicing techniques have been around for hundreds of years. And you combine that with the right mindsets, the right attitude, presence, how to problem solve. Self-compassion is a big one. I work so much on self-compassion with my students and my coaching clients because self-compassion is not self-indulgence at all. Self-compassion is self-respect, self-alignment, excellence rooted

Starting point is 00:13:06 in self-alignment. That's what self-compassion is. And when you combine those elements together and have a very mindful approach, then practicing becomes more efficient, performing becomes more effortless or you know you you can reach a place of feeling freer and also the whole experience itself because mastery is about the journey so practicing in itself is not just to get to the result it's to isn't it a wonderful exploration we have these instruments in our hands and we're having fun and we are producing sounds and we're finding things out about technique about ourselves You know, it's, it's just when we become so enthralled in the process itself and everything is more rewarding and the results, um, start to pile on.

Starting point is 00:14:01 I love that honoring the journey and enjoying it, enjoying the process of it. And, um, I know I've read some, I've read some self-help books and like some, uh, some studies on like the science behind how we learn and I find that so interesting and everything you said you know like the the idea that um we can only become what we believe we can become you know like if we can't believe that we're possible of achieving these things and we have this negative inner dialogue it becomes almost impossible to achieve the things that we want And so I think so much of it is like finding this sense of self-compassion, um, believing in ourselves, like giving ourselves maybe even some affirmations about it and approaching

Starting point is 00:14:52 the practicing, not as something that like, I have to just, I have to do for hours and hours at a time, but really finding, seeing it as a puzzle, you know, seeing it as something that is a problem solving process. And, um, I just think that's, that's so amazing. Uh, and you, you mentioned a few books, like if, if we want to dive deeper into this kind of area of self compassion, is there a book or maybe a couple of books you would recommend? Oh, there's so many, I mean, anything that Kristen Neff wrote, she is a researcher who worked with Brene Brown. So, you know, a lot of what Brene Brown talks about ends up being things that came out from the research she did with Kristen Neff is really great. And, you know, any kind of venture in the Buddhist philosophy or meditation, all of

Starting point is 00:15:54 those principles, I mean, bare awareness, beginner's minds are principles I use heavily in my coaching and within the deep practice model itself. So, you know, all of those things, wherever you get your principles about self-compassion is going to lead you to the right place. And you know, one thing that I hear a lot from people, there's, there's this hesitation of trying things because they want to do it the right way. So one thing I keep saying all the time is you can't mess it up. Just try something. you know we have so much inner wisdom that we can tap into if we give ourselves the permission to do it and to reflect on things so i think that at times self-compassion can also come from a place of self-trust and trusting that we can figure it out and you just mentioned learning this great

Starting point is 00:16:50 book about learning called how we learn by benedict carey very interesting uh oh and there's i mean so many i have what you guys don't see so there's this bookshelf behind me but there's another one there that's full of books so there's many i could recommend any of these things um i mean don green's books are fantastic of course my favorite is performance success um i love the inner game of golf even more than the inner game of tennis oh interesting and uh kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery is also very great um Barry Green Inner Game of Music or so I mean also yeah also your dissertation The Mind First and Foremost yeah that's that should be a book soon hopefully

Starting point is 00:17:43 oh hopefully I'm excited for that that's amazing yeah I oh yeah so you know I had a conversation Oh, I don't see it. It was on my desk all week. Forget the title. I had an episode on the Mind Over Finger podcast with Amy Baldzell and her books are incredible. I strongly recommend Amy Baldzell. I'm writing all of these down to add to my list. Thank you so much for that. So you're an incredible violinist and you've done so much work as an orchestral musician, as a concert master and did you always find the violin to be something easy for you or did you come up against any challenges like in terms of um the mindfulness or self-compassion part that you talk about or maybe in other in other ways 100 yes to all of these questions

Starting point is 00:18:44 resistance obstacle uh right I think that I am really walking my journey through all of the things that I teach because books are great but there's nothing that replaced having lived it so when I talk about I have a group coaching program and I talk about all of these things it's called the music mastery experience and it's so fun and I hope that everyone who's listening joins we start June 1st and there's still some spots available and we talk about all of these things mindful practice and all of the aspects of performance preparation but for me it's I've done countless performances in my life and I've learned from each of them I've done a lot of auditions I've performed in all sorts of circumstances I've done many competitions and

Starting point is 00:19:33 oh you know just to think back I'm thinking like how did I go through all of this I don't even know But that's one thing I want to tell everyone who's playing music right now, professional, amateurs, teachers, students, it's that whatever the other people's experience is, you have to live your own journey. And it's not going to be easy. There's going to be obstacles because we are facing our own demons is a strong word but I'm going to use it because at times I really felt like I was having a battle in the practice room with some super mean Renee, you know, I talked so much about self compassion now because I had so little. and I really I think that we are trained to go in the practice room and get the work done so when I talk about the grind I've lived it I've done the grind and I would walk in there and practice and be like this is what it takes to win this audition and then I realized now that it doesn't have to be this way there's a way to find joy in the process and get all of these results from a place of self-compassion and self-respect you know and to really enjoy that

Starting point is 00:20:59 process but the resistance the strong emotions the negative feelings they're actually not necessarily to be avoided but they could be noted acknowledged even maybe welcome because we're allowed to feel of all, all of our feelings and be like, huh, I feel very angry right now. Let's look at that. So instead of, you know, just seeping into that, I don't even know if that's the word in English, but you know, instead of sitting in this anger and just grinding through it, just pause for a second. And why am I angry? Like something's making me upset in this practice session. How can I reset that? Like, let's, let's observe this anger, this frustration, this feeling of not getting anything done and tune into it figure out where it comes from

Starting point is 00:21:50 and you know there's so many ways to change that so i face um you know i'm not immune to this negative talk every day but now i have more tools to overcome it so i would say i have faced all of the obstacles i continue to face all of them but now I know how to work around it, you know? So anyone who's on that journey to mastering a musical instrument, whether you're a professional or a music lover, a student, there's going to be, there are going to be obstacles. There are going to be moments where it's not easy to practice. And it's about the self-growth. It's about what we learn about ourselves through the process what we you know the skills that we develop it's hard to develop

Starting point is 00:22:43 skills on an instrument you know one thing i hear a lot is it should feel easier and my question to this is should it why should it be easy to learn to play the violin it's not easy but does it have to feel awful i don't think so there's a way around it but we also have to accept that it's a process and we can't skip steps so how can we approach this with so much curiosity so much patience and self-love and self-acceptance and uh you know beginner's mind is all about curiosity enthusiasm so any obstacle how can you approach it with curiosity and be like all right things are getting hard what am i going to learn you know i hope this makes sense Yeah, it totally makes sense. And I'm just thinking of like, you know, in my own musical

Starting point is 00:23:39 experience, it's hard to find musical experts in our field that are modeling that kind of behavior. And I know that you kind of brought up like having some obstacles or some negative experience with like teachers and fellow students. And like, do you want to, do you want to talk more on that? Or maybe how, how do we meet the obstacles that are outside of us and not take that as an internal judgment of our self-worth or how far we're moving forward in our own, in our own practice journey? Absolutely. See a comment here.

Starting point is 00:24:21 It's a long journey. I mean, I just want to talk about coaching here for a second, because several years ago, I started getting coached and it was a huge revelation for me, what coaching does to a life, to my life. And now I'm a coach. I'm actually also getting certified to be a life coach because I feel like the ability for me to explore my thinking process is changing me so much and I use these tools with my clients and I just wanted to be the most qualified at it so I in addition to to have the skills to coach from an artistic point of view I'm also I find that so much of the work I do with my clients in our coaching context is life coaching and so let's go

Starting point is 00:25:14 back to trauma I think that all of us to a certain degree have experienced and I mean trauma is a big word and it can mean a lot of things to many people and unfortunately I was trying to find another word than than trauma because people who have experienced not that I want to categorize trauma but there there are some people who have suffered tremendously out there and are really traumatized by something and then there's some people who have you know bad experiences with performances. So it's hard to find a word that can encompass everyone. So I treat this word with a lot of respect and a lot of care. I'm very careful when I talk about this, because there are such a big scale of trauma. And I think, you know, there's trauma with a big T and there's

Starting point is 00:26:08 trauma with a little t and um I think that you know as somebody that has gone through some some trauma-informed trainings I just want to say too that like trauma isn't about the experience of what happened so much as it is the way that it's affected the nervous system because some people are well regulated they have support systems they have access to resources and they might be faced with something that's like a big t trauma but walk away from it feeling fine like it's not affected them in a deep profound way somatically yeah and then there's people that may not have experienced that big t trauma but don't have the tools or resources to self-regulate their nervous system. And something like long-term stress actually affects the nervous system in

Starting point is 00:27:09 a similar way. We're seeing then people that have experienced some of these major life events. And so, I mean, I think it's okay. I think it's okay though, that we use this word trauma from the sense that like, we're not talking about the event of what happened or what occurred, but that we're talking about the way that someone's nervous system has been affected and how we're able to move past stressful events in a way that we feel empowered and doesn't affect our mind and our body. So I actually appreciate your use of the word and also your just compassion around that word too and the way that you're the way that you're using it so that's very eloquently put thank you so much for clarifying it so much better than I did but yes you know it's exactly what you

Starting point is 00:28:08 described is that's for some people an event is very triggering and it just stays with you so this is work that we do is how do we you know get back to this place of self-alignment that I've mentioned many times and you know another word that is very loaded is worthiness inherently we're all worthy we will not be more worthy tomorrow than we are today and we're not more worthy today than we were yesterday we just are all worthy but not all of us know that about ourselves and so is how can we go back to seeing our own self-worth finding our footing with our emotions and our thoughts uh and then you know maybe look at some of the past events see how we can get some leverage over them try to understand um

Starting point is 00:29:07 the thinking that affected the emotions and what you were saying and how it affects the nervous system. And then, you know, there's so many ways to slowly get us comfortable. So for example, if you've had a teacher who was so negative and so triggering and caused deeply embedded trauma in terms of not feeling like you can perform, there are ways that you can gently recondition yourself to perform starting with very safe contacts friends loving friends and then gently as you build your confidence expend that to you know i'm not saying that everyone has to perform but for the people who want to and have to overcome all of these like huge walls in front of them there are ways to gently build a ramp up the wall

Starting point is 00:30:03 so it's a it's a beautiful long at times difficult but worthy process oh I love that and I love I love your framing of worthiness and and and that performance um that it's that it's a ramp up and I think in a lot of musical settings we are expected you know from the very first week of our academic music school life to start playing for our peers. And oftentimes that can be the most challenging audience. That's so much more challenging than playing for a random group of people who may not be professional musicians or even know what piece we're playing. But to play for people that we may feel that we are in competition with, that they know the music better than we do sometimes that can be so challenging to just dive right into that yes

Starting point is 00:31:02 isn't it interesting what like the thoughts do to us because there could be I'm sure you've experienced this you're practicing in the practice room and you're feeling it like you're having such a great time and there could be 15 people in the corridor including the one that intimidates you the most, you know, if you're a violinist and maybe Hilary Hahn is standing outside the door, that might be a little bit intimidating unless you don't know about it. If you don't know about it, you're just doing your own thing. But as the second you have this thought, oh my gosh, she's standing right there. And all of a sudden your, you know, your entire self shift, it's a different perspective. And all of a sudden, you know, things start to happen. And that's just

Starting point is 00:31:51 with one thought is very interesting. That's so interesting. I want to, I want to get to just a couple of these questions. Cause I think they're on the same, they're on the same wavelength. One of the questions was, how do you think we can fight inner negative self dialogue? And would that be healthy? And someone else asks, how can we get over? I'm not good enough, or it's not good until it's perfect thoughts I think those two are kind of very very closely related um what are your thoughts on that oh many thoughts I mean let's try to scroll down what would that be healthy okay so I think better when I can see things um one of the things that I find the most powerful about negative self-talk is noticing that it's

Starting point is 00:32:40 happening and in the music master experience we have a whole training about that how to address negative self-talk but like the biggest part of it i don't just give it for free here is when you notice that it's happening already you're separating yourself from it so it's already losing some of its power on you because your notice is very meta you're noticing you're thinking you know and i think that some techniques that you can start to use is if you notice that it's happening can you extract the language the words maybe you write them down and you don't have you don't even have to change that yet just look at it and just looking at it might get you to pause and think wow those are not very nice words to use with a human being you know i mean i don't

Starting point is 00:33:31 know about your kind of self-language but mine was not language I would use in front of my children you know and you start to look at this language you could I mean that's a completely different set of other topics when do I use it and then you know but if we just address this language there can you start to find kinder alternatives to these words there's also the concept of understanding that when we use this kind of language with ourselves we're creating an inner battle we are attacking ourselves and what happens when we are attacked as human beings as as you know people with people talk about the lizard brain or whatever you know while we go into flight or fight and we definitely i think tend to fight

Starting point is 00:34:24 or we can flight too but either way the negative self-talk is using a lot of ram in your brain while you're trying to practice that's not helpful so by just knowing that because at times we feel like well i just gotta do it i'm gonna hustle i'm gonna make it and to make it you have to coax yourself and this is the way all of us i mean maybe not pianist but you know if a pianist playing the orchestra too or they've been yelled at by someone but as an orchestra I mean I don't know if you've had this experience before I definitely had where you get like the that my husband calls it the like the furry eyebrows from the conductor and it just kind of all of a sudden you can't do anything you know so if you get I remember youth orchestra

Starting point is 00:35:16 conductor at Curtis he was a scary man if he looked at me with those eyes I know as a 12 year oh, I couldn't do anything. And so, but you're being that person to yourself in the practice room. You're totally incapacitating yourself. And I hope I said that word correctly. So once you start to see that, that fact that this is not helpful and you can understand that what is helpful is being completely objective, assessing what is rather than judging yourself, choosing the language that you would use on a student, a dear friend, maybe your own child, someone that you care deeply about and you really want them to do well in life, there is a way that you would encourage them.

Starting point is 00:36:16 You would be that kind of coach. that's how you want to talk to yourself so there's a certain intellectual understanding that we can use in terms of well even on paper this is not helpful this negative language so I should just stop it and then there's the the more emotional aspect starting to notice what kind of words do I use one thing I do with some of my clients is we name the negative voice so we have Bertha for example and then it's just noticing when you know when bertha is in the room and okay so and i think that um they use that kind of analogy also in the inner game of tennis um even elizabeth gilbert in her book big magic which i really like like this book a lot talks about fear and how you know

Starting point is 00:37:05 she sees that fear has a value in her life and how fear is going to be there and she's not going to hate fear but fear you know she talks about being in the car on the road trip with fear and she writes a love letter to fear and be like you can come along on the ride but you cannot drive you can't you know access the radio station you know so uh so yeah so i think that sorry it's a really long answer to your question but there's that intellectual understanding that this is not helpful and then there's looking into what we're doing so that we can start to modify the language that we're using the tone that we're using also noticing physically how we feel when we're using this language and we can use our body state to change that so a breathing exercise is really

Starting point is 00:37:55 great a moment of mindfulness of releasing tension i think that when we release bodily tension we also release the anger in our words so those are some some ways to do that oh that's so great and um it's so similar to I just remember when I was going through this journey with myself I had a lot of negative self-dialogue uh a few years ago and I took a break from practicing and I was like it's it's amazing how much inner self-dialogue you don't realize is there until you start writing it down something I want to say too um but for me I was like I'm not I thought of my negative self-talk as like my practice goblin it's like something that would just be there like saying the absolute worst things about me and allowing myself to distance

Starting point is 00:38:51 myself from those thoughts just just acknowledging that like I and and I'm sure you know this from your time with yoga and meditation, but like, I am not my thoughts that my thoughts are something separate from me as a human. And I felt like that was the most empowering realization to have. um but I also wanted to touch on um something else you said about oh my gosh I can't remember I can't remember right now but yes just like the self the negative the negative um self-talk is something ah I caught it the negative self-talk is something that actually has um it can tell us information about ourselves about what is weighing on us and how we're feeling in our bodies but I feel like for me my negative self-talk around practicing started because I felt I think I felt

Starting point is 00:40:05 like I had to motivate myself in a certain way in order to create urgency around practicing or getting things done. And so like, for me, it was the messages of like, I'm not enough. I'm always out of tune. I have to do this. I have to practice more. I have to practice harder. And then it's really hard to even, even if you're telling yourself in a positive way, like you're not there yet, you have to keep going. That can still very quickly turn into, um, I'm not enough, you know and what's funny is what we use to motivate ourself is what makes us not want to practice i mean sometimes we look at the i look at the case it's close right now and just looking at it i mean i bypass all of the thinking it right away goes to the dread of oh you know

Starting point is 00:40:59 what self-limitation am i going to have to face in the practice room today you know what i mean Yeah. When we use this harsh language, it just creates a domino effect where it comes to the point of us not even want to practice at all. So it's kind of a vicious circle that can be very beneficial if we break it. Yeah, absolutely. And just finding ways to like, feel good about practicing that don't have to be um that that don't have to be centered around this like urgency to to get better or urgency to be perfect right now because I think for many of us it's like with weekly lessons I think with that um structure especially like I know some weeks for me I have I'm in a good headspace I got lots of free time to just kind of practice explore things and I show

Starting point is 00:41:55 up to my lesson feeling great. And then there's other weeks where life happens and maybe I don't have as much time to practice and it can just feel like, um, on a weekly basis, we're trained that there's a certain expectation of how much we're supposed to improve. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I think that we shoot ourselves in the foot with that because I hear that so much all the time from clients, and I was guilty of that as well, is we feel like we have to practice something once and we should expect it to be solved. And the learning process does not work like that. What happens is we learn something. If we are able to play it great in the first session, it means that this was 100% within the realm of our current skills. Great, be happy. But if you

Starting point is 00:42:50 practice something and you and it felt great you have this illusion of acquired skill because you you know it's very fresh in your short-term memory but it has not yet been assimilated at the long-term memory level or at the you know I know it's not muscle memory but we'll just talk about muscle memory because everybody knows what that means it's not yet assimilated at the muscle memory level so people show up in the practice room the next day and they feel like oh it was there yesterday and now it's here and they start defeated. They start feeling defeated. And what kind of work do we do when we feel defeated? Not amazing work. So what I would propose is for people to celebrate when they feel like they pick a passage that they practiced the

Starting point is 00:43:39 day before and felt amazing. And they feel like they are back, you know, 50% or more celebrate that. That's the learning process because what you need to do is learn it, relearn it, maybe relearn it a third time. And then every single time that you relearn it, you're building all these neural pathways, that myelination process that everyone is talking about. That's what's happening. You're building the skill. It's normal. It's what it should happen. You should forget. Forgetting is amazing because that's what allows you to really deeply embed those skills that knowledge those notes that you want to memorize when you have to relearn them you're doing it right so don't be upset if you feel like you come back and you've lost half of your skills that's it

Starting point is 00:44:30 that's what it should be so if you can do it perfectly the next day that was you were already there if it's not you can feel amazing knowing that you're building fresh new skills in that if you keep showing up and relearning it and you know reinforcing it and anchoring it you know start judging a year later if you still can't play that passage but give yourself a little time so if you forget celebrate it you're doing it right is there anything else you would like our listeners to know oh i don't know there's too many too many to choose from i mean i would love to have a anyone who's maybe curious about the music master experience to maybe check out the website and check the page and see if this says something that could be interested for them

Starting point is 00:45:26 and then if it is they could book a call and we could chat let's see um but you know there's so many beautiful topics lots of them on the mind over finger podcast of course including your episode which is so great and hold on I see a question here oh sure how can we get over I'm not good enough or it's not on oh it's not good unless it's perfect thoughts wait is that the one you told me earlier yeah I think I think we covered that one a little bit earlier but if there's anything else you'd like to say on that or you know I'm not good enough is is a hard one and we can try okay here's one thing one thing I'd like to offer transition words can be very helpful

Starting point is 00:46:13 it's important to believe what we're trying you know if there's a deeply embedded belief you can't go from I will never be good enough to I will be amazing you know you can repeat that in front of mirror all day, if you don't believe it, it's not going to work. So positive affirmations only work if you believe it. So then what would you believe? So what's the word here? It's not good enough. It needs to be perfect. You know, it's possible that one day I would feel that I'm good enough. That's something that you could believe. It's possible that one day I'll play this piece. It's possible that one day, you know, so to just kind of find a phrase that offers some flexibility that you could believe and work towards that. Because it's so wonderful

Starting point is 00:47:14 when you start to contemplate, is it possible one day I could be enough? Yeah, that's possible. Oh, okay well let's stay with that for a little bit and then you know gently work your way up the scale of affirmations you know but good enough I don't know it's a journey it's growth it's it's not a there's no destination I think and how can we find you everything is at mindoverfinger.com you know or instagram facebook mind over finger thank you so much for joining us if you enjoyed this episode be sure to hit subscribe give us a rating and follow on instagram at the aligned musician thank you so much and take care

Starting point is 00:48:18 thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this chat with kimberly hankins from the aligned musician podcast you can find the show on your favorite podcasting platform or at thealignedmusician.com where you will also find all the information about kimberly and the wonderful resources she has for you kimberly and i would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were so get in touch with us i'm mind over finger on both instagram and facebook and she's the aligned musician don't forget to visit mindoverfinger.com for all the details on practicing for peak performance my brand new three-day workshop where i will share with you all the tools to reach new peaks of performance that's what i

Starting point is 00:49:09 have for you guys today happy practicing and a bientot Thank you for watching.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 105 Dr. Renée-Paule Gauthier & Dr. Kimberly Hankins : The Aligned Musician

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