The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 108 Laurie Niles: Trailblazing with Joy

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 108. 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 for musicians, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope you're feeling wonderful as you're tuning in. My guest today exudes joy and enthusiasm, and she's sharing wonderful wisdom with us in the episode. I'm very excited to bring you Lori Niles from violinist.com on the show today. Lori is a performing violinist,

Starting point is 00:00:52 pedagogue, and the genius mind behind violinist.com. She founded the website with her husband in 1996, and it offered her the perfect opportunity to blend her skills as a formally trained professional violinist and a former daily newspaper reporter. Over the past 20 years, violinist.com has proven that the internet can draw together people from all over the world, and that it can inflame their passion for it. The site attracts more than 200,000 unique visitors each month, from teens in Kansas blogging about a Suzuki festival to professionals in the Far East sharing practice tips.

Starting point is 00:01:35 Lori also published the books Violinist.com Interviews Volume 1 and 2, and each volume contains about 30 of the best interviews with world-class artists from Violinist.com. In our discussion, Lori shares some of her favorite takeaways, tips, and tricks accumulated over the years from star violinists, her thoughts on dedication and discipline, some of the things young musicians dreaming of a career in music should do, and so much more. Lori has been our ears and our eyes in concert halls, masterclasses, and conferences, and thanks to her we've been able to enjoy insight and information from the world's best violinists

Starting point is 00:02:20 for years. She's also an extremely passionate teacher and a kind and energetic person and we're lucky to have her as an advocate for all violinists. I had such an amazing time talking with Lori and I know you're going to love our conversation as much as I did. Let's go to the show. Lori Niles, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, it's great to be here. Lori, I've shared a little bit about you in the introduction, but I would love to hear your story in your own words. So can you please tell us about you, about your musical journey, and how you got to where you are? All right. Well, I am a violinist. I am a writer, and I'm also a teacher.

Starting point is 00:03:21 Back in the day, I studied violin performance at Northwestern University, and then I also studied journalism at Indiana University. And I always wondered how these things would ever come together in my life. And for a very long time, I led sort of a double life where I was playing and symphonies on one side of it. And then I was actually a daily newspaper reporter for a while too, you know, chasing fires and writing stories about the weather and just weird stuff, police blotter. And so, you know, I sort of did these two things separately for a very long time before my husband in 1996 at Christmas gave me a beautiful gift, the domain name violinist.com. Of course, in 1996, this really didn't mean much to me because the internet was so new. I just

Starting point is 00:04:18 thought, what kind of, what is this? You know, what am I going to do with this? And he sort of explained. And so we started a website. And honestly, it started out almost like Facebook for violinists, you could put your profile up there, we didn't even have a discussion. And then I thought, you know, should we just let these people talk amongst each other. And we started a discussion. At a certain point, my husband said, you should start a blog. And I said, what is a blog so it was that early on in the internet and I felt like you know what was wonderful about that is that I felt like I had a whole new medium for expression I feel like I got to help invent what a blog was I was so excited when you write in a newspaper all you get to do

Starting point is 00:05:08 is put print in there when you write on the internet you can put hyperlinks in there and video and photos and write a story as long or as short as you want. So for me, it was a very exciting new medium. And I've been at it ever since. It's been nearly 25 years. That's an amazing gift for you. But please tell your husband thank you from all of us. That was a great gift to us. Yeah, yeah, I think we knew I met him in journalism school. He has a website called theme park insider.com he's former la times for he used to be there for a while but anyway we knew it would be a journalistic endeavor and to me as a teacher it is also it is also an educational thing my my aim is to um well to get people addicted to the violin but also to just be

Starting point is 00:06:05 an open invitation for anybody who wants to learn about the violin. I like to uphold examples of excellence. So that might be excellence in playing, excellence in teaching, excellence in the instrument itself, excellence in, and hopefully in community and, you know, how we interact with each other and welcome each other. So that's been my aim. It's such a wonderful website. And I feel like the word you just used, community, is exactly what What violinist.com has meant for us for so many years, as I was telling you right before we clicked record, I've, you know, remember reading amazing posts on violinist.com, you know, years ago when I was living back in Canada. And it's just been a great, in French we say, rassemblement, such a great way to bring people together that share this passion. And I love how it's this marriage of both your passions.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Yeah, it has been a real labor of love for a long time. And yeah, when I hear that people used the site a long time ago, that makes me so happy. One of my happiest moments is I was signing my book. So I have a couple of books that came out of this, all books of interviews of violinists. And it's just a long, long list of violinists, you know, from Ruggiero Ricci to Hilary Hahn, Rachel Barton Pine, you know, just I think it's 27 or 30 or something in each book. Anyway, I was signing this book and I was at Disney Hall and Vijay Gupta came up to me. Now, he is a beautiful person. He has started something called Street Symphony, but he was a member of the L.A. Times. I mean, sorry, L.A. Phil for the longest time. And he was the youngest member.

Starting point is 00:07:57 And he said, you know, when I auditioned for the L.A. Phil, I read your account because I wrote about auditioning for the L.A. Phil. Now, I didn't get in at all, but he said that it really helped him. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I just I almost fell over. I was so that that made me so happy that, you know, that just the things that we share can really help each other. And, you know, one person may go off in a completely different direction based on what you're sharing. But but it's wonderful. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, you and I were talking before this interview and exchanged some correspondence and something that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting is that correlation that there is between being a violinist and a writer.

Starting point is 00:08:50 you were talking about the fact that writing requires as much practice and discipline and long-term study as violin playing. And you were mentioning that learning the art of written expression has taught you a lot about learning the art of musical expression. And as you put it, expression in any medium requires work in technique. Can you please speak more to that? I will. Yeah. Yeah. So I started violin when I was nearly nine years old. You know, so obviously, I've put in a lot of time practicing violin, but I started writing in a journal in about fifth grade. And I wrote every single day for about 20 years. um it it's a it was a real devotion it still is a real devotion um and i learned a lot from that and the one thing is you know you don't necessarily um look at your practice sessions from when you were nine years old um but you can go back and read your diary that you wrote and it's so

Starting point is 00:10:06 interesting to me the change you know like for for maybe like even a couple of years i would write things like, today, I got up and ate. Then I went to school. Yeah, the most pedantic, boring kind of thing that you can think of. And then I think at some point, I thought, you know, maybe I should just write about the interesting stuff. You know, so you know, you start choosing, you know, first, you're just kind of learning how to put the words together, the sentences together, then you start choosing, well, what do I want to actually say, I should say something with this. And then when I was in journalism school, so I when I was at Northwestern studying music, I would sneak into the journalism class, you know, I managed to get my way

Starting point is 00:10:54 into a lot of the journalism classes, and they were brutal, you know, but so there were some very specific things they had about, you know, sentence structure and the way you use verbs and this kind of thing. And, of course, I had my class assignments, but I would take it home to my diary as well. And I would make sure that I was using active verbs, that I was not using state of being like just made that part of my vernacular to the point, you know, where after you do it lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of times, it is natural and that you're no longer, you know, it's different. The way you speak is really different than the way you write. If you just write down what you say, it's, it doesn't mean as much. It's not as, doesn't convey as much.

Starting point is 00:11:39 And I learned a lot about musical expression from that. I realized, you know, even writing, because it's easy to think that writing is just, you write down what you think. It's real art. And I learned, wow, well, I really learned expression from this. I can really express much more. and and music is the same way there are things that that we do with our technique where you learn how to do it and you you really have to do it a lot to incorporate it as part of the way you play that practice is so so important yeah i love to say that practice is habit building and i feel like you put it so beautifully is making it part of the vernacular that's what we're doing with practicing the technique and also with expression, because we know that once we acquire a technique, then we can really take what's in our mind and translate it into sound. So this is a really beautiful way to put it. Fluency. Yeah. And what's so interesting to me

Starting point is 00:12:44 is that after all this, you know, I also did a lot of study of the Suzuki method and I teach violin And that is all based on a language approach that we can learn violin in the way that we learn language. So it all kind of fits together. But the way we learn language, it's fluency. It's all about fluency, getting fluent in language, fluent on the instrument. And then when we have something to say, we have all the tools we need. And we can choose which ones. The bigger toolbox you have, the more you have to choose from to make that expression that you want, you know, to create what you want. Yes. You're talking about this fluency, which is a perfect word for this. And you've told us you're a violinist, you're a teacher, and you've talked to hundreds, thousands of teachers and performers over the years.

Starting point is 00:13:37 And we want to hear more about these books later. But what are some of your favorite takeaways or tips and tricks, some of those that you've accumulated over the years? well let's see for practicing honestly I guess one of the things that I would say particularly as a teacher that I have learned is that with children and with anybody it is easier to practice every day than it is to just decide which days to practice on to make it a habit and something I learned with my with my son who was like four at the time I think and he was taking piano and we were being a little bit like well practice on this day practice on that day this older teacher sat me down and said you need to form a practice habit and I'm like what you know he's like do it for 21 days it takes 21 days to form a habit after that you will expect to do

Starting point is 00:14:37 it and you'll be doing it it's like brushing your teeth 21 days in a row or any other habit and we did actually do it we made him practice 21 days in a row and you know on about day 21 20 22 23 okay i'm ready to practice you know it it works for adults too you know if you can actually um do those uh 21 days that's like the goal without missing a date you have to start over if you miss a date you have to start over and you know what it applies to Hilary Hahn. This is something I don't know if anybody has followed Hilary Hahn's 100 days of practicing. But you know, it's interesting to realize that even people at the absolute top of our field fall off the wagon for a while, or you know, they take a sabbatical

Starting point is 00:15:28 as she took a year long sabbatical. And then they have to get back into the habit. And that is a chore. It's actually just simply a chore that you have to set yourself to. I'm gonna do it every day. Yeah. And that's not like the fun part, right? I mean, we all want to just like play. But we have to do this. I love this with my kids. They're young. So we practice we don't practice every day, but we practice every day except Sunday. And what we've been doing is have a very stable routine. And now it's never a matter of if we practice or when we practice, it's always we practice after breakfast. And it's that strategy of pairing that I love so much from Gretchen Rubin, who's the author of a book that I love called Better Than Before and The

Starting point is 00:16:26 Four Tendencies. And I recommend those books to everyone. And I love that after breakfast, they just know that it's time to practice. So it's never a struggle or we don't have to make the decision to practice. It's just, they know that we step to the piano after breakfast. And it's so true what you're saying is how can we implement habits so that the skill is acquired, the shape is maintained and then things become easier things become more joyful in the way because you are in um a virtuous cycle is what i would call that a virtuous cycle because um you're you're practicing every day you're getting better and then that makes you enjoy practicing and then that makes you better and you know it's just it's just a circle absolutely

Starting point is 00:17:15 keep rolling if you can if you can sustain it but the thing is that you know life is long and things happen and you go on vacation or you have a disruption in your family or something happens and you fall off that wagon, you have to be able to say like, okay, that's all right. It's all right. And I get back to it now. Absolutely. Any other tips or tricks for us? Well, I have over the years talked with a lot of different violinists and I do have some takeaways from them they're not all necessarily targeted at practice but they are generally targeted at you know what we're doing here so I will start with Hilary Hahn and I think the big secret to her success has been to be herself to have she has so much integrity things around her have

Starting point is 00:18:08 changed so much the internet you know Instagram but she uses these tools in a way that are uniquely hers you know I've seen her over the years like when she commissioned 27 encores what a great idea you know she wasn't trying to do anything except for you know something that really authentically came to her at one time she did this contest to create an album cover for like a vinyl release she was doing and she kind of did it on Instagram and that was a really wonderful way of using what's out there um in her authentic way she also put that hundred days of practice up on instagram and that's been hugely popular it has been but it's not like she was saying i think i'm going to do something to make myself popular she just was like well i have to practice and

Starting point is 00:18:57 here's instagram you know she just it was a very genuine kind of thing and i think that's what we all see um some other stuff um so rachel barton pine is also a wonderful violinist she she as well as hillary wrote one of the four words to my books uh which are both they're all called violinist.com interviews anyway um so with rachel barton pine she is a self-professed geek and she has taught me that you can always dive deeper into the history of a piece, the history and the technique. She just always has something amazing to say that is super deep about, you know, whether it's Bach or Mozart concertos or Black composers. She has uncovered so much. She's created some books of music by Black composers. She's always just looking for new things to play and looking,

Starting point is 00:19:56 diving deeper into the history of that so that's something from her gil shaham um we did a little show called gil harmonic during the pandemic and we had lots of fun uh it was almost like a little master class slash interview but what i learned from him you can be incredibly famous successful amazing talented and still like a nice person he's such a nice person but also he also has this like almost like childlike wonder curiosity about pieces that he's played a zillion times he did a video on violinist.com about um the Bach preludio and it was just like this this revelation and he was so full of wonder about it and I think that to be able to have that kind of feeling about music even after you've played something a thousand times

Starting point is 00:20:53 it's just amazing um I can keep going here please do James James Ennis so something he's a wonderful Canadian uh violinist and the thing that I really got from talking to him he went on such a journey to get a really good violin and it was so like sort of difficult and heart-wrenching and you know so many turns to the story and you know it's really important to do it like to like to go through that it's worth that difficulty the persistence like the sheer will that you have to bring to the table to get yourself an excellent instrument because that is the tool of our trade your instrument is your teacher as much as anybody was your teacher right if you have a good one it will serve you if you don't it's it's hard um and you just really have to be persistent about that

Starting point is 00:21:53 get it for yourself i'll keep going uh lindsey sterling the most famous violinist in the world she is someone that i interviewed and you know what she taught me that like if you're going to capture people's hearts and she has captured more hearts than any of us have you know it's more than just playing this is a person she's a brilliant person and when she performs she's thinking about the whole entire scene of what she's doing the set the costumes the colors the lighting the feeling the pace of it all it's something we should think about you know I think we should be looking to popular music a little bit to see you know what can we what else can we bring to the table besides our you know talents as classical musicians what I love in all of these things that

Starting point is 00:22:43 you're talking about is that it's all about human qualities yeah it really really it comes down to it and I think a lot of it is about figuring out how you are who you are and what you bring to the table that is unique and and being okay with it too you know like okay well I'm not Hilary Hahn I'm not going to be able to come up with that idea. I can pretty much only come up with my own idea. So this authenticity you're talking about and to find the peace with yourself that where you, you know, the calm waters where you can let those ideas come to the surface and, um, act on them and, and do them authentically and, and, uh, be on board with yourself as yourself. Um, I'm not trying to pretend to be anyone else.

Starting point is 00:23:33 And, of course, as we grow into ourselves, you might try on a lot of different coats, right? You might try on a lot of different ways of doing things. And that's okay. And, you know, actually that brings to mind another person I interviewed, Deborah Borda. She was, at the time that I talked to her, she was the CEO of the L.A. Phil. She is now the CEO of the New York Philharmonic. and she was telling me about when she came to the la phil they were still in the the awful dorothy chandler pavilion they had not built disney hall it looked like they were never

Starting point is 00:24:08 gonna get it done and she somehow and this you know this was a this was an orchestra that's kind of failing a little bit and she just totally turned it around by the time she left they built disney hall they've gotten gustavo dudamel i mean they're just their star was just ascending and and another thing that she said is like you have to be able to let your people because she's a leader let your people um experiment try new things and fail yes um and to have a system in place where you analyze things at the end like okay well did this work did it not work if it did fail then you move on and you there's no blaming and you know you just allow that experimentation to happen within your within your organization or within your

Starting point is 00:24:58 people that are working with you i feel like you've just summarized the deep practice model in a few sentences which is have a system in place but then experiment and embrace all the failures as lessons right it's hard to do that though you know you want to blame you there's all this self-recrimination and doesn't feel good to fail if we change what meaning we attach to the word failure then yes so much is possible right and if we're also accepting and if we have people around us who are accepting and fundamentally accepting of you know okay yeah you're trying your best laurie this season on the mind over finger podcast i'm covering elements that are part of creating a fulfilling musical experience, whether that's with the intention of pursuing it

Starting point is 00:25:54 as a career or not. And to pursue it as a career, I think we all know that starting kind of young is something that's highly recommended. And for those young musicians dreaming of a career in music, those who are walking that road leading to a music degree, what are some things that you think they should do along the way? Maybe some skills they need to acquire, maybe ways they need to practice. You've talked about habits already. Maybe there's some experiences they need to seek or a specific path they need to follow. What are your thoughts on this? Well, this is something that comes up all the time on violinist.com and on the discussion board. We actually have a lot of people who started later, but also people who are students and just seeking

Starting point is 00:26:44 out this kind of information and i would say you know beyond that practice habit which i think is very very important the discipline and the practice is just an open-mindedness um you know i i think it has to be an open-mindedness to to genre and also to technology i see my son is a filmmaker and um studied filmmaking at the la county high school for the arts loxa um and there was one time when he was tasked with a it was a 64 hour film and they had to make a musical actually in 64 hours and so they were writing this music at the last minute and they're like mom can you come play the violin well what was so fascinating for me is they were using a program called ableton live um and such a different compositional technique they didn't have any anything written i'm used

Starting point is 00:27:35 to going to an orchestra you put something in front of me i sight read it i'm good they're like uh could you try this or that you know and I'm following sort of this fever line of where the music's going on a computer screen that had no notes no keys no anything and just kind of doing it all by ear and trying something and then and then the the person who is the composer would sort of sing it back and could you do a little bit of oh you know oh I like that thing you did can you try it again I and I thought to myself wow well to be adept in both something like that computer program and how to use that you know and it lays straight into a film um and to be able to be you know to be able to be flexible enough to play something by ear and adapt and be able to

Starting point is 00:28:21 work in that kind of environment but also to be able to read music and to have those traditional skills what a great combination like gen z you guys go you're you're on top of it um Um, so I think you have to be, you have to have like one foot in the old and one foot in the new, you, you have to be listening to your mentors that are, um, that have been around the block, but you also need to be, um, coalescing. With your peers, you need to be working together with your peers. You need to not have such a competitive attitude that you can't just hold hands and do something fun together.

Starting point is 00:29:03 You know, like, wow, you're talented. I'm talented. Let's do this. Let's do a duet. Let's create a, you know, the more that you can get that kind of a group of people around you, I think the bigger success you're going to have. I love this so much sorry go ahead I was gonna say I just recently interviewed somebody named Randall Goosby um who's a protege of um Itzhak Perlman you know so he's got that amazing you know um old world if you will you know like wisdom but he also he just put out a new album called Roots it's a celebration of African-American music among other things but one of the things he did is he collaborated with this friend of his that's his age that he met at the Pearlman music program and he said I want you to come on and write a piece for me and we'll play it together and and it's you know they created this piece together um so you know his roots weren't just about

Starting point is 00:30:01 that they were about like his own upbringing and the people he met along the way yeah forming that kind of group and I love what you said about one foot in the old and one foot in the new I feel like it's so important to acquire the skills to also know about the traditions and know about the history and also bring all of this into the future with us and in that spirit of collaboration and friendship that you're talking about I feel like that's where the future of classical music is yeah absolutely yes this is great how about a round of rapid fire question before i let you go oh boy i'm nervous okay but i'll do it what's a habit that you have and that you think contributed to your success writing every day i wish it was playing violin every day

Starting point is 00:30:56 i pretty much do that too but yeah yeah the power of habit the power of devotion even better love that yes is there a performance that has stayed with you throughout the years And if so, why, you know, it was probably super early and I'm not even sure why, but it was, I was at Northwestern university and Victor Yampolsky was conducting and we were, we were playing, uh, Brahms fourth symphony. And during the slow movement, there was this, you know, the practical, and he stopped conducting and I looked up and he wasn't conducting anymore. And it meant that we were just holding together on our own. It just lifted me out of myself.

Starting point is 00:31:44 It was just this amazing moment of just, he didn't need to. He knew he didn't need to. Like, it just, we were so in that moment and together. It was, oh, amazing. What a beautiful memory. Yes. How about a favorite tool in the practice room? shall i say it the metronome please please do yes i use it a lot for my students for myself

Starting point is 00:32:14 but it can keep you honest um that's in the practice room that's to get things together you know obviously you don't want to play like a metronome but they're it's an awfully useful tool in fact i love the metronome so much that i have a guide for it that's available on my website so I think I have like three. I have like the mechanical one and then I have the other ones. And, you know, I was going to ask you about a favorite book that you would recommend to our listeners. But what I'd rather hear about are your two books that you wrote. Tell us about this. All right. So, well, OK, I've got two books, Violinist.com Interviews 1 and Violinist.com Interviews 2. so very basically named but um they each have about 30 interviews with um violinists um and

Starting point is 00:33:04 basically it evolved from all the interviews hundreds and hundreds that i've done over the many years that i've been editor of violinist.com so i've just interviewed a lot of violinists and they are these are some of the best of them and i'll just read off some names so like um hillary Han, uh, Rachel Barton Pine, Ruggiero Ricci, who I was so happy to interview him before he passed away. Um, Joshua Bell, Anna Sophie Muter, uh, James Ennis, Janine Jensen, Philip Setzer, Philip Quint, Sarah Chang, Nadia Salerno Sonnenberg, David Garrett, Lindsay Sterling, Augustin Hadley. I mean, you know, it's just kind of everybody. Um, but you know, I just tried to get the unique thing out of each of them that they had to offer. And it was just, it's been an amazing privilege to be able

Starting point is 00:33:55 to talk to these people. And these are also very family-friendly books, something that a 13-year-old can read and get a lot out of, and coming from a lot of different perspectives, people of different ages and generations and backgrounds. Such a wealth of information, so much wisdom. And you know, in the introduction, I mentioned that everything on violinist.com is not only for violinists and it's not only for string players because all of those principles are universal to music making. So I think that anyone listening, even if they're not violinists, those would be really interesting books. Yeah, that's the idea. It was, you know, to just find something universal with each of these artists that really speaks to us. What's a piece of advice that was given to

Starting point is 00:34:45 you that you'd like to pass on to the listeners? Does it have to be about practicing? This is my advice for parents, actually. And it's the only advice I have for parents. You'll either spend time at the ice cream parlor with your child or in the principal's office. So spend the time at the ice cream parlor. It might feel trivial or like you don't have time for it, but it's the most important thing and maybe maybe that speaks to our artistic lives too you know we can think that there's a lot of important things that we're supposed to be doing but we better be feeding our our relationships our soul the things that sustain us as people if we're to share that as artists that's really beautiful and very powerful thanks so much for sharing that

Starting point is 00:35:39 and also I'm going to play that back to my husband because he gives he gives me a hard time for how often we go out for ice cream like it doesn't have to be ice cream but you said ice cream I'm going to stick to ice cream I like it how about a quick actionable tip listeners could implement today in their musical lives try something new oh I love that I've been playing Clara Schumann's romances. There's three romances, some, you know, just music I haven't ever played before and making it my own too, coming up with my own fingering. It's awfully rewarding. Love that. Lori, where can people find you and connect with you? I'm going to put all of these things in the show notes, but let's have them hear it also. Okay. So you can definitely

Starting point is 00:36:29 find me at violinist.com. I have blogs on there. There's a discussion board. There's some directories you can join as a member. You can write a blog on violinist.com if you are inspired. So it's just a community for musicians and lovers of classical music and the violin. Also violinist.com has a presence we have um a facebook page violinist.com we have an instagram we have twitter um we also have a youtube channel where you can find um a lot of like interviews and also some instructional videos for violin that sounds great i i think everyone should subscribe to everything yeah subscribe visit me all the time we also have a newsletter actually which is very very useful it's twice a week um and it's not spammy at all it's just all

Starting point is 00:37:32 articles meant to keep you up to date and inspire your musicianship and i'm guessing we can find the books on the website as well yes and it's also just on amazon so violinist.com interviews Sounds perfect. Laurie Niles, it was an immense pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for spending this time with me in sharing your insight and wisdom with the listeners of the Mind Over Finger podcast. Thank you so much, Renee. It was wonderful to talk with you. thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this conversation with lori niles there's so much great wisdom to take in and experiment with and i particularly resonated with the concept of being authentically ourselves i don't know about you but for me the last 18 months offered the opportunity for so much reflection and reassessment and it's so

Starting point is 00:38:41 wonderful to be back in rehearsals and performances with a renewed vision of how I want to be and show up as a musician and it's not just when I'm at work but how I show up for myself in the practice room and as a person in my life in general. And I'd love to know what you think about it. If you relate to this conversation, let Lori and I know by getting in touch with us and let's keep this discussion going. I'm mindoverfinger on both Instagram and Facebook and she's violinist.com. As I've shared with you in the last episode, practicing for peak performance, my performance preparation workshop is now available for download if you're looking for a process that works and that will allow you to enjoy more efficient practice sessions gain confidence

Starting point is 00:39:35 and perform at your best check out practicing for peak performance at mindoverfinger.com when you join practicing for peak performance you gain access to all the recorded content that's over seven hours jam-packed with information, guidance, and effective high performance systems. You get detailed handouts and worksheets, access to the PPP Facebook group community for support and answers to all your questions, and for a limited time, a complimentary private 30-minute coaching session with me. Carmen Peluso has this to say about practicing for peak performance. For a long time, I've had this belief that learning an instrument is difficult and hard work, or that it has to be, and there's no other way. Only a few weeks after

Starting point is 00:40:25 PPP, I'm starting to feel that change. My everyday practice sessions are now filled with freedom and ease. And another participant shared this. During PPP, I realized a major shift had happened at some point in my musical history. When I was younger, I frequently accessed the flow state and I was fearless. As I progressed, the pressure to play perfectly became quite overwhelming and even though I've been able to improve my performing, I haven't been able to access true flow in years. I'm excited that PPP has allowed me to recognize and unpack this on the journey back to fearlessness. Thank you. So if that sounds like the kind of results you'd like to experience, head to mindoverfinger.com right now and access all the tools that will help you transform your

Starting point is 00:41:20 practice, gain confidence in your process, and start performing at your best today. As always, I'll have all the information related to this episode in the show notes. You can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com. While you're there, you can also find more information about mindful and efficient practice, performance preparation, and how to work with me. And don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to receive your free guide to a productive mindful practice using the metronome. So that's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt! Thank you.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 108 Laurie Niles: Trailblazing with Joy

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