The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 142 Practice Room Superpower: Patience

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Why "Slow Is Fast and Fast Is Slow" and how "Patience Leads Fastest to Your Goal." Reflection: How am I feeling right now? What am I experiencing in my body? Which emotion is powering my practice right now?   >> DOWNLOAD THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE HERE

You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 142. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, optimal performance, and building a purposeful life and fulfilling career. I'm your host, violinist and certified performance and life coach for musicians, Dr. René-Paul Gautier. Hi, everyone. I hope this episode finds you doing great. This month on the Mind Over Finger podcast, I'm talking about practice room superpowers. And I'm going to be covering those and much, much more in my free fall workshop on Friday, October 14th at 10am Central. So make sure you head over to mindoverfinger.com to register. You're going to hear about all sorts

of ways to make your practice and your performance preparation more efficient and enjoyable. When you make it live, you get the opportunity to ask me any question you have. But I understand we all have really busy schedules. So by registering, you also guarantee that you'll get a link to the replay. So either way, whether I see you live or you get the replay, make sure to sign up at mindoverfinger.com. So in the last episode, I discussed the important principle of mind over finger, or in other words, the idea of alignment over unnecessary effort. Today we continue with the one ingredient that is so crucial to progress, but is so often missing in the practice room, and that is patience. Anyone who's ever worked with me, they know I love a good

analogy. I like to compare inefficient and impatient practice with rushing out the door. You know how things are when we get ready in the rush. We start dropping things. We spill. We knock things down. We forget important steps in our morning routine. We might end up making it out of the house on time, but we forget stuff at home. We've got our sweater backwards. Our hair looks terrible. We forgot there's no gas in the car. You get the picture. And that's how it feels sometimes in performance if our practice was not as efficient as it could have been and it was rushed. We don't feel settled. We don't feel in control and we might sound unpolished and it's definitely not as much fun. One of my favorite quotes is from the book, The Seven Habits of

Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And he says, the price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow. There is no shortcut. Let me read that one again, because it's very important. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow, there is no shortcut. So make no mistake about it, my friends. The price must and will be paid sooner or later. Because shortcuts are, in fact, expensive, time-wasting dead ends. What we don't practice well today, we're going to have to practice again and again and again until we either master it through sheer effort and a great deal of time, or until we realize that rushing, that process does not work. The quote-unquote shortcut usually leads us nowhere.

And we realize that we have to go back to the drawing board and implement patient and intelligent practice methods, right? Let's not forget mind over finger. So we can either make the effort to improve our work ethic and reap greater success, whatever success means to you, or pursue in our old ineffective methods and learn to accept our usual results. Don't get me wrong. I realize that life is a series of deadlines and that we have to meet them. And trusting in the process and waiting for progress to show can be so hard at times. But what I can tell you is that it's possible to find a balance in reaching short and long-term goals and to adopt practicing habits that serve both purposes. First, we want to plan well, and I've got episodes that can help you with

that. Check out episodes 136 through 140. And second, we want to work methodically and patiently. By learning well in the first place, we learn forever. We minimize the time spent working on mistakes and poor technique, and we maximize our sweat equity, and we save a great deal of time. The problem with that is that at first, things seem to go slowly. So we think that there's no progress and we try to rush things. But here's what I always say. Slow is fast and fast is slow. Patience leads fastest to your goals.

When you follow the process with patience, your efforts will yield results. But if you try to rush or force progress, you sabotage your own progress. Remember that myelination process from episode 141. It can happen quickly, but it does take some time. We need the right kind of repetitions spread over time. That's the concept of spaced repetitions. And how long it takes depends on the skills we already have and the degree of difficulty of what we're trying to learn. so if you already have a lot of the fundamental elements that would allow you to play a passage

for example you can learn it in a few minutes and that's great but if you're learning a very difficult passage that has a lot of techniques you don't master yet you're not just learning that passage you're creating a whole new set of neural connections and that happens over time When we try to rush the process, we pick up a lot of bad habits and a whole lot of negative thoughts and emotions. So what we want to do is get better at gauging how long it would take us to learn something or acquire a new skill and give those synapses and those neural circuits the best conditions to get formed properly.

We also tend to get frustrated when we feel like we're in a plateau. We get fooled by the obvious absence of progress, but that's not quite what's happening. Oftentimes, that's the brewing process for the skill we're working on. So what we need to do is trust the process and stick with our discipline. But not mindlessly, of course, always mindful, always mind over finger. Again, we want the right kind of work done with patience over the right amount of time. And my favorite analogy for this is a story from The Three Little Pigs, with the third little pig building himself a house of bricks.

It took him a long time to build it, and it was a very strong house. We want to make haste slowly. And when we do that, it can feel like we initially spent quite a lot of time on developing something new. But it's going to bring it to a high level of mastery in a way that will anchor it permanently. You get solid results and you're done with it instead of struggling with the same difficulty for months. An efficient practice session requires a great deal of thoughtful patience. patience to listen well to pause in the presence of a problem to ask the right questions to analyze it to think of ways to fix it and finally to work on it methodically and thoroughly

another thing i like to say is that we fight the bad peas with the good peas we prevent poor practice and promote proper practice with precise planning a purposeful process and plenty of patience. We're in the business of building brick houses, my friends. Now there's one more thing I want to mention before I let you go. Superpowers are awesome, sure, but we sometimes see how they can cause a superhero's downfall. So don't do that. Don't use patience against yourself. Being patient doesn't mean to give yourself way too much time and assume everything's going to take a long time. Don't use that as an excuse to be nonchalant in the practice room. In French, we say, il faut faire la part des choses. We have to find the right balance. So don't rush the

process, but also don't stall it. Challenge yourself to move forward at a great pace, but don't get frustrated and rigid and tempted to cut corners. It's that Goldilocks factor. You want to be in that space where it's not too slow, it's not too fast, it's just right. And sometimes that's going to mean being on the edge of discomfort and that's okay. You know you're rushing the process when you feel urgency and frustration. And you know you're being nonchalant when your practice is mindless and it feels mechanical. So try that this week. Be mindful.

Check in with yourself and see if you're operating in that sweet space of giving yourself enough time, but not too much time. Look at whatever you're practicing. Notice what's involved. Is this something that's already within the scope of your abilities? If so, what are some ways you could work on it to solidly learn it from the get-go? If not, what additional skills do you need to acquire so you can learn that passage? What's your short and long-term strategy for this passage?

Do you need to include new drills or exercises in your routine to help with that? And plan to revisit the passage often and build it one brick at a time patiently. Spaced repetition is your friend. And often check in with yourself. keep tuning into your body and your emotions as you're practicing. Later this season, I'm going to bring you all sorts of tools to understand and process your emotions. But you don't have to wait for all that great content to get started and get clarity. Just pay attention to how you're feeling. What feeling is driving your practice right now? Are you feeling driven and interested? Or are you

feeling powered by a sense of urgency, of impatience, of frustration that things aren't happening quickly enough? Do you have thoughts racing in your mind? Do you feel tension in your body? If you feel any of those or a combination of those things, pause. Put your right hand on your heart. Take three deep breaths and try to understand where the urgency is coming from. Go back to your purpose, to your long-term goal, and notice how using patience now is the best way to get there. Be mindful in your approach. Be dedicated to your process and get back to the business of building a house of bricks with a bucket full of patients next to you. Remember, slow is fast. And ponder on those questions this week as you practice. How am I feeling right now?

What am I experiencing in my body? Which emotion is powering my practice right now? And by simply noticing your answers to these questions, you are going to get so much insight and I can pretty much guarantee it get back to a place where you're going to be able to practice much more efficiently. So think about it and let me know what insight it brings to you. This is what I have for you today. Remember, we're in the business of building brick houses. Slow is fast and patience is a superpower in the practice room. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Mind Over Finger podcast.

If this content was helpful for you, please share with everyone you think could benefit from it. Take a screenshot, share on social media and tag me. I'm Mind Over Finger everywhere. So reach out, send me a DM and let me know how this content helped you. let's keep the conversation going as always i 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 where you can also find more free resources on efficient practice and performance preparation links to sign up to my free workshops and information on how to work with me don't

forget to sign up for my newsletter to receive your free guide to a productive mindful practice transcripts from the mind over finger podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week and more also join the mind over finger facebook community my private group for access to my live videos and to exchange with a community of like-minded musicians so make sure you're subscribed to the podcast and if you have specific questions for me or my guests that you would like answered in an episode, share them with me using the link in the show notes or send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. That's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.