The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 161 How to Master a Scary Passage for Performance

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

What is your current strategy to deeply, fully master a scary passage performance?  Is it simply to practice it more? In this episode, I present you a better option that will allow you to not only learn it better but also learn it faster and facilitate flow in your performance!   DOWNLOAD THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE HERE   Join my mailing list HERE and become a Mind Over Finger VIP member!   As a VIP member, you will you receive my free guide to a highly productive practice, a transcript of each new podcast episode delivered to your inbox every week, and all the insider information about my coaching programs, including VIP prices on most of them.  March bonus: get 10$ off the Performance Anxiety Solution when you join the mailing list HERE!   Do you have specific questions for me or my guests you would like answered on the podcast? Share them with me HERE!   DOWNLOAD THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE HERE   Don't wait and sign up for my brand new workshop – THE PERFORMANCE ANXIETY SOLUTION! Find all the info at www.performanceanxietysolution.com       Mind Over Finger Visit MindOverFinger.com for resources on mindful practice and information on how to work with me. Sign up for my newsletter to receive your free guide to a highly productive mindful practice and to get the transcripts of the Mind Over Finger Podcast episodes delivered to your inbox. Join the Join the Mind Over Finger Community  for access to my live videos and to exchange with a community of like-minded musicians. www.mindoverfinger.com https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfinger https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme:  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson. A HUGE thank you to my fantastic producer, Bella Kelly, who makes this podcast as pleasant to listen to as possible for you!

You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 161. 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. Renée-Paul Gauthier. Hi, everyone. I hope you're having a fantastic day as you're tuning in. Things are great here. If you've caught last week's episode, I'm so excited to have launched my brand new workshop, The Performance Anxiety Solution. This is going to be perfect for you if you feel like you're still

not experiencing the type of performance you want, but you've looked at everything, You've read everything you could. You've tried everything you heard about. But it always feels like there's one key ingredient missing for you to really get a hold of how you can control your performance anxiety. Well, there's a solution and I'm sharing it with you. Join me live on April 1st and 2nd for the Performance Anxiety Solution Workshop by going to mindoverfinger.com right now. Together, we're going to analyze your past patterns and understand what is going on. We're going to set your powerful dream vision for future performances. I'm going to give you clear strategies to permanently transform your experience with performance anxiety. and you're going to walk away with a step-by-step plan to full performance preparation. It's going to be amazing.

You have to be there. So go to mindoverfinger.com right now to join. And if you're not already on my mailing list, now is the best time to join. You're not only going to receive my free guide to a highly productive practice, But you're also going to get a transcript of each podcast episode delivered to your inbox every week. And you're going to get all the insider information about my coaching programs, including VIP prices on most of them. And if you join now, you get 10% of the Performance Anxiety Solution. So don't wait.

Again, all of this is at mindoverfinger.com. And I'm going to have that link for you in the show notes. Okay, let's dive into today's topic. In March, on the podcast, with the workshop coming up, you've guessed it, we're going to discuss performance anxiety. I'm going to share a lot of applicable tips for you that I think could help infuse a little bit more confidence in your everyday practice and more success and positive results in your performance preparation. And I'm going to start today with a tip that is very concrete, something you can start to apply today and experiment with. It's one of my favorite techniques. It works really well for me, and I share it with my Music Mastery Experience participants, my clients, and of course, my violin students. And it's a concept that I call micro-planning. Now, in a nutshell, what micro planning is, the name describes it well, is you plan everything in the most minute detail.

I'll explain what that is first, and then I'll tell you why that works. Here's how I use it and how I teach it. What we want to do is, let's say you're practicing a piece. There's a passage that you find particularly tricky and you feel maybe a little bit insecure about. That's going to be a perfect candidate for micro planning. So you take that passage, and I think it's better if it's not too long, maybe a phrase or two, three max.

And you're going to plan in great details every single aspect of that phrase. You're going to make a lot of decisions. You start with the musical idea that you have, how you want that passage to sound, and you're going to experiment and find sort of the roadmap of how to execute it so it sounds exactly like what you envisioned. The exact choreography. And that's how it feels like to me once I've practiced it for a while. A choreography. So you start with the musical intention and then you get the plan. The bowings, the fingerings, the articulations, the sound colors you want, the dynamics, the consonances on your attacks. If you're a string player, make a very precise

bow distribution plan. Know exactly how much bow you're going to use on each note. Decide the amount of pressure you're going to use. Decide where you're going to be at all times. Are you going to be near the bridge? Are you going to be near the fingerboard? All of this. So a precise plan of your bow distribution, your bow pressure, and your bow placement. If you're a wind player, you're going to do the equivalent with your airflow plan. How much air, when, and how. You're also going to make decisions about vibrato. To vibrate or not to vibrate? How much are you going to vibrate? How fast? How wide? Are you going to start at the beginning of the note or are you going to phase it in or out. Any aspect you can plan for, do it. Based, one more time, on your

interpretational choices. And there's also going to be technical considerations. Some passages are very hard. There might be a difficult shift or an extended technique. You want to know exactly what the mechanisms are going to be for you to be able to play this really well. One way you can look at it is that if you were trying to teach a student exactly how to play a passage the way you want it, but you could not do it in person and you could not play it for them, you have to either write it down for them or say it out loud using words. What would you say so they know exactly how to play this? How would you mark the score? Now, one thing about markings. I think markings in the score can be really useful but this type of work is a little bit too detailed for a

performance part if you're playing with the music. So I would recommend to either make a photocopy if you're using paper or create a new layer on your four score app so you can plan and mark your score and practice with the markings but you don't have those in the part for the performance. It's a little bit too stimulating visually. So once you've made preliminary decisions, and I say preliminary because as you keep practicing the piece, as you start to know it more and more, your ideas will change. You're going to keep on tweaking the plan as you go. That is totally normal. So once you've made the preliminary decisions, practice the plan. And I recommend practicing it until it feels really anchored and comfortable and really natural. You want it to feel like a dance,

a dance that feels really good and that you're not going to forget because first of all, it works, it feels good, and it has been assimilated. So again, pick a very short passage, maybe a phrase or two. You create your micro plan by making decisions about every single aspect of interpretation or execution you can think of that's going to be helpful for you to play it successfully. And then you practice your plan until it feels like second nature. You can do this for several passages in the piece, but you can see that it's not possible to have this kind of plan for an entire piece. I mean, you can try it, but I think it just would take too long. Also, I don't think it's necessary because you probably don't need to go that deep into details for an entire piece.

But when you do it, even for one or two passages, it will positively impact the rest of the piece. And I think that's a good segue into the next thing I want to talk about, which is why it works. Microplanning is really efficient and potent in two ways. Well, more than two, but there are two main ways that are especially relevant for performance. First, it helps you learn a passage really, really deeply because as you devise your plan, you analyze the passage in all sorts of ways. You scrutinize it. You look at it from every angle possible. You experiment. You try many things. So you learn it intellectually, mentally, really well. Then as you practice your plan, your micro plan with all of the presence and intentionality that this brings to the work

you very efficiently learn how to successfully execute it you learn the passage deeply at the physical level and as you get comfortable with the plan you're able to get more and more musically expressive that my friend is going to give you a lot of freedom in the performance and you're going to be like, what, Renee, you just told me to create the most detailed and precise plan in the world and practice it until I'm on automatic pilot. And now you're telling me I'm going to experience freedom. And to that, I say, absolutely. You're going to experience freedom because the point of the micro plan is not for you to think about it and execute the plan in performance. putting this much effort into figuring out the exact best way to execute a passage technically

and musically and then practice it until its second nature is actually going to make you feel so comfortable with the passage that in the moment you're going to be able to forget about the plan completely and let the music flow out of you by the performance you might feel so in control of that passage that you might be able to follow your inspiration on the spot and change everything. This is important. The goal of the micro plan is not to execute the plan in concert at all. It's the opposite, actually. You use the micro plan as a way to learn a passage really well. From having a really well-managed and practiced phrase, you're able to reach a level of comfort where you completely let go of the plan and do something different in performance,

if you want to. I'll say it again. The goal of the micro plan is not to execute the micro plan perfectly in performance. The micro plan is a tool to facilitate flow in performance. okay the other thing that it does is that it gives you a point of rally in case of performance anxiety so ideally in performance we would be in a state of flow we kind of just let go we know the repertoire so well that we can just let our expressivity speak that's the ideal outcome but sometimes and a lot of times our mind gets overactive and when that happens falling back onto our micro plan can be one of the best ways to actually get back to flow. I know it sounds counterintuitive to get back to flow from a place of executing a super detailed and precise plan,

but bear with me. You've been there before. Let's say you have a difficult passage coming up in performance. And again, I don't recommend doing micro planning for an entire piece. I keep it for particularly difficult, problematic passages. So we all have those passages. And one of those approaches in the performance, sometimes our mind starts to play tricks on us. It starts to doubt that we can execute it, that we can play it well. Fear shows up. When that happens, we need to give our mind a bone, something to chew on.

That's something that Tim Galloway talks about in the inner game of tennis and the inner game of golf. So in performance, there is a part of us that is a control freak, that wants to run the show, that wants everything to be perfect. He calls that self-one. And self-one is critical and judgmental and can be quick to freak out. Self-one is a bit of a worry wart. So we want to give self-one something to do. that overactive mind we give it something to do so our true self or what Tim Galway refers to as self too can do what it knows to do self too is the subconscious part of us that can play at its

best when it's well prepared and left alone so when we start to unnecessarily worry and clutter our mind with useless inner chatter. Giving self one something to do allows self two to come forward. Having this micro plan brings you back in your body. It quiets your mind because instead of focusing on these irrational thoughts that are spewing in your head, you're channeling your mental effort on something concrete. You're focusing on executing a plan that you know really well and feel comfortable with. It acts in many ways like the process cues that Don Green talks about because you're connected to the present. You're connected to your body. You're not worried about what your arms are doing. You're present with what your arms are doing or your mouth

or your head. You're executing movements that you've rehearsed. And through this mind-body connection, you can ease back into a feeling of control and of knowing rather than the feeling of worry and being out of control. So when you're in the concert or the audition, the masterclass, any performance, and you have an overload of emotions or thoughts or an over-desire to play well. You know, when you want to play so well and be so expressive, and you want to impress so bad that you get all tense and your brain and body go in overdrive. You've been there, right? The micro plan helps you fall back onto something tangible so you can let go and release all that unnecessary tension and mental clutter. This awareness into the present moment,

this narrowing of the focus from a large pool of thoughts that are out of your control to something specific and familiar can ease you back in a state of flow. Okay, so let's review real quick and try it this week. When you have a difficult passage, you can remove uncertainty and fear from the equation by creating a super precise plan to execute that passage and you tweak it and you practice it until it's deeply anchored in your mind and fingers. Choose a passage that you would like to feel more comfortable with, preferably something short. I would say one or two phrases. Listen to it and play through it many times and develop your musical idea, how you want to interpret that passage. From your musical intention, experiment and make decisions on

every technical aspect you can control in order to execute your chosen phrasing for that passage to your satisfaction. Practice your micro plan until it feels very natural and organic, until it sounds the way you want musically, and until it feels very comfortable physically. and once you feel very comfortable with your micro plan and you know it's there for you to fall back on anytime you need in performance, start to experiment outside of the boundaries of your plan and be more spontaneous with your interpretation of the passage. And use these questions to guide your reflection as you're trying to come up with your plan. Start with looking at the whole passage. How do I want this passage to sound like? What do I want to say with

this phrase? What is the musical direction in this passage? What character am I trying to infuse in the passage? What colors do I want to have in my sound? And then examine the role of each note and how to make it sound exactly how you want, looking at all the technical parameters you can use to have the dynamic shape, color, articulation, or sound you envision for that note within the phrase. And as I said earlier, doing this type of in-depth work for one passage will impact the rest of the piece. It's going to bring your awareness to a completely different level and you're going to start to find yourself applying all of those things directly on command as you hear them in your mind. It's a lot of fun. So I hope this is helpful. This is a technique that I cover

extensively in my group coaching program, the Music Mastery Experience. In the trainings, I show you in details how to do this, things you can try, how to come up with your plan. But I think you have a great idea of how to get started today. And as I said, it's a very effective tool to help you feel more confident about a difficult passage and to help you perform it with ease in concert. But that's only a very small part of the preparation process that can help you perform at your best and mitigate stress. Getting leverage over your performance anxiety is so much more than this. And if you're serious about getting a hold of your performance anxiety, you need more than just an accumulation of techniques and tricks

and ways to practice. You need a complete mindset shift. And if you've been looking for a solution to your performance anxiety, if you've been looking for a way to start performing the way you want to, that's what I have waiting for you in my brand new workshop, The Performance Anxiety Solution. As I shared with you at the beginning of the episode, in this powerful workshop, I'm going to give you the tools to create this powerful mindset shift for yourself and to start experiencing the kind of performances you've always dreamed of. We meet live on April 1st and 2nd from 10 to 11 30 a.m. and I'm going to have a whole runway to the workshop so don't wait to register. Go to mindoverfinger.com right now. And I can't wait to meet you and share the solution to performance

anxiety with you. So this is what I have for you this week. Experiment with micro planning and reach out to me via email on my website or in my DM on social media and let me know how that worked for you. Don't be shy. I'm very approachable and I will reply to all of your messages. Much love going your way and à bientôt! 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! Thanks for watching!