The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 190 Practicing for YOUR Ideal Performance

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

In this episode, we're diving deep into the art of "Practicing for YOUR Ideal Performance."  We explore crucial concepts and ideas surrounding effective practice, tackle common practicing problems, uncover the basic principles of mindful and efficient practice, and you'll get four effective practicing techniques to start implementing today.    Sign up now for the brand-new FREE workshop – Mastering the Stage Download the transcript from this episode HERE   Mind Over Finger Click www.mindoverfinger.com/coaching to book your free consultation with me. Visit MindOverFinger.com for my online courses as well as free resources on peak performance. Connect: https://www.youtube.com/@MindOverFinger 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.

You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 190. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, where we dive into the world of mindful music making, peak performance, and crafting a purpose-driven life and career. I'm your host, violinist, certified performance and life coach for musicians, and your guide to unlocking your full potential, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Welcome, hello everyone. We are here inside the Mind Over Finger Facebook community to talk about practicing for your ideal performance. This is the second in a series of three live Q&A sessions inside the Mind Over Finger Facebook community here. Last time we talked about planning for your ideal performance. Today, as I said, is about practicing for your

ideal performance. And next time we are going to cover how to condition for your ideal performance. And if you don't know what conditioning means, well, please make sure to tune in because that is about to change the game of performance for you. So all of the details for the series and all of the upcoming Q&A sessions here inside of the Mind Over Finger Facebook community are inside of the group. And also you can get all of these details if you subscribe to my newsletter. So if you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening to this on the podcast, I invite you to join the party here on Facebook or join my newsletter by going to mindoverfinger.com and join on the bottom. I send goodies every week via email. So there's a lot of value there.

And also inside of the community here on Facebook, there is tons of value. There are former challenges that are here. The joyful practice challenges are all here. So many live videos with all sorts of resources that you can use to enhance your performance, your practice, your musical journey. So there's a lot going on here inside of the community. So I really hope that we find you here with us. So how it's going to work today. First, I'm going to introduce some concepts and ideas. We're going to talk about practicing problems. Then I'm going to share some basic principles of mindful and efficient practice. I'm going to give you suggestions of fun ways to practice you can try today. I have four exercises you can try. They're so much fun.

I think you're going to love it. So I think there's a lot of great stuff ahead for you. And then we're going to end with a Q&A session here in the community. So if you're here live, you can start putting your questions right away in the comments and you can put them throughout the presentation, of course. And this is going to allow me to give you personalized answers to the questions that you have that relate to you. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you're listening on the podcast, join us here. The replay will be here and you'll get to take in all of this information, all of this insight. We had such a great time last time. So many great questions and a lot of great things to ponder on and explore or discuss. So again, here's my invitation to you.

You can find this at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfinger. And I always have all of these details in the show notes. The links to all of the resources I'm going to mention today are going to be in the show notes. So make sure to consult them if you have any questions. So let's begin. Without further ado, how about this? I have my notes.

I have a warm beverage. Let's all get comfortable and have some fun today. Let's talk practicing problems. I think we all have them. It doesn't matter if you are a professional, if you're an amateur, if you're a student. We all have stumbling blocks, I think, in our practice. That is the human experience. Let's look at some of them today.

Not all of them, but the ones that I think are maybe the most common amongst us. One that I see so often is no plan. No long-term plan, no vision, no purpose, no short-term planning. and we fixed that in the last session. So if you haven't already, go and watch it inside hear the community. This was podcast 187, very easy to find, and it's the best place to start. Another problem that I see is before practicing, we don't take the time to prime. I have a whole podcast episode about this. What I mean by this is that we walk in the practice room and we just jump into action right away. We don't set an intention. We don't get ready physically. We

don't get ready intellectually. We don't get ready emotionally. We just kind of rush in with the head spinning and that can lead to very erratic practicing, unproductive practicing. It's kind of the equivalent of walking in the kitchen. It's a little bit of a mess. You don't really know what food you have, you don't have any recipes, and you just attack without really looking, without planning properly. So that's another problem that I see. Priming is very, very helpful. Another one that I think we all engage in, it doesn't matter what level you're at, is mindless repetitions. You hear this everywhere, correct? So mindless repetitions can really anchor bad habits. So that's something that we want to catch ourselves when we are engaged in this activity.

Another problem is not enough variety. Sometimes, yes, we want to stick to things that work. But if we always repeat the exact same practicing techniques, we practice the same things in the same order, in the same way, this becomes very boring. It's not stimulating enough. It's not creative enough to keep us engaged and keep us excited. So what we want to make sure is that we cover all sorts of ways to practice. Sometimes we do too much or not enough of one thing.

Yes, practicing slowly is great, but there comes a time when you need to start playing things at tempo or same with playing everything fast or just playing run-throughs. So too much of one thing and not enough of the other, that's not beneficial long-term. So do you practice only technique and not keeping enough time for your repertoire? Or do you skip technique work and jump into the repertoire? Do you adhere only to practicing techniques that were taught to you and you always do them in the exact same order in the same way? So that's what I mean by not enough variety.

We want something that keeps us engaged and keeps us intellectually stimulated and something that is fun and more joyful. Then one of the biggest problem that I see is no consistency. And that's a very big one. And I'm going to explain later why consistency is so important. So we've talked about not having a plan, not taking the time to prime, playing mindlessly, practicing mindlessly, not having enough variety, and not being consistent. Solutions to those problems, quote-unquote problems, are simple and not necessarily easy, kind of the same way I was

sharing last time. I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't be overthinking that. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be simple and you don't have to suffer. And simple is actually preferable. but what are these powerful basics that you're missing? Let's take a look at them. And with these simple basics, you can already get a big head start. So what are these basic principles of mindful, efficient practice? One of the first one that I would talk about is having the right quote-unquote attitude and mindset. How do you show up in the practice room? Who are you? Are you curious? Are you open-minded? Are you solution oriented? Are you present? Are you patient? Have you planned? So what mindset are you bringing in the practice room with you? Then we want to make

sure we know what we want to practice, taking the time to prime. As I said, there's a whole episode about this, so I'm not going to spend time on this right now. Then another element, is to aim to listen and experience better. How present are you in what you are hearing? Are you listening to the sound that you're producing? Are you present with your experience and how it feels? So I really believe that you should aim to train yourself to always sound as beautiful as you can, sound as good as you can, and feel as good as you can. This is the goal in the end, right? To play beautifully and have it feel easeful. This starts every minute in the practice room. So we want to have this intention from the get-go. Then let's talk about these fundamentals. And

those things that I'm giving you right now, they're not in any particular order. All of this and symbiosis. It all works together. So the fundamentals, yes, posture, efficiency of movement. Are you paying attention to this? Then we have the three pillars, right? In time, in tune and in tone. How is your tone? How is your rhythm? How is your tempo, your pulse and intonation, right? So we want to have all of these fundamentals in the forefront of our mind as we're practicing. Another building block I think is creativity. I want you to step inward and really grant yourself permission to be creative in your approach to problem solving. I want you to allow yourself to explore new ways of practicing, new techniques, new problem-solving approaches.

This will make your work more stimulating, more fun. And there's so many ways that you can do this. I have tons of tips on this in previous episodes. Check out all of the joyful practice challenges episodes. And I'm going to give you all of these numbers at the end. There's so many drills. that you can come up with ways to gamify the experience of practicing. So all of this is contributing greatly to make practicing in itself something that you enjoy doing. If you remember what I've shared about mastery in the episodes from this past May, one of the things about mastery is to be involved in the process, to be in the game for the process itself. And making practicing something that is creative, that is enjoyable, is one way that we do this.

Now, let's talk about consistency. Oh boy, is this important. Consistency might be one of the most important thing you can start to implement right now if you don't already do it. Why consistency is so important is because this is when all of the information that you're absorbing transfers from the short-term memory to the long-term memory. What happens is as you're consistent day after day, as you literally sleep on it, all of the neural pathways are getting reorganized. So the process is something that we call memory consolidation, right? All of this

new information gets consolidated and these neural pathways are created and they get strengthen. These synaptic connections, they strengthen overnight as the brain reorganizes all of these neural networks. And this is why the knowledge and the skills, they become more stable and easier to retrieve the more you practice it. I think we've all had this experience, right? Where you rush into the practice room the day before a rehearsal or the day before a lesson and you practice and it feels good it feels like yeah I've got this I should be good for tomorrow and you show up the next day and you've forgotten half of this stuff right you've been there I think that's something that we've all experienced as students I think and definitely as teachers we've seen it

happen in front of our eyes week after week and that's the reason the reason is because those activities, those information that came into your brain, all of that information lives in your shorter memory and didn't have time to consolidate overnight. We need space repetition. We need to engage in what is called active recalling. This is a training. So that's why I say to students, six hours is not six hours. And they're always very confused when I say this. But if you work on one piece of your repertoire for one hour every day over six days, you're going to get completely different results than if you spend six hours in the practice room on that piece for one day. And this is because of the myelination process that's happening,

this reorganization of the neural pathways that's happening. So consistency is really your friend. I highly recommend if you're not already doing that, that part of your planning involved in the future to make sure that you revisit the same things often. Maybe spend less time on them each day and revisit them more often. That's one of my most favorite ways of preparing for orchestra programs or opera, chamber music, whichever performance I have, is to plan ahead. So for an orchestra concert, I don't wait until the day before the first rehearsal to look at it. I plan ahead of time. When is the music available? When can I start spending a few minutes on that every day, check the level of difficulty, identify the hard passages, and really spread the work over

time. When I do this, by the first rehearsal, I feel very confident. And side note, I'll share with you one of my favorite techniques, which I call the fantastic five, because I highly believe in the power of five minutes. The amount of progress you can make in five minutes is staggering. So one of the things that I do is, you'll allow me just a sip of water here. As I start to look at the repertoire, I identify what the hardest passages are, the ones that will need revisiting. You know, a little bit like one of your friends who's sick and you need to go spend time with them a little bit every day to check on them. So I take these passages and I put them in one place. I either print it out or I create some PDF document. Technology is so wonderful these days.

and then whenever I have a lost, what I call, you know, those little stolen moments where, let's say, a student doesn't show up or you get done with a task much faster than you thought and you have five minutes to look at one passage, you can fix a shift. You can learn one measure. you can understand something new about that passage. So use the power of these stolen moments. Use the power of the fantastic five. Five minutes can change your life one at a time. So use that trick and think of me. Let's talk about practice methods now. We're going to start with some general ideas and then I'm going to share four fun ones that you could implement starting today. So a good tip is always to start from small to big. I recommend starting with, you know,

that's once you have a general idea of the piece, you understand the structure, the overall direction, you start to have an understanding of what you want to do with the piece musically. This is when you sit down to do the work. You're doing the deep work. You're learning the piece. I recommend starting with small chunks and then building from there to bigger ones, bigger sections, and ultimately to bigger run-throughs. Another practice method is mind over finger. This is pretty much actually more of a mindset or philosophy that I highly recommend you have inside the practice room.

Mind over finger. this means that you aim to understand what you're doing before you jump in the action what are the notes what are the fingerings what are the articulation what is the phrasing what am i trying to do with this what is the difficulty what is a possible solution to help me learn this passage, to help me master this passage. So always sift things through your brain first and understand what it is you're about to try to attempt before you just jump in and start moving your arms. So mind over finger. Let's talk, of course, about slow practice. How can we not talk about slow practice. One thing I like to say about slow practice is that you're moving slowly, yes,

but you should be thinking fast. So that's what I want you to think about when you're thinking slow practice. Play slow, think fast. And that is because slow practice too often is treated as something easy that we can be mindless about. And what I want you to do is turn things around and the slower you play, the more intensely present you are. Pay attention to all of the movements. Pay attention to the shifts. Pay attention to angle of your arms. Pay attention to how every articulation starts to be very present of taking information as things happen one analogy for this could be when you're driving in a car when you're driving fast things go by fast each side of you so what i want you to think is when you're driving slowly you have a chance

to take in the scenery you have a chance to notice elements you can see where you are and you can enjoy it but if you're playing slowly if you're driving slowly but you're looking down at your phone you're not paying attention you're not taking in anything so you're playing slowly and you're thinking fast all right the other thing about slow practice is to be mindful of real life That's another problem that I see sometimes is as people practice slowly, they're not really thinking ahead of how that will map onto a faster tempo. So you have to use a mind over finger and know what articulation do I want here? What does that look like at tempo?

How is it executed at tempo? And you bring this awareness inside of your slow work. because if you're not practicing slowly for what you're trying to execute at a faster tempo, you're not learning the proper movements. You're not learning the right thing and you're going to have to relearn the passage. So you can anchor a lot of bad habits even when you're practicing slowly by not being mindful enough. The last thing I'll say about slow practice is to be patient and not rush to fast tempo.

So really take your time and give your brain the opportunity to seize every single piece of information intellectually and physically as well. Now let's talk about something that I really like, which is slow and fast practice. What I mean by that is that sometimes you'll be practicing some parts slowly and inside of that, you'll be playing things at tempo. This is a very effective method because it requires you to be extremely present and mindful and intentional and strategic. So you will be practicing, let's say a passage with a big shift in the middle. You play all of these notes slowly. Then once you get to the shift, you have awareness of the proper mechanism of the shift, let's say, and then you

execute that shift in tempo. That's one example. Another example is maybe you're playing a fast run and in the string world, we would have string crossings and shifts perhaps. So one thing you do is practice the run at tempo, but pause for all shifts or all string crossings. That's one way to reorganize thing. I know that some other people call that chunking. Whichever name you use for this technique, I think that it's a very effective one to use. So how can you play with your use of tempo inside of your work to really serve the needs that you have in that moment? Let's talk about fast tempo work now. I see a lot of people playing fast but not performing fast. So when you're practicing fast, please know that this is how you learn how to perform at tempo. So you want

to keep that angle in mind. You want to be mindful and of course go back to implementing some drills or practicing slowly if the passage is not working at tempo. But once you can play it at tempo, This is when you practice performing. You're teaching yourself how to perform this. Once again, you can go from smaller chunks to bigger sections to big run-throughs, but know that this is performance work. So as you're practicing in tempo, keep this in mind. And going back to our basic principles, pay attention to your tone. Pay attention to all of the basics, all of the fundamentals. How is your posture? How easeful does it feel? So fast tempo is very important. And when done the right way, it has so many great results for you. Let's

talk about drills. I love drills because they do what I call, it adds desirable difficulty. You've heard about all of this, so I don't need to get into details, but you can practice with different rhythm, different accents. You can transpose in other keys. You can map things onto each other. That's a lot of fun. So another thing also is metronome work. And I'm not going to get into this now because I have an entire guide on metronome work. And there's an episode in the works about this coming up. You can grab the guide at mindoverfinger.com. That's a freebie that you'll get when you join my mailing list. And I have all of the ways that I like to practice with the metronome inside this guide. So metronome work, all of the ways that you can get super

creative and super efficient with metronome work, adding different rhythms, different accents, all of these things. Another practicing technique is to record yourself. Please start recording yourself. I have an episode that teaches you how to do it easily. There's just no excuse nowadays. When I was younger, you had to use a cassette tape deck and the quality wasn't great, but it still was so helpful. So please start recording yourself. The beauty of your recording yourself is that it gives you an honest assessment of your playing, which you don't really have access to while you're playing. Because when we're playing, we're busy performing. We're distracted by the actions that we're doing, which affects how we're listening. We don't have 100% of our

brain capacity on listening because so much of our brain activity is dedicated to the execution. So recording yourself gives you the smear for you to look into, and it shows you where the issues are and what is so that you can come up with solutions to fix it. And then the last one I have for you is finger over mind. I talked about mind over finger. Yes, we want to think before we execute. We want to understand what we're doing. The problem is when we hop on stage, we need to be in our right brain we need to be in a space where we can dedicate ourselves to the musicality to the message that we're trying to transmit if we're still evolving in the left brain capacity where we're analyzing and we're thinking this really puts a filter on everything

and this is when a lot of problems can happen in performance one of my favorite author is Gretchen Rubin, and she has this wonderful saying, and I'm going to quote it here, the opposite of a profound truth is also true. Let me read it again. The opposite of a profound truth is also true. And what she means by this is that life is full of paradoxes. She gives a lot of examples on her website that I'm going to read now, because I think it's important to understand that concept. She says, I can accept myself and expect more of myself. I can take myself less seriously and take myself more seriously. I can push myself to use my time efficiently, yet also make time to play, to wonder, to read at whim, to fail. I can strive to be

emotionally self-sufficient so I can connect better with other people. How beautiful is that one? Come on. I can control and mastery are key elements of happiness and so are novelty and challenge. You see here how these opposite truths come together. This is the human experience. the human experience includes an entire spectrum of emotion. And we need this variety. We need this flexibility to create something that is truly our own. The last thing that she says that I love and really applies to us is, another of the paradox, is think about myself so I can forget myself. And this is where mind over finger becomes finger over mind. For us, that means that we learn the piece so well that we don't have to think about it anymore. But to learn it that well,

we need to think really hard first. So the mind over finger part of the equation is for us to learn efficiently for us to learn deeply and for us to learn effectively and then you get to the other side when you can execute without thinking we fall into finger over mind and when we can do that we get a lot of freedom and this is a lot more fun and when we know something this well we can get out of our own way because we're not stuck in thinking and analyzing this is when we can enter flow. So start with mind over finger so that you can get to finger over mind. Now, here are some of the techniques that I would love for you to try today. I have four of them. I think they're so much fun. I think they work so well. I think you're going to love them. And I

can't wait to hear what you think about them. Number one, I don't have a specific name for it. I'd love to have a title for it. I don't know if there is a title for it out there, but I know that a lot of other people use this technique. It's a great one. If you've not done it before, I highly recommend you try today. So you record, practice, and assess. So before you practice a passage, decide what you want to practice. Decide what you're trying to work on and decide how much time you're going to work on it. And this decision of how much time you're going to work on it is very important. I think maybe you're familiar with Parkinson's law that says a task will expand to fill the time it's allotted. That is very true. So deciding how long

you want to work on it is very important for that reason, because you want to challenge yourself to be efficient. Another reason why it's important is that this allows you to focus on progress, not perfection. If you stick with that passage until it's perfect, you will only cause two things. Either you'll be stuck in there for days, which nobody wants, or you're going to create a lot of frustration and disappointment for yourself. You are just setting yourself up for failure. So what you want to do is decide how long you're going to spend on this passage. As I said, It makes you more efficient. It makes you focus on progress. And also, it allows for what I talked about, which is the spaced repetition effect. You practice a little bit today, give it some time,

come back the next day, and you reconsolidate everything. You strengthen these neural pathways in your brain. So deciding how long you're going to work on a passage, that's a technique that I want you to start applying to everything right now, starting now. So you pick a passage, decide how long you're going to work on it, then record it. And this will show you exactly what is going on. Maybe the problem is not at all what you thought it was. Maybe it sounds better than you think. Maybe it sounds worse than you think. Maybe you thought you were stable and you realize you're not. You need to work on the rhythm. Maybe you thought that the phrasing was effective and you realized that it's not as impactful as it could be, but you can hear the specific spots that you

could favor in the phrasing to make it shine. So recording will direct your work in the direction to make you super effective. And then at the end, record it again and assess your progress and you move on. That's a very important part. Decide how long you're going to spend on it and move on. So that is the first technique. The second one is really fun. I call it mix and match. And basically, it means that you're going to take a passage that you want to work on and you're going to get creative with mapping something else onto it. It could be that you take the notes from this passage and you use the rhythm from a different passage or you use the rhythm from your favorite pop song or Mary Had a Little Lamb or you take the rhythm from that

passage and you use the notes from another piece or you take the rhythm from this piece you use it on the scale or you take the passage from your piece you use a completely different articulation from another piece. And the reason why this is so fun is because this takes us outside of the very specific drill that we always use. For us as violinists, we often use this Galamian rhythm book. So we have a tendency to always go to the same rhythm when we're doing rhythm work. But all of a sudden, if you're trying to practice Schumann's Scherzo with the rhythm from a Beethoven symphony of your choice, then it's a brain puzzle. And that is stimulating. That is fun. One of my favorite time memories from exploring that concept was years ago when I was preparing

for an audition, and I was so sick at the idea of yet again having to practice Schumann to Scherzo. So I thought, you know what? I've practiced this passage every way that I've been taught, or that I can think of, it's time to step outside of the box and come up with something different. So at the time, I was really deep into Kreutzer 9, which is one of my favorite etudes. And if you're a violinist, you know what I'm talking about. And I decided, wouldn't it be fun to take the stroke of Schumann, the dynamics, the accent, the phrasing, and do that with the notes of Kreutzer 9, which I kind of knew by memory. so I could look at the Schumann score, mimic the articulation, mimic the meter. They're not in the

same meter, the same accents, the dynamics, all of it using the note of Kreuzer 9. It was such a mess at the beginning, a real brain puzzle, but it was so fun and it was really hard. And I applied myself to do that for a specific amount of time, which I forget what it was now. But when I came back to playing the Schumann with its original notes, it felt so fresh. It felt sparkling and it had improved because my brain had been stretched outside of the scope of the work that I had previously done. The brain had made new connections with the articulations. It had forced me to notice accents, and really see the dynamics, really notice the phrasing. And it just brought a completely new dimension to this excerpt. So for me, this is one of my favorite techniques,

the mix and match. Take the note of your piece and use the rhythm of another piece, or the articulation, or the dynamics, the phrasing, all of it. And have some fun with that and tell me what you come up with. Now, let's do mind over finger. This one is very easy. Again, take a passage and decide either how much time you want to work on it or how much time you want to repeat it. And between each repetition, I want you to put the instrument down and play the passage mentally. Try to really see all of the information on the page. Try to really experience everything and see if you can see yourself playing it, feel yourself playing it, and then play it with the instrument. And tell me what that does for you. This is a really,

really powerful way to progress a lot faster. And then, as I've discussed earlier, we take mind over finger and we reverse it to finger over mind once you feel comfortable with a passage have some fun with it so pick a passage that you've already mastered something that feels somewhat ready and then i want you to practice it until it feels completely assimilated or well consolidated and memorized by the by preference so take that passage and play it until it feels like it's automatic. You could play it in your sleep. You know it so well. You could walk up and down the stairs playing it, which I don't recommend. Then try to play it while either watching a video. So pick your phone, turn on a YouTube video

or turn on the TV and try to see if you can play the passage while paying attention to what's going on. Another thing you could do is also pick a book or a magazine or an article online and try to see if you can play the passage while reading. So what you want to see is that if you can play this passage while your brain is engaged in a different cerebral task. And if you're able to do that, chances are that that passage at this point is really well anchored for you. And I think that you'll find that the passages that are learned that well, they offer you this opportunity to really push the limits of your musicality, of your technique. You can really let yourself go and you have better chances of experiencing flow and performance when you know passages this well.

Now, this is only an exercise. I am not saying you should practice while watching TV or reading, but this is just a little test that you can try from time to time and see how well you know a passage and how distraction impacts you. This is going to be very telling for you to see where the mistakes happen while distracted. And it's going to inform the subsequent work you do in this passage. Okay, so we're going to revise. But before, I want you to know that all of these techniques, they're simple, they can be fun. They're not hard to implement. And yet, sometimes it feels as though we can. So why is it that we know what to do a lot of times, right? There's a lot of stuff I shared with you today that you've heard before. I don't think anything I shared

today was a groundbreaking idea. People have been playing music for centuries. People have come up with practicing strategies for centuries. So everything I shared today was at best a reminder of things you already know. Yet, why is it so hard to implement it at times? Well, that's because the psychology of practicing. The psychology of performance preparation runs much deeper than this. Why is it that we don't do the things that we know are good for us? There's a multitude of reasons. It can be our past. It can be trauma that we have associated with practicing or performing. It is most definitely what we're thinking. So all of these underlying reasons profoundly impact not only our ability to implement all of these things, but our ability

to once we implement them, really make sure that they work for us. So because of this, I have created a brand new workshop and I'm very excited about it. I hope you join me. It's called Mastering the Stage, absolutely free. It's going to be on April 4th through the 6th at 10 a.m. Central. And you can sign up at tinyurl.com slash mastering the stage. Of course, I'm going to have that link in the show notes for you. And I'm telling you, it's like nothing I've done before, because we're going to go beyond all of the tips and tricks and systems and methods and hacks.

and we're going to go at the bedrock, why all of this is happening and how we can overcome it. You're going to walk away with a completely different perspective on practicing and how to prepare for performance. So we're going to cover what works and what doesn't when it comes to performance preparation at that deep level. We're going to talk about what sabotages your progress in the practice room. We're going to talk about the mindsets that will boost your practice into hyperdrive and so much more so you're going to be able to reach that optimal state when you practice you're going to walk on stage confident you're going to be able to feel free while you perform so i really hope you join me again you can sign up at tinyurl.com slash mastering this

stage and i have that link in the show notes here in the comments in the facebook group and like I said I think you're going to walk away with a completely new perspective on how to approach that work and you're going to start to see how you can really make a difference in your practicing and your performing so let's revise real quick when it comes to practicing I do believe a good place to start is the mindset you bring with yourself in the practice room so what is your intention? What is your plan? I would love for you to aim to listen and experience better. So try to always play as beautifully as you can and feel as good as you can while playing. You want to monitor your fundamentals. You want to get creative in your approach to practicing.

You want to be consistent. And remember, mind over finger in your approach and finger over mind in your execution. You prepare so well with so much intention that once you're on stage, you can completely let go. And then you try at home these four exercises. You record, practice, and assess. You mix and match. You apply mind over finger by playing in your head between each repetition. And then you apply finger over mind by integrating a passage and then playing it while distracted. And now I have a list here of supporting podcasts that you can listen to if you're interested in experimenting with all of these other creative ways of practicing. I'm going to have that list here in the comments of this video. If you're listening to the podcast, of course, you know this

now. Show notes, same on YouTube. So I love the Joyful Practice Challenge podcast episodes and videos. Here in the community, catch all of the replays. I have all of these live interviews and workshops with musicians like James Ennis, Simon Fisher, Tessa Lark, Billy Hunter, and so many others. All of these joyful practice challenges live here in the Facebook community. And I have two podcast episodes where we cover all of these fun practice techniques. So I have episode 72 of the Joyful Practice Challenge and episode 128 of More Joyful Practice. In episode 124, I have the three-note exercise that was recommended by Joe Alessi. In episode 138 is all about priming. I talked to you about how to practice, how to prepare for practice rather. In episode 139,

I tell you how to warm up, how you can build a warm-up regimen that works for you. So how you come up with a warm-up regimen that works for you. In episode 140, I show you how you can build the formula for your own practice session. In episode 141, I talk about the practice room superpower of mind over finger. In episode 142, we talk about patience, which is one of the most important quality you can have in a practice session. In episode 147, I talk about the magic of micro rests. In 149 is about the delightful 10. So this is how to start practicing when you don't feel like it. In episode 161 is how to master a scary passage for performance. Finally, your no excuse recording technique is in episode 162. So these are all great resources to bring

more mindfulness, more creativity, more joy, more results in your practice. So if you're here inside the Facebook community, this is when we're going to start the Q&A session. Put your questions in here. If you're listening to this on the podcast or you're watching on YouTube, this is where we're going to say goodbye. I hope that this will help bring mindfulness, fun joy efficiency in your practice i hope that you share with me what resonated with you the most what worked well or maybe some other ideas that you have some practicing approaches that work really well for you and that you'd like to share with us and don't forget to sign up for the free workshop mastering the stage and until next time i send you much love and i say a bientot

Thank you.