The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 237 Shift Your Results - The Simple Tool That Transforms Your Practice and Performance

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast. This is episode 237, the ninth episode of your Reset and Rise summer series. Today, we're building on the mindset work we did in the last episode with a clear, practical framework to help you change your results, whether in the practice room, on stage, or anywhere in life. 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

Starting point is 00:00:45 Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Hello there and welcome back to your Reset and Rise summer series. I'm so glad you're here. This episode is part of a special 10-episode journey I created just for you this summer to help you reignite your spark, rethink your practice, and show up with more clarity, confidence, and joy. Each episode builds on the last, so if you're just joining us, feel free to hop back to episode 229 and catch up. The series follows a clear arc. We start with reigniting your joy and connection to music. Then we move into mindset tools like alignment, patience, and self-compassion to bring more ease and clarity to your work. After that, we clear away hidden obstacles. And finally, we wrap up with powerful tools to help

Starting point is 00:01:41 you manage your mind and build real momentum. And if you're ready to go even deeper, check out my course, Practicing for Peak Performance. It's your full blueprint for performance success. And when you join this summer, you're going to get my Performance Anxiety Solution course for free. All the details are at mindoverfinger.com and the link is in the show notes. All right, ready to reset and rise? Let's dive in. Hi, everyone. I hope you're feeling amazing as you're tuning in. Today, we continue our exploration of the self-coaching model, and we're going to look at how to get different results in the practice room, on stage, and in our lives. The self-coaching model, or the model as we simply

Starting point is 00:02:38 refer to it, is based on cognitive behavioral theory and it helps us observe our mind and understand how our brain processes the world around us. The basic premise is that there are circumstances in the world, those are the things that we cannot control, and those are neutral until our brain offers us thoughts about those circumstances. Those thoughts create our feelings, then our feelings fuel all our actions, and those actions create the results we have in our life. Those five elements are what our lives are made of, and having this way to organize them and observe how they interact and impact each other gives us a powerful understanding as to why we feel the way we feel. We do the things we do and get the results we get. It helps us get the answers

Starting point is 00:03:30 we've been looking for. But what's crazy is that we're never taught this stuff or rarely. We're never taught to observe what we think or to question what we think when we don't feel great or we're not getting the results we want. People throw lots of tips and tricks and advice at us. 10 ways to do X, Y, Z, try this, try that, do this, do that. And don't get me wrong. We do need that information. We do need to learn methods and systems, and we do need tips and tricks and hacks. I have personally done a lot of that on this podcast for the past four and a half seasons, and I hope all of it was helpful for you. But it only goes so far because without real understanding, we can't really create a profound transformation. And that's what I hope I can help

Starting point is 00:04:25 with for those of you who are looking for that. We can't permanently solve a problem or create different results in our life with actions alone. It doesn't last. It's exhausting. And it causes lots of resistance. Think about your new year's resolution or how you feel at the beginning of a orchestra season. This year, everything's going to be different. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. That's going to be awesome. Have you ever said those words before? At first, there's lots of momentum to our actions because we're really motivated and we have a lot of hope. But when the stumbling blocks show up, and they always do, we lose steam because willpower is draining, and it's not something we can sustain. At the root of all of this are our thoughts.

Starting point is 00:05:18 And until we understand which thoughts have been running our lives, we're mostly going to keep getting the same results. As I said in the last episode, we're going to go deeper on the Mind Over Finger podcast in the months to come. My favorite quote is by Viktor Frankl, between stimulus and response there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and freedom so when we use the deep practice model in my online course practicing for peak performance and my online coaching program the music mastery experience we operate in what i call the space of maximal response every tool i create is to allow us to have a lot of intentionality so that we respond to all the stimuli in our life in a way that is

Starting point is 00:06:10 aligned with our values, who we are, and who we want to be. The self-coaching model allows us to operate more in that space of maximal response because it shows us our mind. This type of work is called causal coaching because we go back to the real cause of the issues, which is the way we think, the thoughts we keep thinking by default without questioning them. When we observe those thoughts, when we question them, when we process our emotions and we become very intentional about those thoughts and feelings we want to nurture in our lives, magic happens. So how do we make this magic happen, you ask me? Well, let's talk about it. The first thing we do before we do anything else is meet ourselves where we are and understand our current model. I explain how to do this in

Starting point is 00:07:08 episode 153, but I will do a quick overview here again. It never hurts. Believe me. And for you, I've created a companion worksheet with all the information you need. You can find this by going to mindoverfinger.com slash resources. In a nutshell, put a few minutes aside to do what we call a thought download. You simply write down anything that's on your mind. You empty your brain on the paper. What you're thinking, how you're feeling, maybe you're upset about a result, maybe you're wondering why you do certain things. Simply let the words flow on the paper as they come to you. If typing is easier for you, you can also do that, but personally I prefer pen to paper. then go back and look at what you wrote and pick out one thing you would like to investigate

Starting point is 00:07:59 it could be any of the five elements of the model a circumstance a thought a feeling some actions you're taking or a result you're getting anything that sticks out that you would like to explore and understand better there's no wrong choice possible to pick when doing a model but I often pick the one that's giving me the strongest emotion or the thought that seems to be coming back again and again in different ways throughout the thought download. Once you know what you want clarity on, you put it in the model. On your piece of paper, you write the letters CTFAR on the left side. You put the element you've decided to unpack in the proper line. You make sure you clearly establish the circumstance, then you fill the rest of the model in any order. Doing this alone

Starting point is 00:08:52 will give you invaluable insight. And sure, I'm going to show you how you can use this as a departing point to intentionally create what you want. But by looking at what is, you're already accomplishing a lot. So after we see what's going on in our brain with that current model, we can start to direct it intentionally towards the things we want to think, feel, do, or the results we want to get. We do this by creating what we call an intentional model. And to illustrate that, I'm going to use an example from my own life. Something that happened when I was around 14. And looking back now, I realized this was the first time I ever self-coached without even knowing what I was doing. I was backstage before the provincial round of the Canadian Music

Starting point is 00:09:48 Competition, which is a competition that happens every year all around Canada. I was about to go on stage and I don't remember everything. I was playing for the round, but I do remember I was in the play Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Camille Saint-Saëns. And I was so nervous. I was really prepared because my teacher and my mom made sure of that. I had performed the repertoire many times, so my fear was not coming from a lack of preparation. But I remember thinking that I was afraid to mess up and embarrass myself. And I was just having the worse of times, wondering why I was doing all of this and why I was putting myself through all of that. I was just a ball of stress. My hands were cold. I felt very tense physically. My heart was

Starting point is 00:10:38 racing. You know how it is. But at some point, and I don't remember why it happened exactly, I just clearly saw my thinking and how it was that thought, I'm afraid to mess up and embarrass myself, that was making me freak out. And it struck me how silly it was to just focus on that and get so nervous by spinning that thought over and over in my mind. I'm afraid to mess up and embarrass myself. I might mess up and embarrass myself. The absurdity of it almost made me laugh. and I remember thinking and telling myself, but Renee, you're so ready. Of course, it's possible that you're going to mess up, but you're not going to embarrass yourself because you're really ready. The only thing making things worse for you is when you think that. So just go out there and do what

Starting point is 00:11:37 you know. Go out there and do what you know. And I understood, really understood in a way that I've never had before. That the only way I could play poorly was if I continued to make myself freak out with my own thoughts. And that all I had to do was to trust my preparation. And this new thought just lifted that weight off my shoulders. So all of this thinking process only took about a minute. But I'm telling you, all of my stress, or at least most of it, because there's always going to be a little bit of excitement when we perform, right? But all of that unnecessary stress just melted and the performance ended up going really well. This is how we can completely change our state. How you can change how you're feeling in one instant with just one thought that you believe.

Starting point is 00:12:37 And in that example, by believing this one thought, it completely changed how I felt, how I played, and the results I got. Let me put this in the context of the model so you can see even better. Let's start with the unintentional model, the one that was created with the thoughts that just came to me without me questioning them. The circumstance, let's remember circumstances are always factual and measurable. So the circumstance is, I'm backstage about to play introduction in Rondo Capriccioso. My thought is, I might mess up and embarrass myself. That made me feel scared. So scared goes in the F line. Because I was scared, in my A line, I would write that. Thoughts were spiraling. My heart was racing. I was tensing my body.

Starting point is 00:13:31 and my hands were cold from the blood rushing to help my poor little heart. Now, the R-line of this model, had I had the opportunity to find out, would most likely have been that I would not have played as well as I could have. I might have messed up and embarrassed myself. But thankfully, I was able to create an intentional model for myself on the spot. I still don't know how I did that. And here's how that one would look like. So the circumstance is always the same between the unintentional or current model and the

Starting point is 00:14:04 intentional model. I'm backstage about to play Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. My thought was, you can trust your preparation. That thought made me feel empowered. And from feeling empowered, I played in a way that did justice to my preparation and I played well. So this is how we create an intentional model. From your unintentional model or your current model, identify what you would like to be different and put it in a new model using the same

Starting point is 00:14:43 circumstance. Ask yourself, do I like this thought I'm having? Is it serving me? How do I want to feel? What would I need to think and believe to feel this way? What are the things I want to do? How would I need to feel to do them? What result do I want to create in my life? What do I need to do, feel, and think to create this? And trust me, once you see it on paper, it will feel possible for you. That said, it's also a process. Letting go of a thought or adopting a new one can go really quickly sometimes, but it's not always instant and it often requires practice. And it's really important to choose thoughts you can believe. False positive thinking is not at all what I'm proposing here. If you're not convinced, if you don't believe the thought,

Starting point is 00:15:46 it will create actually more resistance because you cannot fool yourself, even if you try your best. Now, there's already enough information in this episode, so I will stop here. But I will have an episode on believing your thoughts in the new year. So don't worry if you have some questions about that. So for now, start to play around with these intentional models and try them on for size. Let me give you one more example and I'm going to go back with the model about procrastinating from the previous episode. So if you notice that you're procrastinating and you're aware that self-coaching exists and that a model could help you, here's the model you could build. I'll remind you that the circumstance is that you scheduled time to

Starting point is 00:16:34 practice X piece. Let's make that even more specific for the C line. The more specific, the better almost always. Let's say you had scheduled one hour to practice X piece and your thought is there's too much to do, which makes you feel overwhelmed. And because you're human and feeling overwhelmed is not something that is very enjoyable, you try to avoid that feeling by procrastinating, which creates the result of your work not getting done and piling up. Now, let's say that looking at this model, you find solace in the fact that it makes so much sense. You're able to feel a lot of self-compassion for yourself, but you would still very much

Starting point is 00:17:22 like to figure out a way to practice and get some of that work done. So let's see what an intentional model could look like. When you look at this thought that there's too much to do and the model that comes with that. It's easy to see that this thought is not serving you. So you might as well be looking for a different thought, right? But there is actually so much to do that changing it to something like I can do it might not resonate with you. I know that this type of positive quote-unquote thinking does not work for me. To me, it feels impossible to go from there's too much to do to I can do it all. It feels fake. If it doesn't feel true and doable, you're not going to believe it, so it's

Starting point is 00:18:10 not going to work. So let's look for something a little lower on the ladder, something you can grasp and believe, and an alternative that resonates as also true. So you can't get everything done, but I think it's fair to say that you could believe that you could get some things done, and that those few things getting done would make you feel so much better. So a thought that you could believe might be, I can get many things done in one hour. Now, when you think that, how do you feel? I'll venture a guess and say that when you think you can get some

Starting point is 00:18:52 or many things done in one hour, you'll feel more encouraged. and from feeling encouraged, you're more likely to pick up your instrument and start practicing. And by taking those actions, you will create the result that will confirm your thought. You will get some things done. Does that make sense? Can you see how this slight shift in perspective transforms your state, how you feel, how you act, and the results you get? that's the power of self-coaching and that's the power of the model now there are a few important caveats that I want to mention the first one is that by using the model you start to step into a different level of responsibility in your life you start to see how

Starting point is 00:19:46 you're not at the mercy of your circumstances but you are creating your results with your thoughts but don't use it to blame or shame yourself. I'll come back to this one often in the coming months because that's a really important one. Caveat number two is that the model does not justify victim blaming or oppression. Abuse and oppression are real in the world. They need proper attention and proper healing, and they should not be tolerated. Caveat number three is don't try to bypass unprocessed negative emotions by rushing to an intentional model. Oftentimes, we want to get to the intentional model quickly so that we can start to feel better right away. But avoiding negative emotions creates a lot of resistance. It doesn't make the negative emotions go away.

Starting point is 00:20:46 you're only postponing the moment where you're going to have to face them. As they say, what you resist persists. And I have found that to be true every time. So make sure you spend time with your current model, process your negative emotions, offer yourself a lot of self-compassion and support, and move to the intentional model once you've reached a certain level of peace and understanding of what is and you've really met yourself where you are. All right, this is what I have for you this week. I think it's enough. I hope all of this makes sense. And as I mentioned earlier, I do have a free worksheet available at mindoverfinger.com slash resources where I'm going to put these notions and also put those model examples for you. Have a great week.

Starting point is 00:21:40 Much love going your way and à bientôt. and there you have it thank you so much for spending this time with me today if you enjoyed this episode i'd love it if you'd share with your friends and colleagues take a screenshot post it on social media and tag me i'm mind over finger everywhere i always love hearing your favorite takeaways and if you're ready to take your playing career to the next level. I'd love to invite you to join the Music Mastery Experience. This is my signature group coaching program where we're going to dive deep into building your confidence and mastery and set you up for success and fulfillment in your life and career. You can find all the details at

Starting point is 00:22:32 mindoverfinger.com. While you're there, check out the free downloads and online courses available to support your journey even further. And don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss an update or a tool to help you thrive. Again, thank you for being here. Until next time, much love and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 237 Shift Your Results - The Simple Tool That Transforms Your Practice and Performance

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