The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 265 The Art of Pacing - Elizabeth Svoboda on Flow, Recovery, and Sustainable Excellence

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

What if the goal isn't to work harder, but to find the right pace? In this episode, I talk with science writer Elizabeth Svoboda, author of The Art of Pacing, about flow, energy management, recovery, and the habits that help high performers sustain excellence without burning out. You'll hear about: • Why pacing matters more than most people realize • How to create the conditions for flow in practice and performance • What elite performers understand about recovery, resilience, and long term success   If you're tired of feeling like your performances don't consistently reflect what you're capable of, let's talk. Whether you're preparing for auditions, navigating performance pressure, rebuilding confidence, or looking for more freedom and consistency on stage, I'd love to help. Book a free discovery call HERE and let's explore what support would serve you best. Book your free consultation with Renée HERE   Download the transcript from this episode HERE   GUEST Grab the Art of Pacing here: https://amzn.to/4ewVAMa Website: https://elizabethsvoboda.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/svobodster/reels/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.a.svoboda     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. Grab my free workshops and PDF downloads by going to www.mindoverfinger.com/resources. 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. This is Episode 265. 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. Hi there. Welcome back to the show. I hope you're doing great as you're tuning in. Have you ever had one of those periods where everything looks great from the outside? You're practicing, you're performing, you're checking all the boxes, you're working hard, maybe harder than ever, actually. And yet, somewhere underneath all of that effort,

you can feel the cost, the exhaustion, the constant pressure, the sense that if you slow down for even a moment, everything might slip away. I think a lot of musicians live there. We're taught how to push. We're taught how to commit. We're taught how to work harder. But very few of us are ever taught how to pace ourselves. And that's exactly why I wanted to have today's conversation with my amazing guest, Elizabeth Zvoboda. Elizabeth is an award-winning science writer whose work has appeared in Scientific American, The Boston Globe, and Greater Good Magazine. Her brand new book, The Art of Pacing, explores what science can teach us about sustaining excellence without burning ourselves into the ground. In this conversation, we talk about

burnout, flow, energy management, perfectionism, recovery, and why many achievers unknowingly create cycles of overexertion followed by collapse. We also explore a fascinating idea that I think many musicians desperately need to hear, that pacing is not about doing less. it's about finding the right effort at the right moment you've heard me say alignment over effort many times this is what we're talking about and if you've ever felt caught between wanting to achieve more and wanting to enjoy your life a little more along the way i think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation let's go to the show Elizabeth Svoboda I'm so excited to have you on the show thank you so much Renee it's wonderful

to be here Elizabeth if I may call you Elizabeth you have a fantastic book coming out actually this week around the time where this episode is being released I got very lucky and I'm holding a copy in my hands, and I read it cover to cover. And I feel like this topic, this book is about the art of pacing, and you're going to tell all of my listeners about it today, is so relevant. I mean, for any human being in any journey anyone embarks on, but very applicable for musicians in the musical pursuits that we are pursuing. So I am just excited about this conversation. And before we dive in to talk about the book, I'd love to hear about your journey and what led you to write this book. Absolutely. So just a little bit of background on me. I've been a science

writer for more than a decade now. And I contribute to Scientific American, Boston Globe Ideas, and Greater Good Magazine. And I would say over the years, one of the points of focus in my work has become trying to interpret the science in ways that can help each of us to reach our highest potential in any number of fields. And that can mean a number of things. But that sort of has become my focus. And my new book, The Art of Pacing, is very much part of that. It's about really how to pace ourselves in different domains of life, whether it's on the job, in your musical career, if you're a musician, in other creative ventures, and there's much more. But one reason that I got into writing this book in the first place was that I had struggled so much, especially when I was younger, with setting a pace that was sustainable for me.

And I think, for me, sort of going 110% all the time, doing absolutely all I could, was ingrained in me from a very early age. And from the musicians that I've talked to, I know many of them have similar experiences, especially if you started playing when you were very young, and you were seen to have potential. There's often sort of this baseline expectation that you are going to do whatever you can to bring that potential to its fullest. And honestly, I think if in my teenage years you had even raised the idea of pacing with me, it would have felt really alien, like really foreign to anything that I had experienced. I probably would have seen it as like laziness or, you know, just pulling back not doing enough. And I might have even looked down on people who tried to pace myself. And I think I had a lot of teachers that encouraged me to fulfill my potential, which in many ways was a great thing. But at the same time, I didn't really have anybody cautioning me to think about why maybe that I was taking on the things that I was taking on, why I was joining all these clubs, why I was doing all these performances, participating in all these competitions. and I think that by the time I reached I had gotten into college and I really I remember right at the end of high school I just hit a wall and I kind of just stopped doing any work at all like I just burned out but I didn't even have a vocabulary for it at the time and um nobody talked to me

about like what this meant like what why are you just not I just didn't feel motivated anymore and just as I got older I noticed that I was sort of driving myself through these cycles of really putting in superhuman effort to meet a deadline get ready for performance whatever have you and then after that after that sort of burst of superhuman effort I would just absolutely crash out sometimes for days. It wasn't like I wouldn't do any work, but pushing myself through the things that I had to do to get through the day felt like wading through murk or trying to walk to the other end of the swamp. And so part of what motivated me to learn more about pacing and to practice pacing techniques myself was that I didn't want to be in the cycle anymore

of just going way above and beyond my capacities, my physical and mental capacities, and then crashing out and having to take way longer than I wanted to recover from that. Yes. I can think of my listeners hearing what you're saying and just nodding along because it sounds exactly like what we're experiencing when we're going through school,

preparing for performances, all of this, that aspect of, to use the same word you did, trying to be a superhuman all at once as fast as possible. So many great things. I'm excited about this conversation. I'm going to quote a few things, especially from the introduction that I thought were so relevant. You talk about tempo giusto. And as musicians, this is something that we definitely resonate with. I actually remember learning that term for the first time, playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in my teens. In the introduction, you talk about pacing and how pacing allows you to pursue meaningful goals at your own rate and on your own terms, steering clear of hand-me-down ideas about where

you should be headed and when you should get there. I love how you put this into such clear terms. And then this is when you talk about tempo giusto as finding the proper pace for each moment, which is exactly what so many of us need to learn. You talk about how outside the sporting realm, the art of regulating your tempo is less intuitive and the connection between early moves and late breaking returns is less clear. I would tend to agree with this. I don't think this is something musicians are well trained to do. This is something I cover with my clients, but it's definitely not something I learned when I was in school. And as a result, most of us like the runner's well-tuned sense of when to go hard, when to pull back, and when to stay the course.

Can you speak more about this, this tempo giusto idea and how the art of pacing is so critical to maintain, well, you know, pursue excellence, but do this in the way that helps you maintain a sense of thriving and fulfillment. Right. Well, I love the tempo juicer idea. And this was actually something that came up in a conversation that I had with, you may be familiar with Carl Honoré. He was sort of one of the pioneers of the global slow movement. And he has lived in Canada as well. But he really emphasized to me in our conversations this, um you know it doesn't pacing yourself doesn't necessarily have to be about going more slowly it really is about finding the right pace for the moment and in the career of anybody who is really

at the top of their field at the top of their game there are going to be these periods when you have to put it all out there and you have to do some really intensive preparation and certainly I'm not denying that that's the case, but I think what athletes do and what some other people have learned to do that most of us aren't so good at is that they build into their schedules rest time and recovery time that is actually commensurate or that matches the amount of effort that they have put in during those really intense stretches. And this is something that came up in my conversations with Olympic athletes, too, that they know, even on a daily basis, I spent some time with a world level middle distance runner who she basically does one stint of practice every day. it's maybe two, two and a half hours. And it is incredibly intense. Like she's doing all these

runs at different lengths, just taking these real short little breaks between stints of running. But then, so I asked her, well, when you're done with your practice for the day, what do you do for the rest of the afternoon? And she kind of laughed and she said to me, well, honestly, I am spending most of the rest of the afternoon just resting, often napping for more than two hours at a time. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that that's exactly what the rest of us need to do, but that we need to give ourselves more grace when we know that we are really putting ourselves through something difficult. If you say you're performing on a stage that is bigger than any stage you've been on before and so therefore the amount of

effort that you're putting in is extremely high you need to acknowledge that and give your body and your mind enough time to recover for that so ideally yeah you would be taking a couple a few days off after doing one of those types of performances um because what we also know from the research is that when you let yourself get all the way into burnout, it can take months, if not years to recover from that state. So part of the philosophy of pacing is you are pulling yourself back actively from the brink of that before you are allowing yourself to ever fall in. Yes, I love that. And starting from this perspective of understanding how we operate best is so important. You make a really good distinction in the book between time

management and pacing. And I think it's really important for people to hear because you talk about, let me see if I can find the passage in the book. I hope all of the listeners purchase this book. You talk about, oh, I'm not finding the quote right now, but I think you know what I do. Yeah, maybe you're talking about energy management as an alternative to time management. So I'm sure so many listeners will be familiar with this concept of time management, like when you are kind of snipping your days into these half hour, maybe hour long intervals, and you're deciding exactly what you're going to do during each of these intervals. Like I know, myself, I have tried this multiple times. I have downloaded the calendars, like there are

these complicated spreadsheets that you can download from certain influencers where it's like, okay, just fill in every single block in this spreadsheet, and you will be all set for the rest of the week. And the thing is, like, when you're filling that out, you feel great, you feel like, I am in complete control now. I've got this. I know exactly what I'm going to do at the exact time. But when it all tends to fall apart is once you actually embark on your week. And I don't know if you've had this experience, but inevitably, like an interruption will happen. If you have kids, maybe your kid needs a ride to somewhere, like a meeting runs long and you have to ditch whatever was supposed to come in the block after that and so it feels it's a very brittle way of

planning your day because you just find yourself having to start over from scratch so many times and it just for me maybe there's some people for whom it works for but for me it was just not really sustainable um and what i prefer to do what has really been much more realistic for me has been an approach called energy management. And energy management, I think, is a lot more flexible, a lot more in tune with your natural peaks of alertness and natural lulls. So what you do is you sort of observe, when do you normally have the most energy and focus during the day? Is it, for a lot of people, it might be mid-morning, it might be later afternoon. For some people, it's even late at night, especially creative people I know often fall into that

category. And so once you've identified that time, you do your most important and your most demanding work during that time. So essentially, you are sort of riding your own natural energy peaks or energy waves. And I have experimented with this quite a bit, especially in the process of writing my book. And what I found is, like as a writer, I often set myself word count goals, right? So my personal peak energy time is anywhere from like 10 in the morning until about noon or 1230 or whenever I break for lunch. And what I find is when I'm doing my really demanding writing work during that time, I am much more likely to blow past my word count goals. Whereas if I tried to do that exact same work, right after lunch, when I and a lot of other people

are in a natural lull, it is just going to be so much more of a struggle. And I may not even meet my word count goal, much less blow past it. So I think if you haven't experimented with this before, it is certainly worth it. If you're a musician, just making sure that you align your peak practice periods with those natural energy peaks and then giving yourself time to rest and recover when you're naturally at a lull and just realizing that those recovery times are not wasted time they are well some olympic coaches call it active recovery because the idea is your body and your mind need time to replenish just like after you punch down the bread dough it needs time to rise back up again. That is just something you have natural human limits and you need to give your

tank time to refill. So that's just the approach that's been really helpful for me. I can't agree with you more than that. I remember when I was a kid, I learned how to schedule from my mom. When I was six, seven, eight years old, we would make schedules all the time. and so for me scheduling time management really works but it's because energy management is part of my scheduling and I think that one of the I don't want to say mistake but one thing that I see from people who try to start managing their time is that they first do what you suggested which is they go with the templates and they go with the shoulds and they ignore their own natural rhythm. And I feel like you have to, as you said, you have to experiment and pay attention

to what has worked in the past and ask yourself some questions, exactly what you said, which is what works for me when I'm at my most energetic. And people have this tendency of wanting to come up with the best plan the very first day. And what I would say is just plan things and experiment, learn from the experience and then adjust. And this is how you come up with a plan that is really tailored for you and works for you. I experimented with working out first thing in the morning and I realized that that's just not what I want to do. First thing in the morning, I like to get a little bit of brain work done before the rest of the body gets going. And so like through trials and errors, I've really found what fits where. And one thing I know is after 5pm, unless I have a

concert, not much gets done. There's no brain cells left after 5pm for me. Yeah, I think the writer Ursula Le Guin if I remember right she she was sort of describing her day how she planned her day and she said at after dinner I really get very stupid and we're just not going to talk about it like that's just not the time of day that I get anything done and I can completely identify with that but you got it something I think is so true which is that I think at the heart of good pacing is ongoing noticing and responsiveness so just noticing how you feel in each moment like being honest with yourself about that like man I really feel like my tank is running low here like I'm flagging whereas I think a lot of us sort of tell ourselves what we're supposed to feel or what

we think other people might be feeling in a given situation rather than how we actually feel but we have to get how we actually feel in place first before we can make the decision okay like this is where I am now energetically what's the next wise step here can I instead of just powering through the rest of this practice session the way I was planning take a five minute break maybe you know vent to somebody on messenger or whatever you need to do just like get it all out there connect with somebody and then just see how you feel at that time and am I ready to launch back in and I think a lot of us just aren't doing that checking in with ourselves enough like it requires a lot of honesty about where we're at and so I do think it sometimes this pacing requires courage

especially when other people around us seem to be setting a very different pace and that that's something I think about a lot too because I've written a lot about heroism altruism like what it takes to go against the grain and that was something that very much came up in my studies of pacing too that to set the tempo justo the right piece for yourself you very often do have to go against the grain maybe the people that you associate with or the larger cultural grain if like Yes, you're in a society where 110% effort is really valorized and celebrated. Yes. Oh, so well said. I wish we could cover the entire book in details, but I'll direct the listeners to purchasing it.

You cover so many important subjects or so many important angles, I should say, rather. and um you know including um the concept of the brief candles like finding your pulse all of this is um um i don't know it's just hard to pick which topic i definitely want us to get to the topic of flow but one thing i would be interested to have mentioned briefly before is the narrative part. You talk about this in chapter three, I believe. And I think that is such an interesting approach for this idea of pacing. Can you tell us a little bit more about this narrative arc? Definitely. And the reason that I included that so early in the book was that I really think it's important if we are to set a sustainable pace in our lives, kind of get

an idea of what the finish line or what the objective is for us. And that is what the narrative exercise that I present is designed to do. It's actually an exercise that was developed by a professor at Boston College. And it's based on these very old, very ancient ideas of the traditional hero's journey which we see in classic stories the Iliad the Odyssey um stories from all cultures but so so essentially um in these stories you have a protagonist with a goal like a very high level goal um they are sort of facing obstacles along the way to their goal they are often getting assistance from people along the way. And then toward the end of the story, they really leave some kind of legacy to their community, or they make the world better

in some way for the contribution that they made. So this exercise specifically, it's called the Hero's Journey Restoring Exercise. And it's a series of questions, I think it's about seven questions. And these prompts are designed to help you find the narrative thread, the hero's journey thread in your own life. It asks you to reflect on your most important goals, the obstacles that you face, how you overcome them, who helped you along the way. And for me, the biggest element of it is what legacy have you been able to leave to the people around you to your community or to the world and what I found and what other people who have done this exercise have found is that it really helps you to get back in touch with the things that matter the most to you and these may

may not be the things that you actually find yourself pursuing on a daily basis. And so sometimes it brings out these sort of misalignments between what you say you want your life to be about in the long term, and what you are actually doing on a day to day basis. So it gives you this opportunity to really do sort of more fundamental rethinking realignment because if you're not if the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis are not in alignment with the kind of legacy that you want to leave generally um then the more granular pacing tactics i think aren't going to help you as much because you are not going to feel as energized about what you're doing it's going to be more of a plodding feeling of like forcing yourself through each day so i

would really encourage people to try the hero's journey restorying exercise it is actually available for free um on the website of the researcher ben rogers who developed it and i would be happy um to give you the link so that anybody who's interested can can try it out for themselves. Yes, would love that. They're in the book as well. So I think anyone reading the book will find them. I really resonated with this concept because one of the most important things in my work with myself, but in my work with my clients too, is this concept of the who and the why. So who are you? What are your core values as a person? Who are you as you do all of the things? how who are you as you practice who are you as you show up to rehearsal as you're performing

as you're teaching and the why behind it why are you doing all of this and the idea of the the restoring i felt was very very powerful and um i very very much resonated with this this chapter that's wonderful i'm so glad to hear that yeah can we dive into the concept of flow please as you might imagine this is something that's a big topic of conversation in music before we hit record I was sharing with you how with my clients this idea is actually a two-hour training in itself inside of my music master experience group coaching program and a lot of the work that we do as we prepare for performance is angled towards you know fostering a state of flow and performance. And so this is definitely a chapter that I read avidly. So tell us a little

bit more about how this art of pacing can help us with flow management and flow creation. Right. Well, just, I think most people are familiar with the flow state, especially musicians. But just to reiterate, what flow is, is sort of a state of deep, often sustained focus on what you're doing that feels very effortless. And to me, I see it as really integral to successful pacing, because when you are in these flow states, and especially when you are getting into them regularly they are highly energizing they are highly motivating and they really add a lot of delight and joy into your life um and getting in flow there are sort of some requirements like you really can't necessarily get into flow

on anything you're doing despite what some influencers uh will try to tell you online um it really to to get in flow it kind of has to be something that is naturally interesting to you naturally engrossing to you and so what i contend is that when you're building more of this flow more of this focus on what really excites you and draws you in um you're going to get these mood benefits, these energy benefits that really kind of help propel you through everything else that you have to do. And the science backs that up too. We know that the more time people spend in flow over the course of the day, the more energetic they report feeling by the end of the day. And also their reward circuitry in their brains is going to be more

active we have these what's called dopaminergic reward systems and getting into flow really helps to activate um those reward generating areas of the brain so i i really think and some people even report that it feels like a peak experience and especially i think for performers that struggle with stage fright or just feeling very self-conscious when they're on stage the more deeply into flow that you're able to get when you're on stage the less self-conscious that you're going to feel because they're actually um there's less activity in these areas of the brain that are responsible for self-consciousness for self-monitoring so it is almost like you were taking a switch and you were turning down the self-consciousness because that area of your

brain is going to be less active uh when you're in flow and i had such um interesting conversations with a former concert master violinist while i was writing this book and part of her part of her thing was like she loved being in flow even before she knew what it was called she just thought of But as a kid, she was like, this is what getting into the music feels like. So she called it getting into the music. And over time, she kind of realized that when she was getting into the music, she didn't have this stage fright. She didn't feel so uncomfortable or so self-conscious. And that was one of the driving things that motivated her to help not just other musicians, but just anybody to find more flow over the course of their lives.

and what do you think I mean you cover this in the book but what are here some some tips that the musicians could walk away to facilitate that flow state in their work right um well I think for musicians like if you are a career musician you probably are I would say almost certainly have known the feeling of being in flow while you're practicing and when you're on the stage So the first step of Diane Allen, this former concert master's flow generating process is sort of identify the activities that have gotten you in flow in the past. But for musicians, I kind of feel like that almost answers itself because you know that you can at least some of the time get into flow when you are practicing or when you are performing. um but the the key thing also is she recommends that you replicate the more specific conditions that help you to get into flow so it might be a certain warm-up routine it might be that you're

practicing in a certain space um for me as a writer it's actually often getting out of the house going out to a coffee shop to work because that then sort of the detritus of the rest of my life falls away for that hour, that two hours that I'm in the coffee shop. So just writing down and thinking about the specific conditions that have been conducive to flow for you. And then the next time that you want to get into flow, repeating as many of those as you reasonably can is going to help ease the process. And another key thing is persistence, especially at the beginning of a flow stint. There was actually some research that I came across where there was this mind body expert at Harvard, and he kind of noticed that oftentimes when people were trying to get into

flow, they hit what he called like a struggle phase at the beginning. And it was sort of the first 20 or 30 minutes when maybe they were finding it hard to focus or just their head really wasn't fully in it yet but what he said was if you persist through what you know is going to be that initial struggle phase on the other side is going to be that state of immersion of it almost feels like it's solar powered right like you feel like you just want to keep going and at that point it actually takes more energy to stop than it does to keep going and so so just I would encourage you to persevere through that struggle phase through the difficult moments at the beginning because it's been documented that once you get through that, the rewards that

you're going to enjoy on the other side are going to be huge. Yes. Yeah. It's such a great chapter. And I was thinking when you were talking about replicating what has worked for you, one of the things that works really well for me and that I share with clients all the time is this idea that I noticed that I can slide or ease into flow when I give myself permission to just play okay. And I'm going to make a parallel here with how a runner would pace themselves for a long race. And let's say you have an entire recital or a whole chamber music concert. So you're playing an entire sonata, let's say. So at least you've got 20 minutes ahead of you. And I feel that as musicians, and I don't think this is only the field of music where

we're perfectionists and we want to go all out and we want everything to be perfect. I'm sure some surgeons feel this way, right? So it's not exclusive to the world of music. But I feel like there's at times this idea that we have to go and from the first note, everything needs to be absolutely exquisite and perfect. And it's almost as if you go in sprinting right out of the, you know, right out the gate and then there's no fuel left for the rest of the race. And I feel that for me, it's extremely triggering for the nervous system to go in a performance this way. And I had found that when I go on stage and I give myself permission to just play okay for the first, let's a half page where I'm going to play in tune. I'm going to play the right rhythm, but I'm not going

to like pour myself a hundred percent, give my soul to this performance. I'm going to just pace myself. Yeah. I find that within a few lines, usually a few systems, half a page, my nervous system finds its footing on the stage and the hall, the sound, all of this. And then it's a very strange sensation where I feel like I'm sliding into flow. And it always feels this way. It feels like, oh, now here we go. And then I feel like I'm in it and it feels amazing and great. And then I can pour myself out. But it's very interesting how exactly what you said, like notice what has worked for you and then replicate it. And that is one of the things that I had noticed is the times when I experienced flow, I usually go about it with either feeling very connected to my why, being very excited about this performance and anchored in who I am. or it's with this idea of you know give 90 percent you know for some people if it's not enough just go with 95 but don't go 110 you know all guns out and then for me usually then it

allows me to find my footing is the best way that i can put it and then the nervous system gets you know goes back to a place where it's operating in a safe zone and or like a maximal zone and then um so for me that that seems to be the the art of pacing seems to be very work very um efficient in finding flow in this way yeah i think that's really smart and i love that you give yourself permission to do just okay, because giving yourself that permission is probably actually helping you to get into flow faster. Because if you were putting that much pressure on yourself to go 110%, get every single note, absolutely perfect, the self monitoring parts of your brain are going to be pouring into overdrive. And when that's happening, flow is going to be a

lot more elusive. And so it's kind of a paradox, I guess, it's when you give yourself permission not to be perfect, that you are actually likely to play better, because you're going to get more reliably and more quickly into flow. So I would definitely say, I mean, of course, it's important to have high standards. But in the moment, right when you're about to perform, trust your preparation just trust the work that you've already put in and just give yourself permission to let it fly yeah yes that's exactly what i was going to say is that when i do this and i i trust the preparation and it's taking out the excess of energy that actually would make me play less accurately so it's to go in with this trust of the preparation and there there's in the

way a sense of release as well yeah which is very powerful so yeah I've experienced that very strongly when when I perform this this approach really helps me slide into it I don't have any that's how it feels that's how it's I experience it like a slide into it right that's a great way to put it. And for performers, you are making such fast and quick motor movements, and they are sort of pre-programmed, like the part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is responsible for very precise, quick physical actions as controlling that. But when you are second guessing yourself, when you are self-monitoring, then slower regions of the brain actually can interfere with this very coordinated very polished uh work that the cerebellum is doing and that's

when you get um well sports players often call it choking i guess performers would call it choking as well so don't step on all this really amazing work by being so self-conscious by second guessing what you're doing. Just really let it fly. I love it. Elizabeth, I would love for you to share with the listeners a little bit about the concept of the brief candles, which I thought was very cool. Yeah, I love this. And I think it's so relevant for musicians because so many musicians are teachers and have so much influence in the lives of young people. So what a brief candle is, it is a very short but intense moment of encounter between two people. And often it's at a moment when one of them, let's say maybe you have a student who is second guessing their

commitment or just feeling as though they don't have what it takes or whatever the case may be. I think a lot of teachers underestimate the amazing impact that they can have in moments like that just through short conversations like this is not something that needs to take a lot of energy, take a lot of time. But just these words that you can say in the span of five minutes or less can really restore, people can restore students to themselves in a way that, I mean, if you look back over your career, you may be able to locate some of these moments yourself when maybe you had a mentor or a teacher in your life, who said something to you or did something for you that if that encounter had not happened maybe you wouldn't even be on the path that you find yourself on today so I think part of the key is just recognizing or learning to look for those potential moments as they arrive um and then just looking back like after they happen and just seeing how that unfolds for the other person how they often will blossom in the wake of that and then that's fulfilling for you too like that

what we most want all of us I think most want is to know that we have a purpose in the world that we've made some kind of tangible difference and in these very short intervals of time I think brief candles are one of the best ways to fulfill that purpose so beautifully put I love that and I think that a lot of the listeners teachers pedagogues are going to resonate as well yeah my kids are taking piano right now and their piano teacher has very high standards um he's russian so he sort of grew up in that that school and so he's very exacting but he's also very loving at the same time and he has ways of communicating his belief in the students that i know have made many of them stick with him throughout very difficult repertoire um i mean

these older kids that are his students just absolutely blow me away so i think it's this combination of high standards, but also nurturing at the same time, showing your belief in them at the same time. I feel like that's sort of the magic combination. I love that. Elizabeth, as the author, you know your book much better, much better than I do. So are there some concepts that we've not touched on right now that you think would resonate particularly well with musicians and listeners of this podcast? Yeah, I mean, there's one thing that an Olympic athlete, Ajay Wilson, who's a runner, she was the one who first introduced this concept to me, but it's called rigid flexibility. And so the idea there is that Ajay sees herself as

having certain pretty non-negotiable things that she wants to accomplish over the course of the day. So if she's in the midst of training season, it might be that she pretty much has to get through this two, two and a half hour block of really intense training. But what she does is she gives herself a lot of breathing room around that. And so the non-negotiables, that's sort of the rigid part of it. But the flexible part of it is, well, maybe she had planned to start her practice at 10 o'clock, but she's not really too worried if she just needs a little extra time that morning and she's starting at 1015 or 1020 or whatever, instead of 10 o'clock. Like I think what so many of us do is we sort of set these very exacting standards for ourselves thinking

that that's what's going to help us get to a higher level. But in reality, if we're not building this breathing room in this okay this is non-negotiable but I can adjust the start time I can give myself a bigger break afterward if we're not doing those things we're probably not going to be able over time to match up to these very exact thing standards that we're setting for ourselves so it's like keeping that objective high keeping that progress going but doing so in a way that has a lot more of a cushion around it than many of us typically give ourselves. I think it's so important because this is where perfectionism can really get in the way of excellence. If we create these rules that are so rigid that that breathing room that you mentioned

gets lost. And then this is when we break, right? If a preparation process is a living organism in itself, then it needs breathing room. Right. And that's why sometimes I talk about iteration too, like that process I was talking about earlier of checking in with yourself, like taking an honest assessment of where you're at energetically, physically, mentally, and then making the best next decision, given that state. And scientists, when they experiment, they talk about iteration, they try things one way, they test, they see how it works. Okay, I got some information there. Now I'm going to try something else and see how that works. And I think that kind of almost playfulness, that experimental nature, I think, is often at the heart of

successful pacing. And that's something that I, as a recovering perfectionist, I'm getting better at. I'm still certainly a work in progress. I do not have it all figured out. But when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I just like to get back to that. Okay, let's check in with myself. Where am I? What do I need to do next? And given all of that, what's the next wise choice that I can make? And so when you're doing these regular check-ins with yourself like this, it sort of becomes its own kind of responsive pacing. And so I would certainly, if you think that this might be an approach that would work well for you, that resonates, I would encourage you to give it a try. hmm so well put Elizabeth in closing is there an actionable tip that you would recommend that our listeners seek action on um well one thing that I think maybe you can give yourself permission to do is to be selectively mediocre in your life and I know that sounds

weird that sounds like a cop-out but what selective mediocrity actually is is you are giving yourself permission to be just okay in certain areas of your life that aren't necessarily at the core of what you want to achieve what your values are like if you need to fill out this paperwork like seriously just do an okay job on the paperwork um it doesn't matter if it's 100 percent, you know, absolute highest standard of paperwork that you can possibly do. I think so many of us were driven, we sort of bring that driven mindset into absolutely everything that we do. But when we selectively pull back like this, when we allow ourselves to be selectively mediocre, we actually have more energy to devote to the things that matter more. And so we may be

actually achieve more as a result of being selectively mediocre plus plus it's kind of fun like you know give yourself permission maybe not entirely blow something off but just like do the minimum that you need to do in order to get through it and that really is okay i love that it's you give yourself permission to be selectively mediocre in certain areas so you can be selectively excellent in the ones that matter to you right right because we all have limits we are humans we have physical limits we have mental limits and we need to be cognizant of that and that's what selective mediocrity kind of helps you to work within those limits it goes back to what you were talking about in terms of that breathing room that we need

and i think that is a very smart move to give yourself that breathing room and it's really all what the art of pacing is all about right you decide where the energy mental energy emotional energy, physical energy goes at the right moment. Right. And a lot of people with chronic illnesses who have just sort of more naturally lower stores of energy, they do this very deliberate pacing all the time. And so I think we have a lot to learn from the way that they manage their energy. And that's also something I get into a little bit in the book, how these deliberate pacing tactics that they are using, almost anybody can actually benefit from that approach. I love that. Elizabeth, tell us where we can find everything about you, about the book,

all of the information to find you. Yes, you can find me at my website, elizabethspoboda.com. I'm often on Instagram. My username is Svobodster, S-B-O-B-O-D-S-T-E-R. And you can find the book on any bookseller. Just type The Art of Pacing into the field of the bookseller and it should pop up. And I'm going to have all of these links in the show notes for the listeners. Wonderful. Well, this has been so nice.

Thank you so much for taking time to be with us today. I highly recommend that all the listeners grab this fantastic book, The Art of Pacing. I think there is so much to learn. And, you know, even if you are someone who feels like you really got it, you understand how it works. I think there could be some really powerful reminders. And also that, you know, this arc of restoring is so cool. all of these techniques. So I think that even if you feel like you're already on top of your pacing, there's going to be some amazing reminders for you in there. So Elizabeth Svoboda,

The Art of Pacing, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, thank you so much, Renee. It's been wonderful. hey if you're ready to bring your best playing to performances competitions auditions tenure track trials and all the other high stakes moments you have to face in your musical career i invite you to join the music mastery experience mme is my high level performance training program for musicians where you're going to learn how to prepare effectively, trust yourself fully, and perform with more confidence, consistency, and freedom under pressure. To learn more about MME and book your free discovery call, visit mindoverfinger.com slash MME. À bientôt!

Thank you.