You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Keeping the Faith - How to Stay Motivated to Practice

Starting point is 00:00:14 Welcome to the Eel Here at Podcast. My name is Adam Anas. Today, joining you for a very special solo episode. As we're sheltering in place, we've been thinking about different ways that we can practice, that we can work on, our playing, on becoming a better musician, a better artist, a better practiser. And I wanted to share some thoughts with you about how to stay motivated to practice on a regular basis. I hear some of the same issues again and again from our open studio members about practicing

Starting point is 00:00:49 and about maintaining a regular routine. And it goes something like this usually. There's so much to work on. I have so far to go. I don't know what to practice sometimes or sometimes I have too much to practice and I just get overwhelmed and I end up not doing anything. thing. And so I want to talk about a very cool technique that I've applied during this shutdown as I've been home and had a little more time to practice. Because even if you have a bunch of time, you know, when we're very busy, we're like, oh, if I had time, I'd practice five hours a day every day. But then you get a little extra time and you're like, well, I don't know. There's so much to do. And I can't possibly get everything in. I need to get in in the two hours I have. So maybe I'll just

Starting point is 00:01:40 sit here on my phone for a while and then the whole day goes by and nothing happens. So how can we stay motivated to get up to do it every day? The technique is a very simple technique. It's the simplest, actually. It's to make it easy and make it obvious. So if you've been around our podcasts and our YouTube's the last few weeks, you know, I've been talking a little bit about this book by James Clear called The Tom Habits, which is, it's a very popular book, all about making habits, keeping habits. And one of the

Starting point is 00:02:16 guiding principles of that book is to make it easy and make it obvious. Any good habit that you want to get into your regular routine without having to use willpower or any kind of additional effort, you need to make it easy on yourself and you need to make it obvious. So what does that mean? That could start simply with your setup. If you have a keyboard, leave your keyboard out, leave it on, leave it ready to sit down and play whenever you can. Now, this isn't going to be possible for some of you. If you have a piano, it's very possible because you can't really put it in the closet and you can't turn it off. So it's ready to go.

Starting point is 00:02:56 It's great. But if you have a keyboard, see if you can leave it on. See if you can be ready to just walk by it and play at any time. That's making it obvious, right? It's visible. It's right there. we can just sit down and play whenever we want. The Make It Easy is actually a little harder, ironically.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Make It Easy means that we have to play some mental tricks on ourselves. We have to convince ourselves that we don't have to take on the entire music world. We don't have to take on the entire history of the instrument, whatever instrument that might be. We don't have to learn everything in one day. We don't have to take this lick through all 12 keys today. We don't have to practice for five hours today. Make it easy on yourself. I saw another podcast, a video podcast, about exercise and this fitness coach, like one of these really fit dudes who coaches celebrities and how to get fit was saying, you know, he coaches people to not burn themselves out in a session, but to make it easy on themselves.

Starting point is 00:04:06 And I was struck by how similar this is to how to think about this with piano practice or music practice. Don't burn yourself out. Don't work out to failure is his philosophy, even though that's something you hear with bodybuilders, work out to failure. Don't make yourself sore. Stop when it starts to get too hard. And it sounds very counterintuitive because we want to progress or whatever. But his whole philosophy was, I want you to come back tomorrow. And I want you to do that same thing tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:04:34 and after a week, you're going to have more reps in if you did, say, let's say you do 30 reps of squats as opposed to 60, right? If you do 60 once a week because you're so sore that you can't come back in two days, that's not good. But if you did 30 today and you did 30 in two days and you did 30 in two days, well, now you have 90 in a week as opposed to 60. You've actually upped it by quite a bit your percentage of how many reps you're doing. It's the same thing here. If you have a voicing that you're practicing or a tune you're practicing, you say, well, I've got to get in at least six keys today. You know, do two and then do two tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:05:17 If you say, I got to practice four hours a day, yeah, maybe do half an hour and then do half an hour tomorrow. What we don't want is to push ourselves beyond the point where it's really, really mentally hard that we don't want to do it, that we don't enjoy the process of practicing. And this kind of gets to another crux of this, right? We want to make it enjoyable. If you don't enjoy practicing, if you are not having fun when you practice, you're going to rely simply on willpower alone to get you to work, right? Willpower is not enough to sustain anything.

Starting point is 00:05:54 We can all do some things via willpower, right? but eventually we have to convince ourselves that we actually like doing this, that it's something that brings us joy, that it's something that makes us happy. And if you don't like what you're practicing, if it's a chore and you're trying to use willpower, if you haven't convinced yourself somehow that this is fun, that practicing the instrument you play, that working on your playing makes you a happier, healthier, more well-rounded person who's got a healthy amount of well-being from, this work, it's not going to sustain. You're going to do what you've done probably for a long,

Starting point is 00:06:34 long time. And that's practice for four hours a day for about three days, right? And then that becomes about two hours. And that lasts about another day or two. And then it becomes half an hour. And then all of a sudden, three weeks have gone by and you haven't touched your instrument. And you get on a gig and you sound not great. It's not fresh. You're frustrated, right? I mean, to me, that describes several cycles in my professional life of trying to do something that's not natural, that's not fun for me, that is very, very difficult to sustain. Now, that's not to say you can't grow as you're pushing yourself like that. You know, there's some benefit, I guess. But if we want real results, like, I often think, like, what if I hadn't burned myself out trying to practice five or six hours a day that week and then really be.

Starting point is 00:07:23 been just tired of the instrument and laid off it for two or three weeks, which has happened to me before. You know, okay, yeah, I got, what, I got 18 hours of practicing that first week. Okay, cool. And then I got zero in for the next, for the next few weeks, as opposed to, what if I would have done in an hour and a half? What if I have done 90 minutes? What if I would have done, I mean, instead of five hours, what if I didn't, less than half of that, two hours? I would have gotten in about twice the amount of hours over the last, over the next few weeks. when you do the math. And it would have been a lot more fun.

Starting point is 00:07:57 And then make it fun what you practice. We all have things that we know we need to practice, quote unquote, that we think that is just crucial for our development. I talk to so many people who are scared to practice the wrong thing. And my answer is always, practice what makes you happy? Just practice. It doesn't matter. I mean, it does matter, but it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:08:19 It's more important that you're at the instrument. So if you're having a day where it's like, I just don't feel like practicing. Just go and play for you. Go remind yourself of why you love to play music. I'll bring it back to another exercise endeavor. I love actually comparing athletic. I'm not an athlete,

Starting point is 00:08:37 but I love comparing athletics and exercise to piano practice because I do think so often we tend to intellectualize our practice and think of it as like study, like we're at college studying. And even they have, you know, of course there's music college now. But it really is a muscle memory act. It's a physical activity, so it has a lot of similarities with exercising. And one thing that I've done in my exercise routine is giving myself permission to just walk for 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:09:06 And that counts as me working out for today, right? And I haven't missed a day in months. And that's because I can just go for a 10 minute walk around the block. I can get outside a little bit. I count that as a good workout. I don't judge it as I'm giving up or a fake workout. out, you know, if I'm not out there running three miles at nine minutes a mile. Like, you know, I count it as exactly the same thing. And with that, I've not missed a day. I've stayed active.

Starting point is 00:09:32 It's been just amazing for my health. And I've logged in a lot of miles on little 10 minute walks. You know what I mean? And honestly, 10 minutes usually turns into an hour. Like, once you kind of sit down at it or at the instrument and say, I'm just going to sit here and play a song, just for me, how often does that last? You find something and you just do it. So make it. So make it. easy, make it obvious, make it fun, and just try to hit it in some way on a daily basis. In a joyful way, make it part of the best part of your day. Don't make it a chore. Don't put all this pressure on yourself that you have to get all this stuff today,

Starting point is 00:10:11 that you have to practice five hours today. Just get to the instrument every day. Some days you're going to practice five hours because it feels awesome. And some days it's going to be a struggle and you're going to play one chorus through of F blues and you're going to be like, well, that was super shi and I'm never doing that again. But you're going to feel good that you at least got to it. All right, that's my advice for today on how to keep a regular routine. Go to openstudiojazz.com and check out all of our courses.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Got our daily guided practice session group going on Zoom. If you're a piano access pass member or a member of our piano guided practice pass, you can join me every day at noon and we practice. And you don't have to think about anything. I tell you exactly what to do. So come join us there, get the piano access pass, openstudiojazz.com. And until next time, happy practicing.

You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Keeping the Faith - How to Stay Motivated to Practice

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