As Jung mentioned in her post today, we have begun to decompress and process our three-week journey with S and J’s school. Today I was able to get back to practicing the piano with a clear, distraction-free mind. Both my memory and hands were weaker than normal today — evidence of my fatigue — but it felt good to get back to my music: my true calling. As I gradually re-imprinted my memory with “Four” and as my hand coordination, if not strength, came back, I discovered that there was an awkward fingering I had learned which I needed to fix. The rest of “Four” felt very secure to me except for those two notes. I knew that if I left those two notes insecure, then I risked having a whole section of the song fall apart if I were under any stress at all when performing. Once I decided on a more solid fingering, I went through my usual “fixit” practice routing until I felt confident that I had done all I could for today to “reprogram” my hand and my memory for the new fingering.

As I thought about how I had been unsatisfied with the fingering of those two notes, I realized that my standards have gone up since I was a graduate student at New England Conservatory. I found this especially amusing because I doubt I will ever again perform for anybody as demanding or discerning as the teachers I had there. As I thought about it more, I realized that my standards have gone up for two reasons:

1. I am no longer playing for any judge but myself;
2. I have no single expectation of how I “should” play.

When I was practicing for a lesson, a master class, or a recital, then I was always thinking of what my teachers wanted to hear. I was always trying to figure out what they expected of me and I wanted to meet or exceed that expectation. I wanted to impress them so as to receive confidence-boosting words of praise. This meant that I created an expectation for myself: an internal expectation that I created to simulate what I thought their expectation was of me. From the moment I began learning a piece of music, I had a single, and extremely high, expectation of the level of performance I should reach.

The practical consequence of this was that when I inevitably made mistakes as I first learned a piece, even when I was playing it very slowly, I already began to berate myself for falling short of my expectation. As the lesson, master class, or recital date approached I would panic and begin to cut corners to try to shortcut my way to “perfection.”

I see now how short-sighted this was. My shortcuts never amounted to anything. My time would have been better spent on slow, careful practicing. Either way I wouldn’t have reached “perfection” but I would have progressed further without the foolish shortcuts.

What I have discovered is even more important, is that I embrace flexible expectations. Part of taking negative self-talk out of my practicing is not setting too high of an expectation for myself at the outset. Maybe I’ll just learn a page of a new piece, or memorize half of it, or even just try to smooth out some fast running passages. Instead of shooting for some lofty goal, I just try to make the piece sound better by the time I get up from the piano than it did when I first sat down.

The practical consequence of this attitude has been that surprisingly quickly, I’m polishing pieces to an extent which is beyond what I was able to do before. Because I don’t feel pressured, I’m not tempted to take shortcuts, and I’m brutally honest with myself about how solid my playing sounds and more importantly, how solid it feels to my hands. I no longer have any fear of acknowledging that there is a problem in how I’m playing so I can look at the problem objectively, find a solution, and get down to business practicing to fix the problem.

Although I long suspected that my high expectations were causing me too much stress, I always feared that without my high expectations, I would be too lazy to put in the work required to perform at a high level. The irony is that by removing my high expectations I am now able to perform with a higher degree of perfection, ease and expression than I have ever been able to before.

For me anyhow, lowering my expectations has enabled me to reach higher standards of excellence, mostly because I now only look at the stretch of trail that is at my feet, rather than the mountain peak that I am trying to reach. As in the rest of our Soul Play Family experience, I discovered yet again that the next step is all I need to think about. Although it may sound impossible, when I keep my attention on the next step, the mountain climbs itself.