Thoughts On Demand

There I was playing a piece of music I hadn’t played in five years when it happened. My mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of a girl I’d had a crush on five years earlier. I could feel my heartbeat speeding up, the swirl of emotions that were throwing me off balance. I recognized familiar thoughts and feelings from that time. It was all very sudden and quite unsettling. Why was I experiencing thoughts and emotions from five years ago, thoughts that had nothing to do with my life now? The answer, it turns out, would eventually change my life. After the initial shock wore off, I realized those five-year-old thoughts and emotions seized my heart and mind at a specific place in the music I was playing. When I was in music school, I was learning that very piece of music. It was difficult and there was one small four measure section that was particularly hard and wasn’t getting any better over the days and weeks I’d been working on it. I decided to devote forty minutes of one practice time to just those four measures, playing them over and over, hoping they’d become less awkward. All that repetition worked. They did indeed become less awkward. But during those same forty minutes, I was thinking about this girl. Five years later when those same thoughts came screaming back to my mind, it hit me. I’d practiced those thoughts along with the notes in that music. In just forty minutes the thoughts and emotions had become so attached to the physical act of playing those notes, that all I had to do was play those notes and the habit I’d created brought the thoughts and emotions back as well. I had practiced those thoughts along with those notes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that experience was the first of many that would inform the process outlined in this book. It’s a process that can free you from the heaviness and shame you feel when negative self talk tells you you’re not good enough in one way or another. Thoughts on Demand Performing on stage is an interesting experience. It’s one that puts you literally in the spotlight. It asks you to be technically outstanding, eminently prepared, and emotionally vulnerable (in public) — all at the same time. When performing, all this needs to be in place at exactly the right second. It doesn’t matter if one is having a bad day, feeling ill or just doesn’t feel like making music at the moment. The music needs specific things from the performer at specific times. The audience comes expecting a stellar performance and it’s the job of the musician to provide that stellar performance on demand, regardless of whether it is only once or night after night. One needs particular skills to do all that. Essentially, performers have to get their mind, emotions and body to think, feel and do what they need them to, when they need them to do it. Practicing is the way they accomplish this. It’s not just mindless repetition though. Effective practice requires a very conscious combination of thought, emotion and physical action. For example, at one point I was learning another piece of music on the organ that was keeping both hands and feet very busy. There was a moment in which one hand was doing one thing, the other hand something else and my feet, well, something completely different from either of those. I was having trouble playing this without falling off the organ bench or creating a major train wreck in the middle of it all. I discovered however, that a particular combination of specific thoughts, coupled with specific motions and all added to the emotional meaning of the music made it possible for me to navigate the difficulties. After practicing these precise thoughts, actions and emotions many times, they seemed to meld into a single motion that I carried out automatically. I no longer needed to consciously think about doing these things because they had become part of my unconscious activity. That is also what’s required to reprogram that pesky voice in your head: consciously thinking, feeling and acting in ways that build new, more supportive habits and practicing those new ways enough so they become automatic and part of your unconscious activity. After thirty years as a classical musician, I got pretty good at refining and practicing these techniques as well as teaching them to my students. What I hadn’t expected was how useful these skills would become in other parts of my life. There are lots of books based the idea that if you follow what the author did, you’ll reach the same level of fame and fortune they experienced. They clearly lay out what you need to do and how to do it. So many follow to a tee the “what’s” and “how’s” the author lays out, but don’t achieve the outcome they were looking for. Those “quick and easy steps” so often seem to work only for the one who came up with them. Many businesses hire highly paid consultants to come in and tell them the “what” and “how” so their business will thrive. There’s energy for a while, but usually the culture of the organization prevents any real, sustainable change.The reason is because the “what” and the “how” aren’t the whole story. What’s been left out is the “who” and the “why.” The beliefs we have about who we are and why we do what we do are carried around with us our whole life, usually unconsciously. They determine how we move through life and are usually based on the beliefs others had about us. As children, we took on those beliefs without much question and now live them out unconsciously. Those beliefs often end up questioning our abilities, capabilities, knowledge, even our value and worth. They challenge our inborn sense of confidence. We become insecure and unsure about our abilities.