What Needs the Most Practice? Your Brain
by Christopher Still. Published October 18, 2022.
We all know how important it is to nail your excerpts at an orchestra audition. Being able to play with great time, pitch, rhythm, and sound is a no brainer.
But playing great is only a part of what it takes to win. The rest? It’s all in your head.
I’m talking about managing your thoughts on audition days. This is a critical part of audition strategy, yet most musicians completely ignore it in their preparation.
So let’s get into it. If we’re really going to get down to the root of the problem here, we’re going to have to talk about golf.
You read that right. Golf.
My favorite books for musicians are actually about sports psychology, not music. I recommend every musician check out Golf is Not a Game of Perfect (and all the sequels) by Bob Rotella and Bob Cullen.
Rotella spends a lot of time talking about mindset, and here’s why—when you’re talking about a physical task as complicated as playing golf or music, your biggest obstacle isn’t the putting green or the practice room…it’s your own brain.
Sure, you always need to improve your physical skills. But if you want to be able to deliver on the big day, you won’t be very successful unless you can quiet your brain and play without getting in your own way.
There are days when athletes and musicians suddenly appear to play beyond their own ability. Someone might say a basketball player was playing “way above his head.”
What’s actually going on here? It’s not that the person is playing better than they are capable. It’s that they’re actually reaching their own potential. They’re finally getting out of their own way.
This seems unusual because most of us don’t do it very often. Even professionals find this tricky. But the great athletes and musicians find ways to do this most of the time, and create systems that allow them to tap into this at will. Sometimes this is called, “being in the zone.”
What does it mean to “be in the zone”?
Let’s use one of the metaphors from Rotella’s books and think about our subconscious as a radio, and our conscious thoughts as the specific station we’ve tuned in to.
If we’re playing great and everything is suddenly easy, we’ve tuned our internal radio to a station that is confident and comfortable. The vibe of this station is great, and all the messages are positive.
On the days we can’t seem to get our playing together, it’s like we’ve tuned to a station where the vibe is negative and pessimistic, and the message we’re getting is “you’re not good enough.” Cue the imposter syndrome!
These are the extremes. Most of us spend our time on a mental “radio station” somewhere in the middle of these.
The trick is to learn to set your mental station right where you want it to be. You can’t play above your actual ability, but you can play UP TO your ability. The goal is to learn to set the radio where you want it, and to get good at resetting it when you hit a patch of static.
Note that I didn’t say you should set the radio at one station and keep it there all the time. Just like an FM radio on a long road trip, it doesn’t work that way. No matter our level of mental strength, we can’t make our brains do what we want all the time.
What we need is mental flexibility and resilience. Negative thoughts and events WILL knock us off that positive radio station. There will be canyons and tunnels where we lose the signal. There will be big bumps and small ones.
Your job is to get really good at resetting the station back where you want it, as quickly as possible. Even pros can’t keep the radio on one station all the time. But they’ve gotten really good at finding it again when they lose it.
Ultimately, I’m talking about training your brain about what it’s going to think about. And training it so well that you can reset it when the stakes are high. It takes a while to learn to find these happy radio stations, but you can totally learn to do it.
Here’s how I like to train my own brain:
Start noticing your mental state when you’re thinking about music, actually practicing, during lessons, during performances, and especially during auditions.
With time, check in with yourself more than that, maybe three times per practice/rehearsal session.
At first, don’t try to change anything. Just note how you feel. What radio station is your brain on? A positive one? A neutral one? A negative one?
Don’t try and force the dial to something totally different. That doesn’t work.
See if you can just nudge yourself in a different direction.
Say something to yourself like, “I notice that I’m feeling [emotion].” And then try and find something just a little bit more positive to focus on.
For example, if your reed is awful, maybe remember that you had a good one yesterday.
Maybe remember a compliment someone gave you in the past.
Maybe remember something you’re looking forward to in the future. It can be as small as your favorite tea before bedtime.
The key to making a big change in your mental state is to get really good at making small changes, over and over. You can’t leap up a cliff, but you CAN walk up a staircase.
In summary, the first goal is to keep your emotional radio station from getting worse. The ultimate goal is to be able to nudge it up to a slightly “higher vibe” station whenever you need to.
With time, you’ll get better at noticing how you are feeling (this is a skill all on its own). And then with more time, you’ll notice that you have more ability to change the direction of your thoughts.
With practice, you’ll be on the lookout and you’ll change the dial long before you get stuck on that terrible frequency.
Remember––Don’t like the conversation happening in your brain? Change the station!
Happy practicing,
Chris @ Honesty Pill
P.S. Want to level up your mental game even more? Grab the PDF of mindset game-changing books for musicians by clicking RIGHT HERE.
BIO
Honesty Pill founder Christopher Still joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Second Trumpet in 2007.
Before coming to California, he was the Principal Trumpet of the Colorado Symphony. He has also held the positions of Associate Principal Trumpet of the Dallas Symphony and Principal Trumpet of the Charleston (SC) Symphony. Additionally, Christopher has served as Assistant Principal Trumpet with the Grant Park Festival Orchestra in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Guest Principal with the St. Louis Symphony.
Christopher has recorded extensively with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Grant Park, Dallas, and Albany symphony orchestras. Active in the Hollywood recording studios, he can be heard on major motion picture and television soundtracks. He is a Yamaha Artist, a dedicated educator, and an active clinician.
Having grown up in a musical household, Christopher originally intended to become a band director and earned a Bachelor of Music Education degree from the Crane School of Music (SUNY-Potsdam). Switching to performance, he received his Master of Music Performance degree from the New England Conservatory in Boston. He was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 1995 and 1996.
Christopher’s favorite aspect of his job is the orchestra’s frequent performance of contemporary music, especially the Green Umbrella concert series.
Christopher lives in Altadena, CA with his wife, Amanda McIntosh, and two children. He enjoys long-distance running, skiing, brewing beer, and hiking in the trails behind his house.