“I didn’t fall off the bench!”
If you asked them, I think that many of my students would tell you that one of their least favorite activities in lessons in self-evaluation. That moment when they get asked: “so how do you feel that went”? They don’t get to just say “good” or “bad”. Students know that they have to tell me two things: what went well, and what can they improve on for the next performance. At least one example of each. This may or may not come as a surprise, but it is actually typically more difficult for them to come up with something that they did well! This spurred me on to create a visual for my students to look at when they are new to self-evaluation; a checklist of sorts for things to think about in their performance, all the way down to….did you collapse or fall off of the bench??
As musicians, we tend to be particularly critical of ourselves. The phrase “my own worst critic” can be attached to the majority of anyone involved in the performing arts. I remember one of my professors demonstrating the importance for perfect performance in front of our audience by having each one of us in the ensemble play 10% of our notes incorrectly in the piece. He did this to illustrate that though each of us would have technically “earned an A” according to academic percentages, the piece sounded nothing like it should. The stakes are simply higher when it comes to performance. It is no wonder that things like performance anxiety and imposter syndrome plague the music community. We hold ourselves to an exceptionally high standard because it is extremely noticeable when we do not.
As important as it is to be critical of our performances and to convey the stories told in our art, it is equally as important to acknowledge our success. I have been involved with music for as long as I can remember, and my passion for the arts has never decreased. But somewhere along the line, I stopped striving for the beauty and communication of a story that music provides and started focusing on the number of times my memory slipped and I sang the wrong verse or my fingers didn’t quite play the passage as I had intended. My anxiety over my mistakes turned performing and teaching, both things that I absolutely love, into a constant test of self-worth. And I have seen the same thing happen in the musicians that I work with, both colleagues and students. I’ll never forget when the day when I was told: “you have to stop striving for perfection, try instead aiming for wonderfully excellent.” Wow. That one hit me right to my core. By putting so much pressure on perfection and noting every single mistake that I had made, and anticipating each possible mistake yet to come I was completely missing the beauty and excellence in the things that I had accomplished.
I am now making it my mission to create musicians of the future that strive for wonderful excellence. I want to train musicians to problem solve and notice areas to improve in practice, but also acknowledge the beauty and success in their performance. Somedays, as our studio wide joke has become, that success is simply not collapsing or falling off of the bench. This quote has come from more than one of my students, and it is a stepping stone for those that are not used to positive self-evaluation. For some students, it takes a very long time to acknowledge the positive, and I continue to work with them on that. Because in the end, the arts are about communication. Communication of emotion, stories, and feelings that are otherwise impossible to describe through simple words.
So try striving for wonderful excellence. Some days you may only be able to say that you did not fall off of your proverbial piano bench, but other days you just might find that you are able to communicate beauty.
