Observation

Still Life (1960) by Picasso

What are you observing when you are practicing?

If your mind goes immediately to how good or bad something is, you aren’t alone. From early on in the learning process, we are encouraged to focus on the right notes, the right rhythms, etc. It only makes sense that our desire to focus on what’s right grows as our musicianship does.

I had really wonderful teachers when I was young, but looking back from this perspective always makes me realize how little anyone taught me about practicing. I was given appropriate exercises, and even things to pay attention to about my technique or sound, but in terms of tools for fixing what I heard or even being able to identify a problem on my own I was lacking. Much of my practice was repeating things until they became at least passable.

That type of practice did generate results, but it also created a tremendous amount of friction and frustration. Progress was often slow. Because I didn’t really learn how to do practice more wisely until I was in college, I’ve always had a focus as a teacher on showing my students how to practice efficiently and how to start opening their ears during a practice session.

The benefit of time spent as a teacher or musician is perspective (and hopefully a little bit of useful wisdom, or at least confident understanding. In the last few years I have refocused my own practice habits in an effort to get better work done in less time while still moving my own performance bar higher. Recently I started working with other musicians on their Creative Resilience skills, and the combination of these activities helped pull together something that has shifted in my approach to practice and teaching practice over time: observation.

If we revisit our early practice sessions we can easily note that we were observing our skills. The prevailing method for most of us was to label “good” and move on, or “bad” and repeat. I think this has a place when we are very young - we need to be able to hear a correct note, rhythm, or know when our form or physical approach is not correct.

For most of us, we carry this approach well into maturity. I can remember the hours I spent repeating difficult passages as a teenager, labeling most things as “bad” and in need of repetition. Fortunately, as I moved through high school I started understanding the value of slow practice, varied speed practice, note grouping, changing rhythms, etc. All of these new practice skills helped move the needle forward faster, but my method of good, bad, repeat (repeat, repeat, repeat) wouldn’t change for years to come.

Teaching helped tremendously with my approach to practice. As I worked to give my students a better relationship with observation, my own continued to change. Our approach became more introspective together - what do you notice (What are your ears telling you? What is the feeling of playing telling you?) and how could you adjust it? Why would you like it to be different?

At this point in the process though, we continued to observe the quality of our skills.

When yoga, mindfulness, and meditation entered my life I learned a tremendous amount about observation. One of the best skills yoga taught me was that of observation without the need for immediate change. It emphasized noticing how I was showing up on my mat each day without forcing or desiring a different result. This idea of gently nudging myself to my limit transferred to practice and performance - what was possible in this moment? It had nothing to do with good or bad, or whether it was better or worse than yesterday - it simply meant finding the upper limit of what was possible in that moment.

You might think that acceptance of this nature would stunt our growth. On the contrary, it loosens our rigidity and encourages a trust of what we know - a permission to take risks and commit to trying without worry about good or bad.

In the same vein, mindfulness and meditation helped me understand how to label without quantifying. By observing our thoughts and identifying them specifically (“thinking,” “judging,” “reaching,” etc.) we remove the personal feeling of guilt or achievement that comes along with thinking about quality.

Transferring this to both my own practice and teaching was pivotal. We don’t need to know whether something is good or bad - our job needs to be to identify it, why it’s happening, if we would like it to be different, and how we might try to adjust.

What really helped me tie all of this understanding together into a practical application was reading Terry Orlick’s book “In Pursuit of Excellence.” (I’ve talked about this book before, and I can’t emphasize the value enough and I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface after one reading!) One of the tools Orlick points to the most is “debriefing” - something I now do regularly for myself, my students, and my Creative Resilience clients.

In its simplest form, debriefing is identifying what works and what doesn’t and why, without identifying quality, at the end of every practice session, rehearsal, or performance. It depersonalizes our results and opens our eyes to the places we are holding ourselves back intentionally or unintentionally.

Let’s take a moment to recap what I believe is our optimal journey of observation, beginning with the standard approach most of us learn, with the addition of these more refined skills of observation:

• Early practice and performance: Identify right or wrong (notes, rhythms, posture, sounds)

• Intermediate to advanced practice: Grow skills of introspection - why are the [notes, rhythms, posture, sounds] right or wrong? What do you feel or hear?

• Intermediate to advanced practice: Implement increasingly advance practice methods and techniques with introspection.

• Advanced practice: acceptance of current moment and skills, labeling of experience without valuing, implementation of advanced practice methods, debriefing to correlate introspection, skill, and outcomes.

All of this can be summed up in the difference between focusing on observing our skills or honing our skills of observation.

If you are focusing on observing your skills, then you are quantifying - good, bad, behind, inconsistent, etc.

If you are honing your skills of observation, then you are qualifying - why, how, what (are we doing, should we change), etc.

Which are you doing when you pick up your instrument?