How to do the Scary Thing Without Spiraling

Practice makes permanent: training yourself to have your own back throughout the creative process

One thing I’ve seen consistently throughout my decades of performing and teaching is this: that the quality of the energy you put into the creative process corresponds directly to the quality of the outcome. This is true whether you are starting a business, writing a book, painting a picture, or anything else that demands an idea, skill, and dedication.

One semester at the university, I had a slew of students (all Taurus babies, as an aside) who were as talented as they were set in their ways.

I’ll make a composite of them to protect their identities and call this person Angela.

The Perfectionism Trap

Angela had a special kind of talent. She had a compelling spiritual connection to music and was the kind of extrovert who could inspire others through her performance and her teaching. Her education had convinced her, however, that she was inferior to the students who had started playing at age 4 and had no apparent technical difficulties.

I used to try to reason with this kind of student with the argument that a technically perfect performance does not equal a moving performance, to no avail. They inevitably wanted to attain perfection first and express themselves second.

Angela’s response to feeling inferior was to literally grit her teeth while practicing and stop herself every few moments to correct something. She didn’t breathe while playing so as to be able to hear the slightest imperfection. I knew she had it in her to be a natural performer, but her recitals in the university were strangulated by tension; a palpable wall separated her from both her inner artist and her audience.

“Hey Angela,” I said one day, after listening to her start and stop a dozen times in a lesson. “Imagine you were teaching a 6-year-old child who was trying to learn a new piece. Would you stop her every few seconds to tell her what was wrong?”

“No, of course not,” she said, and I knew this to be true from watching her teach in pedagogy class.

“What effect do you think this is having on your body, on your young inner artist who is just trying to sing?”

Tears started to stream down her face. “I know it’s not good, I know I’m not practicing well, but I don’t want to repeat mistakes. I was told I should never let a mistake go.”

“I understand that. That’s what we’re taught. But there’s something else happening here: you’re training yourself to hold your breath, to listen for mistakes, to tense up all your muscles as if you were about to be beaten. And this tension is what you’re internalizing in the process. This is what you’re training yourself to do.”

She nodded and wiped her nose. “I just want to be satisfied with my performance. I want it to go well.”

"Yes, exactly,” I said. “Which means you have to practice being satisfied. Train yourself to be in love with the result.”

She looked at me blankly. I sympathized. How can you be in love with anything when you’ve been dissecting it to discover its defects?

Then I dug into my large bag of silly tricks for getting students to release their high standards. I invited her back into the somatic recollection of joyfully singing to herself as a child. I closed my eyes, turned my back, plugged my ears to give her space. Then we worked on recalling that un-self-conscious joy and channeling it into the cello, no matter how many ‘mistakes’ might happen along the way. I persisted until she was able to reconnect with her inner artist, that musical spirit that had brought her as far as a professional degree in a competitive music college.

By the end of the lesson, she was playing through long sections without stopping; she was actually breathing and smiling. Most importantly, her personality was coming through the music again, not just the checklist of what she believed should go into a good performance.

“How satisfied do you feel with your playing now?” I asked.

“Not 100%, but much better than before. And the crazy thing is that I am actually making fewer mistakes now.”

“Did you get there by gritting your teeth and listening for mistakes?”

“No,” she said, looking like she was experiencing an epiphany/duh moment. “I got there by not even thinking about mistakes at all.”

That’s it—not thinking about mistakes. Distracting the thinking mind from deficits and directing it toward beauty and connection. It’s so simple and yet so challenging because the thinking mind is convinced that there is a right way to succeed and a checklist to be worked through. The thought is so compelling that it seems like truth, especially when no one has ever recognized and cultivated your inner artist.

You don’t have to be on any kind of professional artistic path to have an inner artist. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you know you have one too. Like all my Taurus students that semester, you probably know that you must create [fill in the blank—your artwork, business, book, etc.] or forever feel like an incomplete person.

The inner artist is your guide not just in creating what society would call art but in developing a form of expression unique to you in this world of increasingly homogeneous words and images.

It is your own personal mentor who connects disparate ideas and interests across time and space to shape your life into something unreplicable, not a facsimile of any corporate or institutional model.

It is also the playful child who sees solutions and connections the adults can’t see.

Full Disclosure: What No One Tells You About the Creative Process

Angela went back to gritting her teeth the next day. The following week, we practiced letting go again, and the week after that, and the week after that, and so on and so forth. Deeply ingrained behavioral patterns that are often linked to (epigenetic) trauma don’t dissolve after a few mindset exercises. They have to be practiced and embodied over and over again.

If you haven’t taken the bold action step that might put you in a vulnerable position, it may be because you simply haven’t developed the muscle to do the scary thing in an environment that does not support you.

As a musician, I know there is no substitute for practice; I am not afraid to go there, to put in the thousands of hours of work. I am also not afraid to hold your hand while you put in your first dozen hours, or your 500th hour. When you practice satisfaction, love, and self-compassion, you are inviting the inner artist to come out and play.

This is what I do with the Angelas of the world and this is what I offer those of you who long to finally realize your creative potential: I teach you to listen to your inner artist rather than the criticism you’ve internalized from your surroundings. I use live music to let you explore and connect to your intuition, which naturally guides you to the next right action step. The inner artist is the embodiment of safety.

Just imagine taking those bold steps with the feeling that someone has your back no matter what—and that someone is you.