Learning to ride

My 5-year-old daughter made the monumental decision today to take the training wheels off her bike. 🚴‍♀️ It took a bit of coaxing, followed by quite a few wobbles, crashes, and even a few tears. But it was amazing to see how quickly she went from struggling, to hooning down the street, singing a tune, and giving my wife and I a wave as she raced by! Needless to say, I am one very proud dad! ☺️

Not so often do we get to see this explosion of skill development in the blink of an eye, so it was pretty special to watch. Despite the rapid improvement, my daughter still become frustrated at times, especially when she started to try too hard and focus on too many things at once.

So after crashing a couple of times, I got my daughter to think about only 1 or 2 things on her next attempt – something like “look straight ahead, and keep pedalling!!” All of a sudden she was significantly better, and started missing a lot more parked cars in the street!

By giving my daughter a select few things to think about whilst learning, she was limiting her focus to the basic essentials, which helped prevent becoming overwhelmed with too much information. Overwhelm happens when our “working memory” overflows with too many things on our mind at one time. 🤯

Working memory is responsible for temporarily storing and using information that is required to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as learning, reasoning and comprehension. Our working memory capacity is quite limited, so making sure that we keep our focus on only a few things at once is critical in operating effectively under any circumstance. Under pressure this is magnified further, so there are a few things you can do to help your performance development.

When you next step out on stage, remember that you are actually learning and refining new skills as you perform (just like learning to ride a bike!). Sometimes the expectations that we place on ourselves can cause frustration and create additional pressure. Whilst it would be great to “fix” all of our performance issues (technical, musical, and psychological) in one concert, unfortunately this is quite unrealistic.

Start out by addressing 1 or 2 aspects of your performance mindset. Plan what these aspects will be before the concert (such as remembering diaphragmatic breathing when you’re feeling anxious, or keeping your self-talk positive) and plan how you will go about tackling them. You may feel that you are missing out on addressing so many other perceived issues. But here it is important to accept and acknowledge that improvement will take time, (although probably much longer that you would like!) so you need to exercise plenty of patience as well. There will always be aspects that you can continue to develop as a performer, but that’s all part of your journey as a life-long musician.

Focusing on a few things and learning to let go of everything else will give you a much better chance of success. Keep it simple! Do this for every concert you play, and in a few short weeks or months you will be noticing significant improvements in those targeted areas. Good luck!