Bringing light and clarity to your musical journey (Coaches Corner, Episode 12)

Christopher: How would you like to bring more light and clarity into your musical life?

I’ve got a great episode lined up to share with you today, but before we dive in, a couple of quick updates. Normally I do little bits and pieces of updates just for our live crew, and I chop it out when we publish the YouTube video and the podcast episode. So if you’re watching the replay on YouTube or listening to the audio podcast, you actually get the little behind-the-scenes update this time!

So the first is just to let you know, we’re going to be taking a short break from the show. I’m going to be going away on vacation, I’m spending time with family in Italy. And I’m secretly going to be putting the finishing touches on the musicality book while I’m there. So I’ll be away for a little bit.

So we’ll do a brief hiatus on new episodes. And speaking of the Musicality book… Sneaky early access for you! A treat for being part of our loyal Musicality Now audience.

We are about to, today, email our early interest list about the book.

But just between you and me, if you go to musicalitybook.com/preorder, that’s musicalitybook.com/preorder, you can sneak in and pre-order your copy of the new Musicality book today!

We’ve got a few exciting pre-order bonuses bundled in, including instant access to the first few chapters, which means you get to be the first to start reading the book. And we’ve also got some really exciting training bundled in so you have something to dive into right away.

There’s also an exclusive opportunity coming up in September just for book buyers, and some of the numbers for that are limited. So that’s another great reason to get in ahead of the crowd by pre-ordering today.

Anyway, so we’ll be taking a short pause from new episodes. But fret not! We have a huge back catalog. We’re up to 316 episodes of Musicality Now, and I actually only know a handful of people who have listened to every single one.

So the beauty of musicality is it’s perennial, it’s evergreen. What’s true is true forever. Which means that even episodes from way back in 2017 are still just as relevant and powerful today.

So even though we won’t have new episodes for a short bit, this is a great opportunity to go back and binge your way through those first few hundred episodes that you’ll find on the podcast or on our YouTube channel.

So on to today’s episode. It’s a Coaches Corner episode.

Today we have Camilo explaining the benefits of having a musical accountability partner. Andy gives tips on becoming more aware of what helps you to keep winning in music. And Andrew shares insights on musical goals, dreams, identity, and the relationship between each of those.

All that and more in this week’s episode of Coaches Corner. And as always, I encourage you to listen out for one little idea or insight or tip from everything that’s shared, something that clicks with you, and then go put it to use in your musical life. Here we go!

————

Christopher: Hey, we are back with another round of Coaches Corner, where I get the intense pleasure of hanging out with our Next Level coaching team and picking their brains on your behalf – to draw out some of the juicy nuggets of wisdom and insight and new tips, tricks and techniques they’ve been developing inside coaching to help you in your musical life.

I’m joined today by our head coach, Andrew Bishko, and coaches Andy Portas and Camilo Suárez. Welcome, guys! Great to have you with us.

I’m going to pick on Camilo first this week. Camilo, what’s new in coaching lately?

Camilo: Lately, I’ve been talking with my clients about accountability.

We realise that many people in the Next Level program, they know what to do, they know how to practice better, but still, we find some obstacles in actually doing that.

So working as an accountability partner has been effective in helping them and helping myself to keep up with my practice.

We talked about that, we made plans. And it’s working well because they feel they are making more progress. Having an accountability partner is such a key part of this program.

Christopher: Fantastic. And for anyone who hasn’t heard of the idea of an accountability partner before, can you just explain a bit more how that works?

Camilo: Yeah, so we set common goals or we set a goal. It’s important to have someone know about the goal that you have. Once that you know that you will feel more encouraged to complete that objective that you have.

Christopher: Gotcha, yeah. And when we’ve kind of done a little bit of accountability partner match-making in Musical U a few times in the past and just encouraged people to do like a daily check-in, or each time they practice, they report to each other.

There was a period, actually, where Zac and I were doing it. I was trying to get more diligent about my daily drum practice, and so we would just message each other once a day and be like “did my practice today!” And it really does have an effect. Like, even if you consider yourself quite disciplined and quite consistent, just knowing that that other person is going to wonder whether you did it unless you tell them you did it definitely amps up that consistency, doesn’t it?

Camilo: Yes. And we are able to share wins and see how the other person is doing. So it’s a no-pressure environment in which you feel really encouraged to keep moving forward.

Christopher: Terrific. And Andy, how about you? What’s new in coaching lately?

Andy: Well, there’s plenty been new. The thing that I’d like to talk about today, though, is it’s about one of my clients who’s a sax player. Although the technique kind of really works with any instrument.

And what was happening was she was having problems playing at the high D and high E flat, and so she was kind of fluffing these notes, and they weren’t coming out very strong.

So I suggested to her, okay, right, slow down, take your time, and have a few attempts at hitting the high D. So we used that as the target note.

And then I sort of said to her, well, when you feel you’ve got as close as you can to getting a good high D out, stop and just consider how your hands feel, how your mouth feels, and how the whole kind of sound of this feels in your body.

So she did that, and she played a good high D. And she then kind of thought about exactly how it felt. And she was like “oh, I’ve got three fingers on these keys, and I’ve got these fingers on these keys”.

So it was really clear that she’d not really taken the time to kind of slow down and consider exactly what it takes to play this specific note. And from then on, I got her to play a few more Ds, and she hit it spot-on every time.

I was taken aback by it, to be fair! It worked so, so well.

And there was a kind of bonus to this as well. Everything else you played during our meeting, her tone for everything was really crisp. It was crazy.

At the start of the meeting, things sounded a little bit blurred. There didn’t seem to be much front end on the sound. But after we’d kind of done this little exercise, everything was lovely. There was a real kind of transient to the front of the sound, and it was bonkers how it worked, to be fair.

But like I say, this works on other instruments as well. So this is not kind of just for the sax or other wind instruments, but you can do it on guitar, piano. Just notice how your hands are on the instrument.

Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that’s a really beautiful example of what comes up a lot with the superlearning stuff, right?

Where that reflection step, we so often skip over it, we don’t even think to pause. And when something does go right, think about what’s going on. And it’s that interplay between the instinctive, subconscious mind and the body wisdom that somewhere, somehow, sometimes knows how to do the thing.

And then bringing in your conscious mind so that you can replicate it more easily in future. I think that’s a gorgeous example.

Andy: Yeah. It’s about slowing right down and being very, very deliberate about what you’re doing because I don’t think we ever practice as slowly as we really should be doing. And I don’t think we’re ever as deliberate as we really should be.

Christopher: Yeah, that was a really interesting point, actually, in Dr. Molly Gebrian’s masterclass this past weekend.

She was kind of “preaching to the choir”, in that a lot of the people there were familiar with some of, if not all of, what she was covering. But multiple people in the chat were like “yeah, I know this is right… but I never do it!”

And it kind of comes back to the accountability too, right? Like, we know we should practice slowly, but do we? We know we should pause and reflect, but do we?

And really, you know, that’s the benefit of having a coach, obviously, but even just for yourself in, in solo practice, to be disciplined about taking that moment, to pause, reflect, give your brain a chance to connect the dots.

Very cool. And, Andrew, what’s new in coaching lately? What can you share?

Andrew: Well, I was working with a client recently who was contemplating his musical identity. And again, he was actually really stimulated by that recent workshop that you did.

But it was interesting how he took it and wherever he was taking it and using it as a way, like having this musical identity, what is my musical identity? And focusing on a lot about what he wasn’t rather than what he was.

And I realised that what he was actually doing, he was using his goals as a way to whip himself. And we all do this.

We have a goal that we want, and we see that goal, that view, that desire that we have, and that’s wonderful. Then we compare ourselves, our current situation to where we want to go, and it’s like, I’m not there… I’m not going to… How am I ever going to get there?

And when we get to that place where we’re just using that goal to whip ourselves, then it seems like the goal gets further away rather than closer. No matter what we do, no matter how hard we practice, no matter all the steps that we take, it never seems to come. And that just fulfills our prophecy that we’re never going to make it there. We’re never going to have that.

And I think that there’s a couple of things that can really help with this.

First of all, we talk about dreaming big. We talk about having a “Big Picture Vision”. But I want to emphasize the word dream, okay? This is a dream.

And if you think about dreams, dreams are kind of floaty and fuzzy, and we’re not really sure what’s going on? We wake up and we try to describe, and it’s like “well, you know, this creature walked in, and it was kind of like my ex-wife and kind of like a baboon, and kind of like, and then it resembled somewhat of a algebraic equation”!

So we have all these things that sort of come together in this very fuzzy way. Which is great in terms of helping us move.

So if we think about our musical goals as more like dreams and that the finishing pictures, what’s going to make it concrete is something that we’re going to develop and grow along the way, rather than always comparing ourselves to a fixed picture. Let that picture be a fuzzy picture. Let it be a moving picture.

And instead, let’s focus on what we did today, to take a step, what we’re doing right now in this moment, to take a step.

So if your goal is to, you want to be performing on stage and you want to be shredding and you want the audience screaming, alright. Focus on what it’s like to play your instrument, what it feels like to play that.

Like, a lot of the body awareness that Andy’s been talking about and what it feels like to play that scale, or what it feels like to play that like. Or what is my learning in this moment?

I had another client this week who was telling me that he really, truly looks forward to mistakes. He’s arrived at that point where he’s like “I’m really happy when I make a mistake because I know that’s something I can work on, that’s something I can learn, that’s something I can do something about”. Because the mistake gives us the information. It’s our greatest teacher.

So this idea of keeping our goals fuzzy and dreamy, the big goals, and then narrowing on down on what is this step today, and creating a practice of satisfaction and enjoyment in our musical practice today in what the task is before us that may lead to another place, that may lead to another thing. And the end goal is going to be even richer and fuller and more wonderful than the original one that we started with.

Christopher: I love that, yeah.

I think I’ve been… I’ve had reason to go back to various times I’ve taught that Big Picture Vision exercise in the past, recently, and it made me want to stick a post-it note on my computer monitor, which is like “any time you talk about Big Picture Vision, tell them it’s not goal setting!”

Because you’re right. There is a huge gulf between a vision and a goal. And at Musical U, we talk about this idea of “the Gap and the Gain” that comes from Dan Sullivan, which is like, you know, you’re always moving towards that horizon. You’re never going to get there. So stop beating yourself up for how far you are from it, and reflect on how far you’ve come and how far you’re going.

And that is really valuable. But I think also what you just touched on there, really understanding the dream-like nature of that vision and letting it inspire you and morph and be very motivational, almost completely separate from your concrete goal-setting and all of the planning and the nitty-gritty. And then making sure that in the moment you’ve got that ease and joy going on.

I think that’s a really beautiful perspective. Really wonderful.

Andrew: Thank you. And may I add, there’s one picture that always sticks in my mind.

I don’t play video games, sorry, but I was watching some people play a video game, and this was maybe around 2006, so an older video game. And in this game, it was a series of rooms in a building, and all the rooms were dark.

But when your character stepped into that room, there would be a little light that came out. And as the character took steps, the room would become more and more illuminated until you could see everything that was in their room.

But it didn’t happen until the steps were taken, alright? So if all your attention is on trying to see that what’s around there and get to this one place, but you’re not taking the steps, you’re missing out on all the wonderful things that could be hiding in that room or terrible things that could be hiding in that room. So it’s really important. It’s always a picture I have in my mind of terms of taking the steps.

Each step I take is bringing a little bit more light, a little bit more clarity, helping things to become more clear and more and filling in the picture, like taking the outlines of a picture and then painting it in with paint and texture and all that.

Christopher: Perfect. Yeah.

And it’s definitely one of the bugbears we see with adult learners, isn’t it? That intellectual need to know every step of the process. They come to Musical U and they’re like “you will teach me musicality stuff!”

And then they’re like “Tell me the 27 steps between here and there. And THEN I will take step one”.

And we’re like “well, it doesn’t quite work like that!”

And I’m also reminded there’s that analogy they often use in personal development of a rocket launch – where you launch your rocket towards the moon or the orbit or the planet or wherever you want to get it to. Or even a plane in flight. And then there are literally thousands of course corrections all along the way.

And you know the destination. You point in the right direction to begin with. But you still need to be in the moment making those choices, seeing what comes up as that fog disappears.

Yeah, I’m going to have that video game illustration in mind in future. I think that’s a really great one. Awesome.

Well, as always, total pleasure getting together with you guys, and thank you for sharing those ideas.

I hope everyone watching and listening will grab on to just one little tidbit from today and take it away, apply in your music practice to have more ease, more joy, and more success.

Cheers, guys! See you again soon.

Subscribe For Future Episodes!

Apple Podcasts | Android | YouTube | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!