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kaberettA framing I have been mulling particularly this week, with respect to playing the horn but also other topics: if I want to Do A Thing, then setting a minimum amount of Thing below which I have "failed" such that I can "fail" while Doing the thing at all is... actively counterproductive.
If horn practice "doesn't count" if I don't play for half an hour, then that's twenty minutes of actually playing plus the executive function involved in getting there that... I'm beating myself up over, because it's "not good enough", so I get all the exhaustion and all of the shame and a lot of the "there's no point even trying" and none of the dopamine.
Which is, I think, why "play one note! any note! there you go You've Done The Thing" is working so well for me: it's a minimum I can do reliably, and then of course once I've actually picked the horn up it's fairly easy to trip and fall into doing at least 15 minutes' practice I otherwise wouldn't have, and hey, guess what, that practice is cumulatively leaving me in much better shape than I was even a month ago.
And: even when I don't like the sound I'm making, the "one note is enough!" lets me go "hmm, I'm noticing that I'm hurting... here, what's going on with that?" and, you know, at least trouble-shoot! Noticing and thinking about problems is way better than never having them arise in the first place.
I note that this general attitude is also the thing that gets me unstuck on PhD-related writing (write some bullet points; convert some bullet points to highly informal conversational prose; ...) and a variety of non-musical physical skills: "hey GO YOU you DID A THING and FOR BONUS POINTS you can see what you want to work on next!" is Very Much the opposite of failure.
But good grief have I got a deep-rooted historical pattern of looking at something I've done, judging it inadequate, and giving up -- which is a not dissimilar thought process, but is skewed enough to lead me fairly badly astray.
If horn practice "doesn't count" if I don't play for half an hour, then that's twenty minutes of actually playing plus the executive function involved in getting there that... I'm beating myself up over, because it's "not good enough", so I get all the exhaustion and all of the shame and a lot of the "there's no point even trying" and none of the dopamine.
Which is, I think, why "play one note! any note! there you go You've Done The Thing" is working so well for me: it's a minimum I can do reliably, and then of course once I've actually picked the horn up it's fairly easy to trip and fall into doing at least 15 minutes' practice I otherwise wouldn't have, and hey, guess what, that practice is cumulatively leaving me in much better shape than I was even a month ago.
And: even when I don't like the sound I'm making, the "one note is enough!" lets me go "hmm, I'm noticing that I'm hurting... here, what's going on with that?" and, you know, at least trouble-shoot! Noticing and thinking about problems is way better than never having them arise in the first place.
I note that this general attitude is also the thing that gets me unstuck on PhD-related writing (write some bullet points; convert some bullet points to highly informal conversational prose; ...) and a variety of non-musical physical skills: "hey GO YOU you DID A THING and FOR BONUS POINTS you can see what you want to work on next!" is Very Much the opposite of failure.
But good grief have I got a deep-rooted historical pattern of looking at something I've done, judging it inadequate, and giving up -- which is a not dissimilar thought process, but is skewed enough to lead me fairly badly astray.
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Date: 2020-03-06 11:35 pm (UTC)<3
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Date: 2020-03-07 12:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-08 10:57 am (UTC)