Mindset

Kathryn Bacasmot
December 13, 2021

At around 16 years old, I decided to take a break from my instrument, the piano. Over the years, I had developed a comfortable identity in excelling at music, but the fun went missing. Somewhere along the way, I had gotten caught up in the allure of winning and my thoughts became permeated with the idea that if I didn’t keep up the high achieving that I would be less of a person. I don’t know where the idea came from. It was certainly never communicated to me by anyone I knew—I was blessed to be surrounded by people who supported me without pressure. Yet somehow it materialized.

My experience is not unique, which is part of the reason I think it’s important to make sure we talk about it. The Covid-19 pandemic that forced halls to go dark worldwide urgently pressed the question to the fore: who are you apart from recognition and achievements? Hopefully a pandemic is a once in a lifetime experience, but other life circumstances (accident, injury, etc.) may arise for anyone at any time that pose the same dilemma. Happenstance aside, even if it’s all smooth sailing, the feeling that your worth is tied to your accomplishments is a highway to anxiety and depression. That’s no way to live (just watch the documentary The Weight of Gold to see how that pattern can detrimentally haunt even the most decorated amongst us). So, what do we do?

Finding answers to this issue is admittedly complicated, but we have to start somewhere. For one thing, we need to equip students early and often with practical tools and strategies for developing healthy mental and emotional habits around goal setting and stress management. As a young music student, I was taught technique, theory, posture awareness, phrasing and expression, but mindset was never addressed by my teachers. I became familiar with the book Mindset by Jacki Reardon and Hans Deckkers through soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan, who discussed it with Sarah Willis (horn, Berlin Philharmonic) during an interview. Though the book is written for tennis players, the skills of mental awareness and focus it fosters are transferable into any arena, including music and even everyday life. An example from the book is the skill of cultivating a mindset of curiosity over consumerism. When we are curious, we are better positioned to have realistic self-knowledge about where we are with our skills and create realistic goals around improving and growing. We are encouraged to ask why (why was practice less productive today?/what could be contributing factors?) rather than just feel upset or discouraged. Meanwhile, a consumer mindset is obsessed with shopping around for something that will guarantee the win. You’ve seen this behavior. It’s on display during auditions when parents and students press their ears to the door to hear what the others are doing. Competing comes naturally enough to us—what we need is deliberate training in how to do it well.

I understand now that as a teenager, when my identity became increasingly wrapped up with the goal of winning and achieving, the entire experience felt mercurial and out of my control because the truth is, competition in the arts is a strange mix of objective and subjective evaluation that is outside of your control. But practice and growth are in your control, and they can be incredibly, joyfully fulfilling in their own right.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, wrote that “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” In the practice room, we have the ability to become people who listen carefully, are able to make adjustments, develop patience and perseverance—the list of positives goes on and on. But those character traits, that can make us not only good musicians but also good citizens and good friends, will fall into the shadows unless we learn to move the spotlight off winning, because as Patrick Mouratoglou, tennis coach to Serena Williams, has said, “winning is not a goal, because it’s a result.”