Think of a time when you played a concert or an audition that didn't go as well as you hoped.
How did you feel about yourself?
What kind of self-talk did you engage in?
Did you review each moment like game film, replaying over and over again the wrong note, the missed attack, or the wrong entrance?
What did you make it mean?
Did you see it as a moment of growth, an opportunity to learn something? Or did you make it mean something about your worth as a musician or as a human being?
A personal story:
Early in my career. I was playing second bassoon in a Mozart opera (It was so long ago, I can’t remember which one) and I saw that the upcoming aria was to begin with a fortissimo C#. When I played it, I was mortified that everyone else was playing a pianissimo C major chord. I had failed to see the “Tacet” written just above the aria in my part.
I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. Feeling my face flush, everyone looking at me, not being able to leave, knowing that everyone in the hall heard that and knew it was me.
The best part though was when the timpani player came up to me during the break and joked about it. He said, “Don't worry, I don't think everybody heard that.” But then he said, “If that's the worst thing that ever happens to you in your career, you’re doing great."
Despite my colleagues reassuring words, I replayed that scene in my mind for years. It was one of those momentous cringe moments we all have. And for a long time, I took it to be a constant reminder that I wasn't good enough.
As musicians, we come to our art with the intention to put 100 percent of ourselves into our performance. It’s personal. When we do well and our friends and colleagues tell us how much they liked what we did, we feel great about ourselves. But when we make a mistake, we want to slip out the backdoor without talking to anyone. We beat ourselves up. We judge ourselves and each other.
Over the course of a career this can become exhausting and debilitating. As professionals, the ability to separate who we are from what we do is crucial to maintaining the emotional well-being and resilience needed to get up every morning and overcome the inevitable challenges we all face.
We have to find a way to transition from making it personal to making it professional.
One of the ways to do this which I've found most helpful is the idea that we all have two containers within us.
· The first container is Confidence. This container goes up and down depending on our thoughts about how well we do a particular task or how well we perform in a particular area. Confidence is about what we do.
· The second container is Self-confidence. This is your belief in your ability to do hard things, that you can fall down and get back up and that no matter what happens, you'll be ok. Self-confidence is your belief about who you are.
Confidence is fluid. It Goes up and down according to your experiences, the feedback you receive, your stage in the growth process, or whether you’re having a good day or a bad day.
Confidence is based on evidence from the past but it’s not always accurate because we aren't always in the best position to measure our competence objectively.
Sometimes our confidence is higher than our ability, sometimes it's lower than our ability.
It's normal to have low levels of confidence when we do something that we haven't done before or are still learning how to do, and we generally acquire more confidence as we gain competence in any particular area.
Having low confidence doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong. It's a normal part of the growth process, as you go from lower ability to higher ability.
This means that confidence is a result, not a prerequisite to action.
You don't need to be confident in order to do what you need to do to move forward.
And this is ok because what you do and your confidence about it have absolutely nothing to do with your worth or who you are.
But if you always rely on confidence to move forward, you will only keep doing the things you've already done, the things you are already good at.
Self-confidence, on the other hand, is internally generated and not tied to what you do or your ability in any one area.
It is based on your thoughts about yourself. It is a state of being.
Self-confidence is the basis for the emotions of Courage, Trust, Resilience, and Growth
It's knowing that you can fail and still be ok because you see failure as a learning opportunity, not as a threat.
It's what allows you to be good at doing new things: trying, failing, learning, and growing.
It is adopting a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset.
When you have self-confidence, you can still have low confidence in a particular area, but also know that you can still achieve your goals because you are capable of figuring things out and walking the path of growth.
No one can give you self-confidence and no one can take it away.
It is based on your thinking which means you get to choose to believe in yourself no matter what.
When you rely on yourself for self-confidence, you know that when you lack it, you only need to change your thinking, which you can do at any time.
Self-confidence is choosing to remember that you are capable of doing hard things, trusting that you can handle difficult situations, figure things out, and that you can fall down and get back up as you continue to move forward.
The problem is that we are socialized in Western society to measure our self-worth by how well we do what we do, by comparing ourselves to others.
When we define our worth by what we do and how well we do it, we are using our competence at what we are DOING to determine the worth of who we ARE.
But this doesn't make any sense and it doesn't serve us at all.
As Stephen Pressfield says in his book "The War of Art,
"We do not overidentify with our jobs. We take pride in our work, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. When you overidentify with your aspiration, when you become overly invested in its success and over-terrified of its failure, you take it so personally that you become paralyzed. You fail to establish the necessary boundaries between who you are and what you do that are so essential to actually doing the work. Without these boundaries you exhaust yourself, become a servant to every circumstance outside of your control."
In addition, when you tie your self-confidence to what you do, you invite the opinions of others to shape your feelings of self-worth.
If you rely on other people for self-confidence, you are relying on a confidence that isn't yours and you will always need everyone else to believe in you before you can believe in yourself.
This means you'll always be trying to manage other people's opinions of you, which is impossible, exhausting, and creates an energy of neediness, and it means that you'll be knocked down as soon as someone doesn't believe in you.
This is the danger of attaching your self-worth to what you do, of falsely believing that what you do and how well you do it, is who you are.
Some of you may be wondering, how is self-confidence different from arrogance?
Arrogance is thinking you're better than someone else and then trying to prove it. It comes from a place of creating false self-confidence by trying to put others down.
Ironically, arrogance typically comes from a lack of self-confidence. It’s based on fear and can’t handle any kind of rejection.
Self-confidence when genuine, understands that all humans are inherently worthy and capable. It doesn’t need or allow for the putting down of others. It is knowing that you can handle fear or any other negative emotion. It's a feeling of abundance, not one of scarcity.
Here are five ways to develop your self-confidence and become less dependent on confidence to move yourself forward.
1. Bring awareness to your thinking and practice believing the thoughts that create self-confidence.
Most of your beliefs are recycled. You don't even realize how much self-doubt and anxiety your beliefs produce because you’re so used to thinking them. The human brain is designed to be efficient, so it likes to think the same thoughts over and over again. Even if your thoughts aren't serving you well, they are familiar and almost comfortable in their predictability.
Some examples of common recycled thoughts are:
· Failure is weakness.
· I'm different from someone who is super successful.
· I don't know how.
· That person is different, special, privileged, and lucky.
· Rejection is the worst thing that can happen.
· Other people's opinions define me.
· The less risk I take, the better
· Confidence is something you either have or you don't.
· Experiencing fear means you aren't confident.
· Confident people are comfortable and don't feel afraid.
These common thoughts are all lies.
In order to develop self-confidence, bring awareness to your current thinking and consciously choose the thoughts that both serve you and that you are capable of believing.
2. Work on developing a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset.
A Growth mindset is when you see failures or setbacks as an opportunity for learning, where you focus on the process of mastering something new and enjoy being challenged and learning new things.
With a fixed mindset, you view your abilities or skills as innate, and you shy away from trying new or difficult things because of your fear of failure. You see failure as a permanent state, rather than as an opportunity for experimentation and growth.
When you have a fixed mindset, you focus obsessively on outcomes. You think that the outcome of any effort is all that matters, and you define yourself by whether you've achieved it or not.
With a growth mindset, you focus on the process. Whether you achieve the goal or not, you focus on what you've learned and how you've grown.
This takes the focus off the external accomplishments and puts it on what you have learned, what skills you’ve acquired, what experience you’ve gained, and how you are stronger for having done what you did.
3. Add the word "yet" to the end of that thought.
Notice the difference in the way it feels to say, “I can’t play this excerpt up to tempo” versus “I can’t play this excerpt up to tempo yet.”
The word “yet” presupposes process rather than finality and this helps take you into a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.
4. Write your story.
What difficult challenges have you overcome in your life? How did those experiences make you who you are today? What resources did you discover or develop to overcome those challenges?
Write down 10 ways you've grown, things you've learned how to do better, or skills you've developed as a professional or as a human being.
Read over the list and see how you feel. Read it every day and your self-talk will shift a tiny bit each time.
5. Experiment with Implementing a “Dare of the Day.”
What is one small thing you could do today that feels scary or uncomfortable and would push you in the direction of growth?
Knowing that you can accomplish difficult things while also knowing that you can fail and still be ok, is what creates self-confidence.
Some thoughts on Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is when someone already has a baseline level of competence in an area but still tells themselves or believes, "I'm not good enough to be here".
This happens whenever you up your game, taking it to the next level, putting yourself in situations that are new and challenging. In a sense, whenever you grow.
The real issue though is the false belief that Imposter Syndrome is a problem.
It’s not having Imposter Syndrome that is actually the real problem because whenever you grow, you put yourself at the edge of or outside of your comfort zone and whenever you do this, you will always have feelings of self-doubt.
This is an indication that you are on the right path, not that something has gone wrong.
The goal is not to become someone who doesn't experience imposter syndrome, but to become the person that has learned to make friends with it, because its very existence is an indication that you are taking action in your life.
When you achieve success, you don't become the person who no longer feels discomfort or self-doubt. You become the person that has learned how to experience that and move forward anyway.
You are not what you do
As a musician and artist, you seek to express yourself through your art so it's common and natural for your identity to be wrapped up in what you do. This can serve you well when you want to connect to your commitment, motivation and inspiration, but when life’s inevitable failures and setbacks occur, when priorities change and evolve over the course of one’s life, or when external circumstances force major life changes, the impact on one’s identity and self-worth can feel destabilizing.
Personally, I prefer to think of myself as a conduit through which my musicianship, artistic expression, and all other creative output is channeled by a higher power. The results aren’t even completely up to me, and I know that deep down I’ll be ok no matter what happens.
This perspective allows me to untangle my self-worth from what I do, while still investing and showing up one hundred percent. In other words, I can be completely committed and devoted to the process without being attached to any specific outcome.
This distance and separation between what you do from who you are will allow you to do the work you want and need to do and to be grounded in the thoughts you choose to believe about yourself. And from this place of consciousness and emotional wellness, you become the author of your own story and the creator of your own moment-to-moment experience of life.
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