You Can't Positive Think Your Way to Success
Sometimes I wish I could choose which version of myself to bring to a certain moment, performance, event or place.
Like the characters in Severance (which I finally jumped into it after all the buzz around it lately... I'm glad I did, it's gooood) who have "Innie" and "Outie" selves. Quick explanation: the "work self" and "real self" are separated by a severing procedure and have no knowledge at all about their other selves.
Wouldn't it be so easy to just "think positive", "be confident", and "trust my practice"? Choosing the well-spoken, witty, totally secure "outie" self, while my "innie" can hide in the dark cave with all her uncertainties and doubts?
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Sorry, but there's no EASY button :(
Being a musician, aspiring to achieve goals, setting out to become a professional... can feel like a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of life. Frankly, anything that's worth doing requires stamina, patience, grit and resilience.
Gabriele Oettingen, researcher and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking, came up with a goal-setting technique that is pretty spectacular in that allows for the big dreaming and positive thinking, but then advises us to do something different.
Yes, start with the ideal, the pie-in-the-sky version of things (and I absolutely encourage detailed, if you could have it abso-freaking all, dreaming - after all dreaming is a form of planning!)...
But then envision a very tired, unmotivated version of yourself.
Ask
- What does THAT person need?
- What plans would work for that person?
“The solution isn’t to do away with dreaming and positive thinking. Rather, it’s making the most of our fantasies by brushing them up against the very thing most of us are taught to ignore or diminish: the obstacles that stand in our way.”
Here’s why this is so great.
We know, it’s easy to dream.
But it's hard to be real.
The reality is the day to day, the obstacles, the mistakes, the fails. You can't just think or dream your way out of challenges.
You have to think realistically, and that doesn’t mean negatively.
It simply means we have to make a plan to overcome them.
You can’t “positive thinking” your way to success. And there's no "outie" version you can instantaneously snap your fingers to summon.*
What it does come down to is something we're not often taught: your mindset. There's definitely not a Mindset 101 class in music school!
That’s why the topic of mindset is so front and center here at Music360. These skills are CRITICAL to your success, but they're too often brushed aside. That's why we make programs chock full of incredibly useful and powerful tools for you to implement and make big shifts with!
The Mindset Mastery program is a self-paced week-long guide with:
- Daily content delivered straight to your inbox
- Implementation exercises that take just minutes but create lasting change
- Specific techniques for performance anxiety, goal setting, and inner critic management
- BONUS: "Performer's Emergency Toolkit" ($27 value)
Your cost is $67.
Get Mindset Mastery
...and see just what might shift for YOU after a week of focused mindset work!
Ixi
p.s. One of my students wrote me recently with this heartwarming note:
"It feels like I've been drawing on your teachings a lot recently, whether it's in my own practice or giving feedback in our studio classes. More importantly, it's helped me retain a sense of confidence when things get tough. I feel a lot more at ease when playing for others than I did just a few years ago. Practice sessions that ended in frustration used to be commonplace for me; now they're virtually a thing of the past. All of that is because you showed me so many different ways of perceiving myself and approaching my work."
I love helping people with this part of the work, because it seeps into all aspects of life, not just the musical side of things.
