The importance of allowing yourself to make mistakes.

Quite often when I’m teaching I see students who mentally don’t deal well with making mistakes. This got me thinking about how often I do this myself in my own practice, where making a mistake is often followed up with an internal dialogue of degrading and scolding.

This does many things, one of which is making practice not enjoyable, after a while we start to associate practice with pain and self hate. We start to avoid it.

This is why to often you’ll find yourself reaching for your phone or giving in to distractions very easily when in front of the music stand.

Let’s create an environment where it’s ok to mess up, as long as you keep working on something, it will eventually get better. Yes, we can create more efficient ways of practicing however, practice being enjoyable is the best practice strategy, because from this state we’re able to put in more effort and work on things in more detail.