Tartellog

Recently I met with a high school student who was visiting IU.  As he was packing up, he asked me if I had any advice on developing confidence.  As our time was short, I hope that my answer didn’t come off as flippant.  I told him:

No one can give you confidence.  It’s something you have to build.

As a teacher, I can give advice and tools to help build confidence, but eventually the student has to take ownership.  If I give a student tools and exercises, telling them that once they complete them that they will be confident, I’m lying.  What is most important in the process is that the student is aware of how they’re doing.

I try to make confidence into a logic problem.  Let’s say there is an etude a student has never seen.  I will ask how confident they are in their ability to perform the etude.  Usually, it’s fairly low.  Then I will give the student one week to prepare it, with tools on how to prepare.  After the week, I ask how confident they are.  Some will say very confident, while others will still say they are not confident at all.  What’s the difference?  The students who used the preparation time to not only learn the etude, but understand and believe that they are able to play the etude, have done themselves a great service.  Too many people ignore the second part.

So here’s the logic:

If you are practicing something, you should be getting better at it. 

If you’re getting better at it, you should have more confidence in your ability to perform it.  

So….if you believe that you are practicing well, but you’re not gaining confidence, you have one of two problems.  Either:

1. You aren’t practicing as well as you think, or
2. You aren’t paying attention to the progress you’re making.

It can be easy to focus on the nuts and bolts of:

• playing all the right notes in the right order
• playing dynamics
• playing in good time
• playing musically

because all of those things are important.  Too often we focus exclusively on what still needs work, instead of also including what has improved.  Make sure you’re looking at the big picture.  After working on a piece of music, ask yourself if it’s better than when you started.  If the answer is yes, then give yourself some credit for doing good work, and realize that you should now have increased confidence, as you know you’re heading in the right direction.

If this sounds overly simple- good.  It’s not complicated (that doesn’t mean it’s easy!).  I’ve found that people like to make concepts that they find difficult as complicated as possible.  Making difficult concepts as simple as possible helps me know that a solution is not only possible, but something I can achieve.