Creative Coaching for Musicians

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S3 E58: What Does Your Creative Practice Need?

Rebecca Hass

What does it really mean to have a creative practice? In this episode I explore the word “practice” and the basic ingredients for a nourishing art practice. I also offer reflection prompts to help you figure out if your creative practice is working for you and how to tweak it if it’s not, so you can grow into the artist that you want to be!

What practices (creative, wellness, or otherwise) are nourishing you right now?

Tag me on Instagram @rebecca_hass (or send me an email) to share!

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 58 of Being a Whole Person. 

In the last full episode, I talked about consistency and what that can look like in your creative practice. I just said the word “practice” - that made me think a lot about what that means and all the ideas that we might have built up around it. What practice can look like, how it can nurture us, all that kind of stuff. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. 

But first, I have two announcements. Number one, the spring edition of my quarterly Build Your Seasonal Self Care Survival Kit workshop is coming up on Wednesday, March 23, at 4pm Pacific. That's a 90 minute workshop, where we will get together and go through the framework of nine different types of rest, and compile a big list of ideas of self care. Then we'll distill that list down to a menu that's kind of your go to List of self care practices that you can choose from in the season. We're in COVID anniversary season now, and spring can be a tricky time for energy. Even when you're really excited about spring, that increase in energy, that jitteriness, it can be overwhelming sometimes. So every season has its self care needs, but I think spring, for me, brings even more of those needs. So if you're in need of a little revamp to your self care practices, or just to check in with yourself and know what works for you right now and what you plan on doing, that would be a great time to join the workshop. It's $22, and that includes a recording if you can't make it live, as well as PDF worksheets and resources. The link is in the show notes to sign up for that. 

Second announcement, you know this one: please rate and review the podcast. As an independent podcaster doing all this stuff on my own, it is so important to get those ratings and reviews so that the algorithm can allow this podcast to be found. I want to keep spreading this message of compassionate self care to fuel our creativity, because I think we all need that. So if you've been helped by this podcast, I would be so appreciative if you would go over to Apple podcasts and give a review or rating. Thanks in advance. 

So let's talk about practice. This word probably means something different to each and every one of us, and how you define it is going to be very personal. I have varying thoughts about the word practice that have evolved over time. As you might imagine, as a musician, this word has been ingrained from a young age. Practice is what it is called when you regularly play the piano or play an instrument, that word “practice” is used very commonly. I remember my piano teacher, when I was younger, saying, “You have to practice, you can't just play,” and there's maybe some overwork, and there's some stuff wrapped up in that that I won't get into right now. 

But I see her point that practicing is playing with a goal in mind. When you're someone who is taking music lessons, you have an assignment each week of some pieces you're supposed to work on and some technical exercises and, you know, certain parts of those pieces that you've been instructed to work on or certain elements expressively. So, yes, practicing is different from playing in that way. I think they can overlap, and it's not to say that practice can have no enjoyment in it. I'll get more into that later. 

But sometimes the word practice did have that negative connotation of obligation, like, “I have to practice,” “I should be practicing.” Those were sentences I said all the time in college. Anytime I was doing something fun, it always felt like I should be practicing more if I had a free moment. So I do have some baggage with the word practice. But I think I have healed a lot of that over the years. 

It always felt different to me when I heard other types of artists use the word practice, like “my painting practice” or “my creative practice,” in general. It almost sounded spiritual to me when certain people said it, it sounded like something that they really relied upon for nourishment. That's how I really want to use the word practice. 

It also gets used in a medical context, like you practice medicine, or my chiropractic practice, or my therapy practice, or whatever it may be. They use the word practice, even though they already know what they're doing enough to help you with your particular ailment. That kind of gives the idea that no matter what we're doing, practice is a lifelong activity that we get to keep growing with, which I think is very cool. 

So coming out of Episode 57’s discussion about consistency, consistency is more about what does your habit look like? Like logistically? How often, that kind of stuff? But then what does your practice look like? Is it more about breaking down, what are you actually doing? 

I was just making myself a little practice grid, because I want to be a little bit more structured in how I'm approaching my piano practice. So I was kind of thinking in terms of skills, like, maybe I'm doing something technical. Maybe I am working on scales and exercises for that. Maybe I'm working on improvisation. Maybe I'm working on chords, like how to voice jazz chords. 

There are all kinds of different skills that you might be working on in your practice. Or for visual art, maybe you're thinking more about line or texture, or how you're using a particular type of paint, something like that. You know what your examples are for your particular creative practice, I'm sure. 

This is where you can ask yourself, does it feel like there's anything missing from your creative practice right now, either in terms of those different elements, activities, or maybe in terms of how it feels. Maybe it's starting to feel like a grind, and you need more fun infused in it. Or like I have been feeling lately, maybe it's just feeling a little too unstructured and it needs a little bit more of a container around it. You're going to go through different feelings around that in different seasons of your life, of course, and different parts of your practice are going to inform other parts. It's all interconnected. 

Especially if you have multiple creative practices, it's really cool to see how those different things inform each other. Like, I dabble a bit in drawing and some other crafty type things like weaving. It's really cool to see how those more visual arts can correspond to music, like a lot of those same elements, line texture that I was mentioning earlier, have an analogue in each medium that you're working on. 

Earlier, I mentioned practice versus play. But we also can differentiate between practice versus performance. Is it private, or is it public? For musicians, you're going to use the word performance. But maybe if you're a visual artist, it's that moment when you finally show off your finished product, either showing it at a gallery, or maybe you're just posting it on Instagram to show the world. I said “just”, but that's still a big deal. I don't want to demean, being on Instagram versus in a gallery, however you're sharing your work is awesome. 

We often just share the end product of our art, and that means that practice can get overlooked, because we like an overnight success story. We like a shiny result, of course. And there's really a lot of richness in the process, also. 

Sometimes I see artists sharing their practice, either for accountability, because they want to say publicly like I'm doing this, and I'm going to share as I go along, so that I follow through, or just to share for fun just to kind of revel in, this is the process. I really love seeing other artists' processes and being able to follow along with the entirety of that process, or as much as they share of course, especially with visual artists. I also really love a sped up painting video. It’s so satisfying to watch something come together, seemingly all at once. 

Even if you choose to keep your practice private, which is great, you can record for yourself, and make a brief log of, what did I do today? What happened in my practice? How did it go? What worked for me? What didn't work? How did it feel? Then over time, you can look at that and see, “Okay, I wasn't really feeling good about my practice during this entire period of time. I wonder why that was? What might I want to do differently?” So that can give you a lot of data that maybe you wouldn't have if you're just kind of going along in the everyday grind, or everyday fog or haze of keeping on going for a long time. 

Also, I really want to acknowledge that learning to practice is also a practice. I encountered this a lot in teaching piano. For a while I didn't understand that I had to model how to practice for my students. I would just be like, “Practice this song, practice this song, okay, bye.” That often meant that when they ran into a problem, they didn't often know how to troubleshoot it on their own. Of course, that comes with more experience too. 

But I gradually learned to teach how to practice, like, “Here's how you practice this trouble spot, here's what you do when you run into this situation.” That instruction was often also for their parents, too. If these were younger kids, they wouldn't know how to necessarily work through all of this on their own, and sometimes parents wouldn't know what to do. Part of my teaching was teaching them how to help and work through these things, and know that it was okay if they didn't always know what to do, that they would learn as they went along. So that's definitely something, a lesson that you can take into any aspect of your life. 

It requires openness to practice. It requires what is called in Buddhism, beginner's mind, and embracing that idea of being a beginner, which is really hard sometimes for adults, especially, because we know what is possible. We might not know the full extent of what is possible, but we kind of have an idea of what end product we would like to see. Then it's so easy for us to build up pressure around that. So, being a beginner can be quite uncomfortable. 

The idea of showing up to practice can be messy, difficult, boring, or tedious. I kind of think of the kid that doesn't want to be in school, like Bart Simpson writing on the chalkboard, the same sentence however many times. Sometimes practice can feel like that. And if practice always feels like that, then, like I was asking you earlier, what might need to change about your practice? 

But it can also be so freeing! It can be that you get to practice and you don't have to be perfect, you get to practice for your entire life. You're always improving through incremental practice, even when you can't see it. That's where that practice log might come in handy for looking back on, “Okay, how was I feeling a month ago? And what am I able to do now that I wasn't able to do last week, last month, last year?” 

Thinking back to the medical practice example, practicing doesn't mean you're not an expert, or at least very skilled at what you're doing. Then that skill of practice can also carry over to new habits or new aspects of your art and what you're doing. 

Practice also implies experimentation, which can be really an exciting part of it, I think. That experimentation is so necessary for creativity, and for life. The more you can view it as an experiment, and infuse everything with curiosity, like, “Hmm, that didn't work. I wonder why that didn't work,” and the more you practice curiosity, the more that can become your first reaction instead of, “That doesn't work. Oh, man, I'm the worst, because that didn't work.” You'll be able to depersonalize it a little bit more, when you're in that place of being hard on yourself. 

I also love that, in the word practice, I feel an implication of resilience, a willingness to try again. If you have that time slot each day that's like, “I'm here to practice,” that just tells you that you're going to keep showing up. And it helps you build that willingness to try again, as many times as you need to, and as many times as you want to. 

Depending on your mood and your mental state, trying again and again times infinity might be overwhelming or inspiring. That cycle will keep on alternating, probably for your entire life, which, once you embrace that, that's probably good.

Overall, practice is the vehicle for becoming the artist that you want to be, whatever that may look like. That's so exciting. You get to make it whatever you need it to be to reach whatever kind of artist you want to be. 

You might be starting new practices in a new year, or new season, whatever that may mean. I invite you to reflect for a moment: 

• What practices do you currently have? Are they nurturing to you? 

Maybe some of them aren't, and they're things that you either want to stop doing, or reduce the amount of time that you're spending on them. 

• What practices would you like to have? What would they bring to your life? 

We're talking about creative practices here, or wellness practices, or any practice of any kind. • If it sounds overwhelming to bring new practices into your life, ask yourself, does it feel easy to do this practice? And if not, how could you make it a little bit easier, like 5%, easier, 10% easier? Maybe that's removing barriers. Maybe that's scheduling the practice, maybe that's shifting your mindset around it, if you feel like it has to be very rigid, and that's making you not want to do it. 

There are all kinds of ways that you can make a really subtle shift, and make it easier to show up for your creative practice. 

If you are as intrigued by this idea of practice as I am, I'm thinking about running a kind of practice lab, where we can get together over a period of time. Everyone will be working together toward individual goals, but we'll all be there to encourage each other. This container could help us measure and kind of document progress, then the sharing element will help with the accountability piece of it. This is all just a seed of an idea. I'm not sure about this quite yet, but if that's something that excites you, let me know! If I hear from enough of you, that could make it happen sooner. 

So I'd love to hear any of your answers to those reflection questions about practice, or just kind of how practice is working for you right now. I'm always excited to hear from you. You can email me at hello@rebeccahass.com. You can find me on Instagram at @rebecca_hass and I'll be delighted to hear from you. So, I am rooting for you in your creative practice and all of your practices. I hope you have a great week. See you next time!