Morning Contemplation: How To Perform At Your Best

In a manner of speaking, we all ‘perform’ in one way or another. Some of us on stage, others in the office. We even speak of our ‘performance’ in bed! Wherever and whenever we perform, it’s common that we want to do our best. But how? Do you even know what your best is? If you did, would you know how to reach it consistently? If you’ve ever thought, ‘I’m not good enough,’ (or anything like that) then what I’m sharing here is for you.

Transcript

In a manner of speaking,

We all perform in one way or another.

Some of us on stage,

Others in the office.

We even speak of our performance in bed.

Wherever and whenever we perform,

It's common that we want to do our best.

But how?

Do you even know what your best is?

If you did,

Would you know how to reach it consistently?

Expectation regarding consistency is thrust upon us as children.

This is erroneous.

No other part of nature behaves consistently,

But in our arrogance,

We take ourselves to be separate from nature.

And this is the root of all our anxieties.

If you've ever thought,

I'm not good enough,

Or anything like that,

Then what I'm about to share is for you.

There's a basic assumption in that thought,

I'm not good enough,

And it's wrong.

The assumption is that there are two identities present.

One who is doing,

And another who is evaluating.

This same assumption shows up when we attempt what we call self-discipline.

One identity is protesting,

The other is attempting to force some activity or another.

If you're a performing artist,

This will almost certainly sound familiar to you in the context of your work and practice.

But this kind of thinking is actually common to the vast majority of us,

At least in the Western hemisphere.

What follows here is a number of contemplations which,

When understood,

Will help you to perform at your best.

Not someone else's best,

Not yesterday's best,

Not tomorrow's best.

Your best.

Whatever that is right now.

What is your best,

Really?

The major fault in our thinking regarding performance is the notion that we ought to be capable of some abstract standard at all times.

This belief is simply incompatible with the way human beings function.

We don't feel the same when we wake each day.

We don't require the same amount of food each day.

We don't think the same thoughts each day.

And since performances are the product of thoughts,

The idea that our performances should be consistent is unrealistic.

Holding ourselves to a standard of consistency in whatever we're doing leads to one thing above all others.

Consistency.

Does this mean that consistency is impossible?

No.

Consistency is a wonderful thing to demonstrate in certain activities,

And it is,

In fact,

Possible to achieve.

Kind of.

The issue is expectation.

Expectations are about results.

Results happen in the future.

The future is imaginary.

Any time you spend thinking about the future is time you're not spending thinking about what you're doing right now.

My performance experience is in music.

I played drums at a pretty high level,

And boy did I have a rough time with the issue of consistency.

It took me years to figure out what I'm about to tell you,

And I eventually confirmed this by deep study of the mind.

In any moment that I was thinking about how I was doing,

Or how my performance was being perceived by others,

I was distracted from the process of performing,

And thus,

The quality of my performance would tend to suffer.

Another way of saying this is that thinking about how my drumming sounds has nothing to do with the act of drumming.

This probably sounds odd if you've never come across this kind of concept before,

So let's go a little deeper.

What exactly makes up the process of playing a drumbeat?

It's movement.

Movements are designed in the mind,

Then carried out by sending messages from the brain to the body.

Very,

Very fast,

Much faster than rational or verbal thought.

So in order to play a simple beat,

I basically have to move my arms and legs in a particular sequence.

Simple right?

Where is wondering how I sound in this process?

It's not there.

It's not required.

In fact,

It would only get in the way.

But how can you play music well without thinking about how it sounds?

I hear you ask.

Well,

To that I ask a question in response.

In what order does the playing and the sound happen?

The playing happens first,

Then the sound,

Then more playing.

If I'm thinking about how I sound,

I'm either thinking about something that happened in the past or something that's going to happen in the future.

What's happening for me as I play is movement.

I do think about sound as a musician,

Of course.

I evaluate how the room I'm playing in sounds,

And I certainly think about how the rest of the band sounds and how to fit in with that.

But ideally,

The majority of thinking about how I sound is done in the practice room.

In the practice room,

I try different movements out to see which give the best sound.

Perhaps I record different examples and then listen back.

Over time,

Usually years for a musician,

I refine my choices.

By the time I'm on stage,

I want to be in the position that I know very well what sounds best in that particular room with that particular band with just a little evaluation.

And then I want to just do that.

Doing it,

Actually playing the drums,

Is a process.

And if I learn to put my attention on that process,

I will almost certainly do it better.

Does this mean that thoughts about how the audience is perceiving my playing won't enter the mind?

Maybe,

Maybe not.

But if they do,

I won't care because I'm oriented to my process.

Performance anxiety could be said to be a symptom of extreme results orientation.

The opposite of what is proposed above.

Most performers,

Be they musicians,

Public speakers,

Bartenders or telesales representatives,

Have experienced some degree of performance anxiety.

All forms of anxiety are mental feedback loops.

And they rely on the imagination of the future.

The moment you're concerned about how you're going to perform,

You've fallen into the trap.

There's no solution to this kind of mental activity.

No one has ever actually figured out how they're going to perform and then said,

Cool,

Glad I thought that through.

The only way to be free of anxiety is to simply not create it in the first place.

But how?

If you've ever taken so much as a glance at any teaching on mindfulness practice,

You've likely come across the word presence or the phrase present moment.

Presence is essential to mindfulness practice.

When you're present,

You're not thinking about past or future.

When you're thinking about the past,

Unless you're already an experienced practitioner,

You're probably worrying.

Likewise,

When thinking about the future,

You're probably anxious.

So,

In typical mindfulness practice,

We train our attention to something like the breath,

Which obviously is occurring right now.

But we don't have to use the breath.

Tai Chi uses movement.

And what did we discover that performances are earlier?

That's right,

Movements.

So to bring a Zen flavor to this discussion,

When speaking,

Speak.

When working,

Work.

When dancing on a table and trying not to spill your champagne,

Dance on a table and try not to spill your champagne.

There's a reason that mindfulness is a practice.

And that's that we're typically thinking hyperactively when we start out due to conditioning.

The Buddha was already training people to calm down two and a half thousand years ago,

And there was much less to think about.

The mechanics of the mind were the same though.

And so his teaching is still relevant.

Most modern people,

When considering mindfulness practice,

Will ironically stress themselves out about having to fit another new thing into their lives.

If this is you,

Good news.

Authentic mindfulness practice is not a thing.

If your conception of mindfulness practice is that you must get up an hour early,

Light incense,

Sit on a special cushion on the floor,

Forget it.

Mindfulness practice is simply noticing what is happening right now.

This can be done for extended periods of time,

If you like,

Or it can be done in many moments throughout the day.

Why bother?

Well,

Do you like being anxious?

Would you like an alternative?

We have a heavy,

Heavy bias toward doing in most parts of the 21st century world.

There's nothing wrong with doing.

But when it's done to the exclusion of rest,

Well,

Life becomes like a piece of music that's all notes and no pauses.

Basically white noise.

The amount of activity we tend to engage in in the modern world is grotesquely disproportionate to what our ancestors were doing.

And the circuitry in the brain didn't evolve to cope with this.

Hence,

We've created a pandemic of anxiety and fatigue that was around long before COVID and will continue long after.

And if you think that's an unreasonable comparison,

Take a look at the research on stress and life expectancy.

One opinion is that working longer and harder will lead to better results.

Which kind of orientation is this?

When we think abstractly,

We can see the logic here.

I want to be successful.

Success is measured in money.

Work is how I get money.

I'm going to work more.

But life is not abstract.

And it's not at all uncommon that people engaged in this kind of ritual find themselves wishing they were less tired and stressed whilst being unwilling to change their lifestyle.

But the fatigue and the stress and the long hours go together.

They're a package deal.

And they're not necessarily leading to the best results.

The concept of the four-day workweek is picking up momentum around the world,

With some early adopters finding greater productivity.

This challenge is the way we typically think about work and,

Conveniently,

Supports my point.

Success orientation is good for results.

And a chronically tired,

Chronically stressed worker does not have a good process.

Yes,

There are outliers.

High performers who somehow bust out 12-hour days for years.

My father is one of them.

But statistically,

These are the exception and not the rule.

Do not hold yourself to these standards.

In fact,

Drop standards altogether.

What is a standard?

It's an abstract notion of how you ought to be.

And any time there is an ought,

A should,

A must,

There's that split personality again.

There's how you are and there's how you think you should be.

And if the two don't match up,

What are you going to do?

You're going to give yourself a hard time,

Most likely.

What part does giving yourself a hard time play in your process?

Do you see a pattern forming here?

Getting to play drums was the most joyous learning experience of my life.

I attribute this to two things.

One,

I was too naive to care very much about how I was doing.

And two,

I was enough of a rebel to ignore my teachers' and parents' demands that I enter exams.

Exams of course are standards and they come with deadlines.

In my 15 years of teaching music,

I've seen that exams,

When forced upon students,

Are good for one thing only,

And that's sucking the joy out of the learning experience.

Some students enjoy a structured way of learning,

And that's great.

Others,

Like me,

Just want to beat the crap out of a drum set.

Exams make it possible to examine.

Beating the crap out of a drum set made me a career doing something I enjoy.

Very few of my professional drumming peers took exams.

Later in my development,

However,

I started to create standards for myself.

And my relationship to my instrument became proportionately less and less enjoyable.

So I found mindfulness practice.

Now I simply enjoy playing when I'm playing.

And this makes for the best performances I've ever given.

All this is the most important and heartfelt advice I can give you as a teacher of mindfulness and as a teacher of music.

However,

There is one more thing I can share,

One other very worldly thing.

Develop your skills to a degree that is beyond what's required.

When I was first performing music,

The pop and rock tunes that I was playing were difficult to me.

Stepping outside my comfort zone to play these tunes on stage seemed to create even more challenge.

Later,

I would master jazz fusion music.

And following this,

Pop and rock tunes were easy.

This greatly decreased performance anxiety.

Nowadays,

When I go out and play the same show twice,

It's not consistent from my perspective.

But from the audience's?

You bet.

From the rest of the bands?

Pretty much.

I may get the occasional smirk from the bass player if I don't quite pull off a daring fill I was going for.

But I land on the beat and everybody keeps dancing.

I'm doing a better job than the job requires each night.

And that,

To everyone else at least,

Looks like consistency.

If I have one piece of advice for you to take away with you,

It's this.

Watch yourself.

Watch what happens when you perform,

Whatever that means to you.

And consider whether or not it's serving you.

If you find that it's not,

Come check out some of my other content and consider starting up a mindfulness practice.

You might just find that letting things be as they are is more productive than trying to pick yourself up by the bootstraps.

Reviews

Wow, this was an amazing Morning Contemplation! This got me to thinking about my 'Performance' vs. my 'Outcomes.' I am in the sales world and I am paid on outcomes rather than performance. However my continued improvement of my performances will lead to better outcomes.

I do a lot of evaluating/self-critiquing/judgement in the moment, rather than just doing. I need to remind myself that every day is a new day of learning, experiences and a time a place for such things. During sales calling efforts and presentations isn't it!

Long story to say . . . I'll be checking out your mindfulness practices and thank you for sharing 🙏🏽

Amazing relation between music and mindfulness. Thanks!!!