Dealing with discomfort
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If you want to grow in your independence as a piano player, one of the best skills you can learn is the ability to isolate and identify the things that are bothering you.
For many people, this means resisting mental and emotional habits they’ve surrendered to for years.
It means not letting your temper get the best of you.
It means not letting yourself be overtaken with negativity and self-criticism.
It means not letting yourself label a project a waste of your time if you don’t attain perfection right away.
While these emotional reactions may provide you an outlet for your frustration, they don’t let you understand the cause of your frustration, and so they don’t help you move forward.
Typically, frustration at the piano stems from a barrier in understanding that causes the player to make a mistake. In my experience, the barrier is usually one of three things:
Not understanding which notes to play
Not understanding how the rhythm is supposed to sound
Not understanding how to get your hand to do what you want it to
Losing your cool or succumbing to despair isn’t going to help you overcome any of these barriers. But exploring them with patience and curiosity will.
So instead of giving up, take a moment to regulate yourself and try to really think, what exactly is frustrating me right now?
While it can be difficult to forge new mental habits, the benefits are so worth it.
Because learning to play piano isn’t really that hard. Learning to have patience with yourself while you’re learning is actually the hard work.
Everything else is just a matter of filling in the puzzle pieces.
If you can learn how to sit with your discomfort at the piano long enough to examine and find the root cause of your discomfort, you’ll find it takes surprisingly little effort after that to solve your problem and keep growing musically.