When being consistent derailed my productivity

If you’re familiar with my channel, you'll know that I try to encourage authenticity and personal motivation when showing up to your piano. I try to dismantle rigid expectations of strict routines and following other people's expectations, in favour of a personalized, heart-led approach to learning piano.

I created this post to let you know that this is a lesson that I'm continually learning myself. In the last few weeks, I've fallen back into some old negative mindsets that I thought I had moved on from. I got caught up in trying to maximize my productivity, but it backfired on me and actually decreased my productivity. This resulted in a creative block that impacted my YouTube channel. Some of you have noticed that it's been a few weeks since I posted anything on YouTube and this is a direct result of the creative block I just experienced.

And so today I thought I'd share with you what happened, what went wrong, and what I needed to do to get myself back on track. I hope you find this helpful toward your own creative journey!

How it started

So, what happened? In a nutshell, I took on some new projects, which was very exciting, but I mismanaged my expectations of those new projects, which is what led to my downfall.

If you’ve been on this site before, you’ve probably noticed that I split my time between streaming private piano lessons online and creating YouTube videos that help beginners learn to play piano. I've been doing this for about two years, and I feel I have settled into a really nice rhythm where I can handle both these commitments.

This spring I started to get some new ideas for projects that I was really excited about! I thought it would be neat to create my own theory pages, to meet a really specific need that I see in some of my students. I also got an idea for a self-guided online course that I thought could work well for people who are absolute beginners to piano but weren't ready to financially commit to private lessons.

I loved both of these ideas and I thought that this summer could be a perfect time for me to make headway on them. I’d hoped to wrap them up before September when people are usually thinking about starting school.

Since I already had a rhythm of teaching and posting videos, I had to allocate extra blocks of time to work on these new projects. This wasn’t hard to do because I was so excited about these projects. At the beginning it was fun! I felt inspired, motivated, and I was excited to see the final product.

What went wrong

But then I experienced a psychological shift, a change in my attitude, that derailed all my creative work — my new projects and my old projects! I still showed up for my students and was fully engaged in my lessons, but I couldn't create anything.

Do you have any guesses what my change in attitude was that derailed everything? I wonder if you’ve experienced something similar.

My change was that instead of feeling joy and gratitude for each hour that I could spend being creative at my computer, I started getting attached to the results of the time I spent on each task. I started looking for evidence that my time had been worthwhile, and if I didn't feel that I had made sufficient progress for that hour, I became dissatisfied and upset that I had wasted time.

But this kind of response is the most self-defeating for creative endeavours! It's the nature of creativity to explore, to try things out, and it needs dead ends sometimes in order to adjust and try something new. If you're truly being creative, not all your ideas are going to work out. But you need to have space to find that out so you can find another better direction. Dead ends are a gift, because they help you recalibrate!

But instead of seeing my dead ends as a gift, I instead totally unconsciously put more pressure on myself to really nail it next time.

How do you think that extra pressure helped my creativity the next time I sat in front of my computer? Spoiler alert: it didn't! Instead, what I found was that when I sat at my computer or in front of my camera, I had even less to say. Because when I feel stressed, the first thing to go is my creativity.

As a result, I stopped getting ideas. Even when I looked back on my lists of ideas from before, I stopped knowing what I wanted to say about those ideas. This was a real creative block! It was scary because I love having a YouTube channel! Being on YouTube is the most fun I’ve ever had on social media. Also, YouTube is a source of new students for me so it was financially important for me to get my creativity going again.

Every day that my creative block went on, I felt like I was facing a greater chance that I'd never get my flow back again.

How I turned things around

So what did I do? I fell back on advice I once heard that the solution is often found in the problem. In this case, the problem I had was feeling like I had mismanaged my time, which translated to a fear that I didn't have enough time. I recognized that this further translated to feeling like I had a scarcity of time.

If my problem rose as a result of a scarcity of time, I decided the solution must be found in acting as though I had an excess of time. So I decided to give myself more time and I purposefully took a step back from those projects. This wasn’t easy to do! My fear of failure was still screaming in my head that I'd never work again if I didn’t get back on track, but I purposefully limited my actions to other things that just made me happy.

I followed my bliss.

That mostly meant working on my hobbies, like leathercraft and gardening. I watched other people's YouTube channels. I played Chopin extra slowly, just to really sink into his chord progressions that I love so much.

I want to restate something because I think it is so crucial: the fear hadn't left at this point yet. I still was really upset by my creative block and certain I'd never find my flow again. So when I was taking this leisure time, I was doing so despite feeling guilty about it.

But that was the point! I find that when the machinery of fear gets going in my head and I start feeling like a robot that's fuelled on negativity, I need to act in open defiance of that fear in order for me to overcome it and feel like myself again. So I purposefully stopped what I was doing, and despite the alarm bells going off in my head, started doing other things that brought me joy.

After a little while, the fear started to lose its grip. I was having so much fun following my bliss that I forgot what I was afraid of. And then in a couple of weeks, I noticed that I felt motivated to work again — but this time, my motivation came from a place of joy and delight again, rather than fear and panic.

But before I sat down at my computer to try this work again, I had to make myself a promise. I grounded myself with a mantra that I've shared with you before but that I'd forgotten: Be strict about showing up, but lenient about results. This is the way I try to balance discipline and flexibility in my piano practice and business — being strict about showing up and lenient about results is how I keep all my business and creative endeavours (like my YouTube channel) going!

I had gotten myself into this mess by being strict about showing up and strict about my results. Before I let myself try being creative again, I made myself promise that I would be more lenient about my results.

The outcome of this lesson is the post you're reading right now! I let myself take as long as I needed to record the video and write the blog post, peaceful that I will publish them whenever they’re ready.

Lesson learned

Even though I'm sad about missing out on YouTube time this summer, I'm grateful this experience happened because it let me see, again, how easily negative thinking can work its way into your life.

Another thing about this experience that’s interesting to me is that my initial negativity wasn't even about my YouTube videos! It was about these other projects I was trying to add on. But once negativity set in on that other sphere of my life, it bled into something I felt really confident about, which is my YouTube channel, and sapped the joy from it. My YouTube channel was collateral damage for my negative thinking in a completely different area of my work.

How I hope this experience helps you!

I hope this lesson I learned is also helpful to whoever is reading this. One reason I wanted to share this experience is because a lot of people I work with are learning piano later in life, and they often communicate a pressure they feel to maximize the time they have with their piano. Sometimes they get impatient with their results, and wish they were learning faster. Other times, they feel an obligation to practice every day — an obligation that actually saps their enjoyment of sitting down at their piano. Or maybe, like me, your frustration comes in from some other area in your life.

Whatever the case may be, I hope that my story today encourages you to be more lenient with the results of your practice, so that you may continue to move forward with gratitude, because your gratitude will be the pathway for your continual creative joy at the piano!

Thanks for sharing in this experience with me.