When can I give up on a song?
My piano students often know they want to give up on a song weeks before they build up the courage to tell me! Often the reason they hesitate to admit how they’re feeling about a song is because they don’t want to appear undisciplined. There’s a longstanding tradition of suffering through piano lessons in order to “get better”. No pain, no gain — right?
Well, no.
I think there are certain kinds of pain that are actually really detrimental to growing musicianship, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today. Let’s reframe what’s happening when you want to give up on a song.
Because of all the shame that surrounds the very idea of giving up in piano lessons, I feel very grateful for my students’ trust when they ask for help sorting out when it’s time to buckle down and when it’s time to move on.
I think they expect me to spend a lot of time helping them weigh the pros and cons of moving on, because they’re usually a little surprised when my answer comes in the form of a yes/no question:
Is this song causing you to dread sitting down at your piano?
If yes, then move on.
I love framing the decision this way because it invites the student to check in with their inner guidance system. Learning how to distinguish the feeling of dread from other emotions that can arise in the face of challenges is a really effective way to start listening to your inner guidance for who and where you want to be as a musician.
If you’re new to my blog, you may be wondering why inner guidance is so important to me. In a nutshell, I believe that the emotional experience of music is both more gratifying and more important than the outward perfection of musical skills. Yes, musical skills are important and they come with time and practice, but I believe they should never come at the expense of a student’s emotional connection to their music.
I want your piano to feel like a friend, someone you can turn to and share all your feelings. The first step in any long-lasting friendship is a capacity for honesty, and that’s why I advocate for building a piano practice that not only accepts but encourages our self expression. That self expression includes the capacity to put our foot down when a song isn’t serving us. And dread certainly isn’t serving us.
Dread is a toxic combination of frustration, despair, and inadequacy that stems from a sense of obligation. Dread often arises when we encounter a challenge at our piano that we either don’t feel capable or motivated to meet, and we can’t muster the energy to push through. Usually it’s a well-meaning sense of responsibility that keeps us feeling obligated to this challenge, but the end result can actually stop a piano journey in its tracks. Dread is the energy that causes us to avoid the piano instead of playing it, sometimes permanently.
No, we don’t want dread anywhere near our pianos!
At this point, my students usually protest, “But if I have permission to keep giving up on songs whenever it gets tough, I’ll never develop discipline and I won’t get better!”
I say not necessarily. Permission to give up is not the slippery slope most people think it is.
A song that’s really challenging isn’t necessarily demotivating. In fact, a challenging song can be extremely motivating! The challenges that motivate us provide our stepping stone to the next stage in our learning. But here’s the important part — even meeting challenges that motivate us require an element of discipline!
Think about the concentration required to learn a new song, even your favourite song. The focus. The problem solving. The decision making. There’s a lot of discipline involved! Even if you committed to only ever learning songs that motivated you for the rest of your life, you’d still have ample opportunities to exhibit discipline!
Chances are, my learner has already exhibited this kind of discipline in the face of a challenge, which is what makes me so confident in their ability to succeed. Even if I’ve been working with a student for a little as three months, I can usually point to an instance where they met a challenge and overcame it. So, the problem isn’t that the learner lacks discipline; that’s too black and white. The truth is often somewhere closer to the middle — the learner exhibits discipline and also isn’t interested in this particular song. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Try to remember:
You have many opportunities to demonstrate your discipline as a piano player without forcing yourself to learn songs you don’t care about.
Even learning a song you DO enjoy requires a ton of discipline!
So what’s holding you back from letting this one go?
I think that if you’re willing to be honest about not liking a song and accepting enough of yourself to just move on, some really great things can happen.
I started offering my students the opportunity that if they didn’t like a song, we could just keep going and I would never make them feel bad about it. We would never look at it again if they didn’t want to.
A really interesting thing happened. When we didn’t make them dread sitting down at their piano, they started enjoying piano more! When we found music that maintained their interest and motivation, it actually encouraged them to play more…and they also became motivated to pick up more challenging music. Students are often able to play songs years ahead of their grade level if they find a song that really motivates them. It’s just that not every song is the kind of challenge that really motivates us that way, and that’s okay.
So the fear that changing your music halfway through a song is going to lead you to be less disciplined? I really don’t buy it. When I reframed my perspective to look more positively for the discipline my students were exhibiting, rather than being afraid of what they might not exhibit, I realized this new perspective also reframed the problem entirely from a concern about discipline to a simple question: do I believe students should be forced to learn a song they don’t care about?
Spoiler alert: I don’t. Your musical gift is for you.
Allowing feelings of dread to come between you and your piano breaks the flow of communication and self expression that is the true gift of music. The risk of not listening to your inner guidance system is that if you’re constantly suppressing it, it will retreat, and you’ll lose your emotional connection to piano altogether.
So let’s not make the mistake of thinking that all challenges are good for you. They’re not.
If you’re feeling dread at the thought of going to your piano, your body is giving you a clear sign that this song is not for you. I encourage you to just drop it and don’t let yourself feel guilty any more than you absolutely need to. Move on to something that you will enjoy more because there’s still lots of room for learning ahead of you!
I want to take a minute to acknowledge that my advice also applies to the times when we start a song that we were initially motivated to learn but lost passion for halfway through.
Changing your mind about a song does not make you flaky.
Changing your mind about a song simply means you tried something and learned it wasn’t for you. Trying things out is such an important part of the learning process because following your curiosity is so essential to personal growth.
It’s important to remember that our feelings toward a song can change. I think that’s just part of being human, and it’s a really important part of the learning process. Sometimes you get a couple of weeks into a song that you thought you’d like to play, and it just doesn’t grab you the same way anymore. Or maybe you thought you’d like it but you realize you just don’t really enjoy playing it as much as you thought you would.
That’s totally fine. Your heart got what it needed out of it. Onto the next opportunity!
In conclusion, I think there are times we can move on from a song in a way that doesn’t compromise our commitment and musicianship. In fact, I think that there are certain times when we need to move on from a song in order to build our true commitment and musicianship.
When are those times?
Move on from a song when it causes you to feel dread.
And if it still hasn’t been clear, I don’t mean just “taking a break” so you can try it again later. ;) I mean dropping the song, and not feeling any more obligation to it.
Make room in your life for something you love better.
I think we can actually build better discipline when we do this!
So go ahead and let go, and see where your heart takes you next :)