Your musical gift is for you

My last video on performance mindset got some amazing feedback, probably more than anything else I've posted online. Multiple people told me their perfectionism and fear of performance ruined their ability to play music, even for fun.

I felt I wanted to response to some of these commenters, to give them an extra step in their path to reconnecting with their musical ability. So I sat down and recorded a few videos sharing some of the lessons I’d learned that helped me overcome my perfectionism, in case it could help them. Here’s one of those lessons in case it can help you, too.

An idea that can change your relationship to music

There is an idea that helped me rebuild my relationship with music and performance more than any other. The idea is this:

Your musical ability is for you.

It’s not for anyone else. It’s not for anyone else to enjoy. It’s not for anyone else to approve of. It’s not even for anyone else to feel they have a right to access.

Your musical ability is an evolutionary gift for you.

To enjoy.

To express yourself (if you want).

If your fear of playing for other people has actually gotten to the point where it detracts from your own enjoyment of music, perhaps one way back into loving music is to think less of your musical ability as being a gift for other people and try to think of it as more of a gift for yourself?

That idea helped me a lot, because it changed my intention when I sat down to play. The pressure to “bless” other people with my playing went away because I recognized that blessing myself first was a bigger priority.

Bless yourself first

I could bless myself by being satisfied with the mere enjoyment of my playing, rather than worrying about polishing up a song enough to be pleasing to other people. Once I could settle into the idea of enjoying the music just for me, it paved the way for me to ask the kinds of questions I wrote about in my post about showing up, like, “What do I think the song needs from me to be expressed to its fullest?” and “How do I want to represent this piece?”

This was the key factor in learning how to practice unattachment to my musical performances. As long as I was showing up authentically for my music, I’d already won, regardless of how my performance turned out!

This is my first time writing about this particular musical struggle, and I certainly have never read anyone write on this topic online, so I hope that what I’m trying to capture in words makes sense. I’ll continue to refine it, and if you as a reader have questions about it, please drop me a line and I’ll try to clarify.

Until then, if you’re reading this and resonating with the emotional challenge I’m raising, I hope you find strength in yourself to take up your musical gift and play again. <3