Practice Archives - Page 3 of 3

Steps to conquer stage fright: Doing the work

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Last week, we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. This week, we’re looking at the importance of knowing what you’re doing.

Some of you may know that I’ve been in Australia for the past few weeks. Tonight on the news, there was a report about the preparations of Australia’s leading artistic gymnast Lauren Mitchell for the 2012 Olympics. After winning gold medals at the 2010 World Championships, Mitchell said she immediately began preparing her routines for London 2012.

She has been working on them exclusively ever since.

Sometimes we forget the levels of training and dedication that experts devote to their pursuits. In order to win a gold medal, Lauren Mitchell is working every day to make sure that she knows every split second of the routines she will perform later this year. And I am willing to bet that she is working on two different fronts:

The specifics of each routine – the protocols for each move she is going to make. FM Alexander would call this the “means-whereby.”
Her general condition, or the means whereby Miss Mitchell uses her body. (Don’t worry if the distinction seems tricky – this bit is for the Alexander teachers out there!)

Today I want to talk about the specifics – we’ll save the more general for next week.

If there is one lesson to take from Lauren Mitchell, it is this. Excellence takes work. If we want to be good at something, we need to do the work. For Miss Mitchell, it means breaking down her routines into split seconds, rehearsing each and every movement. It means making sure that she knows every movement so well that she barely needs to think about them at all.

So if I am to perform a new piece of music, I should know every note intimately. If I am giving an after-dinner speech, I should know not just every joke, but the position of every comma.

How well do you know the piece you are about to perform? What difference does it make to your nerves when you know it really well? Let me know in the comments.

*In the chapter I am looking at from Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, ‘Uncontrolled Emotions and Fixed Prejudices’, you will see that FM uses both ways of writing the words ‘means whereby’, and he seems to make a clear distinction between the two uses. See Irdeat Complete Edition, pp.341-2.

Steps to conquer stage fright: How to banish panic

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Last week, we talked about the fear factor. This week, we’re talking about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic.

Last week I talked a little about the fear symptoms we experience when we’re about to perform. I explained that many of the symptoms that we experience are the result of hormonal ‘fight or flight’ response – what FM Alexander described in 1923 as ‘fear reflexes’.*

Right on cue, after I posted my article, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to an article in Scientific American, entitled ‘This is Your Brain in Meltdown.’ The authors are scientists who have been researching the way even small amounts of stress can cause us to jettison the logic-based functions of our pre-frontal cortex (home of our executive centre), and fall back upon the primitive reactions of our amygdala to take over. The amygdala is responsible for emotional responses, and can cause us to experience mental paralysis and logical ‘meltdown’.

I bet many of us have experienced this kind of mental paralysis. I can remember a music performance where I was so paralysed that I couldn’t remember not just what the first note was, but also what fingering I should use to play it!

So how do the scientists recommend we prevent our brains jettisoning our reasoning and going primitive? Interestingly, current research seems to be confirming FM Alexander’s principle of building a ‘staircase’ of satisfactory experiences to build confidence. The scientists write:

“Animal research suggests that the sense of psychological control that becomes second nature to a soldier or emergency medical technician remains the deciding factor in whether we fall apart during stress… The routines of the drill sergeant are mirrored by animal studies that show that juveniles grow up to be more capable in handling stress if they have had multiple, successful experiences confronting mild stress in their youth.”

Steps to success!

If you have a big performance or presentation coming up, here is a plan to help you prepare.

Prepare your speech/performance thoroughly. The better you know it, the less you will need to work your pre-frontal cortex to remember the words or music.
Do trial performances. Find a sympathetic audience or three. Or six. My recorder quartet like to trial new music at our local music festival, where the audience is small but appreciative. If you’re doing public speaking, find a local Toastmasters group (or similar) where the members are friendly and knowledgeable.
Have a goal for your performance. Small goals help you to keep focussed. When I played a recorder solo recently, my goal was not to win the prize at the festival. My goal was to play a very difficult piece of music, to allow for mistakes to happen, and to keep going. And I did.

Do you freeze pre-performance? Do you become irritable? Have you tried having goals and constructing a stairway to success? Tell me about it in the comments!

* FM Alexander, Constructive Conscous Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.338.

Photo by criminalatt from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Be Persistent! Stickability, Creativity and the Alexander Technique

This is the fifth and final post in a short series on what FM Alexander can teach us about steps to creativity. The first post was called Make Mistakes! The second post was called Make Decisions! The third post was called Make Allowances! The fourth post was called Be Methodical!

En route to South Korea (and ultimately Australia), I found a wonderful documentary on the airline entertainment system last night. It was about Jascha Heifetz, the great violinist. According to the documentary, after living and touring in America for a few years, the young Heifetz began to enjoy the trappings of fame – cameras, cars, parties – and moved away from the highly regimented practice regime that he had previously followed. But after a particularly poor review by a journalist called Henderson, in which the reporter suggested that The performer was short-changing his audience, Heifetz was so shocked that he made massive changes in his lifestyle almost overnight. He became, once more, the consummate professional and utterly brilliant virtuoso.

The story fascinated me because it reminded me of another key characteristic of the great creative minds: persistence.

Heifetz didn’t quit. He didn’t ignore the criticism. He took the setback in his stride, accepted the criticism, and acted upon it.

In a similar way, FM Alexander faced difficulties in his efforts to find a solution to his vocal problems. He had spent months observing and experimenting. But after he had tried putting his head forward and up but still found that he could not prevent his habitual misuse of himself, he wrote this line:

“I now had proof of one thing at least, that all my efforts up till now to improve the use of myself in reciting had been misdirected.”

This sounds like a setback to me! But Alexander, like Heifetz, didn’t give up. He keep thinking, reasoning, observing and experimenting. He went right back to the beginning and started again. He worked really hard.

Setbacks are normal, no matter what our field of expertise. But our creativity demands that we overcome whatever seems to block our path. In fact, as with Heifetz and Alexander, the setbacks can often become a spur to even greater accomplishment. The key is not to give up.

What obstacles are challenging your creativity? And how are you going to spur yourself on?

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 3. Practice, practice, practice!

An old joke to begin:

Rumour has it that once, a pedestrian on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhatten stopped Jascha Heifitz (or possibly Artur Rubenstein!) and asked, “Could you tell me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The great musician replied, “Practice, practice, practice!” *

I’ve noticed that the concept of practice has been popping up in blog posts gain, and in very diverse fields. For example, author Sarah Duncan recently wrote a post discussing the importance of writing consistently if you want to be any good. And an article by Sonia Simone appeared on the Copyblogger website which talked about the importance of practice to copywriters and graphic designers.

So the concept of ‘doing the work’ is in the air at the moment. Which is great, because it is one of those topics that is so important that it needs to get a regular airing.

And doing the work is definitely a part of the Alexander Technique. Writing in 1911, FM Alexander said, “Fortunately for us, there is not a single one of these habits of mind, with their resultant habits of body, which may not be altered by the inculcation of those principles concerning the true poise of the body which I have called the principles of mechanical advantage…” **

FM’s use of the word ‘inculcation’ is interesting. He wants us to fix an idea in our minds with constant repetition. Sounds a bit like practice to me!

But what sort of practice?

Sonia Simone’s article takes a slightly different slant, though, and it is one that I really like. She asks us to think about the type of practice we are doing, not just the quantity. Because, as she says, “10,000 hours of playing the scales is easy (if really, really boring), but it won’t get you to Carnegie Hall. And even 10 hours of the right kind of practice will bring you something meaningful and interesting.” ***

So we don’t need to do masses and masses of hours of practice – though some consistency would be good! But what are we going to practice? How can we practice the Alexander Technique effectively so that we can move and think more freely and easily?

Well, FM gives us the key in the passage I quoted. He wants us to inculcate (fix in our heads by repetition) the “principles concerning the poise of the body”.

Principles.

Not exercises. Not positions. Not lists of instructions.

Principles.

Principles are great things. They are, in Stephen Covey’s words, fundmental truths of universal application. Remember a principle, and you can apply it pretty much everywhere.

So what principles should we remember?

Yes, I could give you a list. I could give you lots of lovely things to think about. But I’m not.

You see, the other danger with practice is trying to do too much all at once. I would rather you worked with one or maybe two ideas and had some success, than that you tried to work on 6 or 8 things and failed dismally. So…

I recommend starting with just these two ideas, and see how far you get.

Before you start doing something, think about how you are going to do it.
When you stop doing something… STOP!

Tell me in the comments how you get on!

* You can find a discussion on the joke at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hall
** FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.57.
*** Sonia Simone, ‘The 5 Keys to Content Marketing Mastery’, http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-mastery/

How long does it take to learn the Alexander Technique?

“How long does it take to learn the Alexander Technique?”

This was one of the questions that I was asked at the beginning of my group class at Bristol Folk House last night. I love my Folk House students for many reasons. One of them is that they aren’t afraid to ask the questions that I know every student is thinking, but few are game enough to put into words.

It’s a great question, but it needed some clarification. “What do you mean?” I asked.

My student replied that he felt he was having some success in applying what he was learning in class to his everyday life, but he wanted to know how long it would take to be able to do the Alexander Technique really well, and do it all by himself.

Now, my student is expecting a certain type of answer to this question, probably either a time-related answer (x number of months) or an answer about application (depends on how much you practice). Instead, I asked a question in return, and asked the class to answer it. How about you have a go, too!

How long does it take to learn the violin?

I’ll give you a moment to think of your answer.

Got one? Great! We’ll continue. 🙂

My Folk House students gave answers like these:

· It depends on how good you want to be

· That’s relative, depending on how much you practice

· Learning is a constantly evolving process, so you’re always learning

And all of these answers are, on one level, true. How quickly you progress in anything does depend on the quality and frequency of your practice. And learning is indeed a constantly evolving process. But if we settle for these answers, when will be finished learning how to play the violin?

Never.

My Folk House students didn’t look happy with this answer, and neither am I. Never is an unhappy word.

So what if we turned this on its head? Try this for size. As soon as we know that if we pluck or draw a bow across the string of the violin, and that we can change the note by changing the length of the string, we can play the violin. Everything else is refinement.

Can you see that this way of looking at the issue is instantly empowering? A couple of basic facts, and we have the basic tools to go away and work the rest out entirely by ourselves, if we choose to. How fantastic!

The Alexander Technique is no different. In fact, FM Alexander believed that we need to do this stuff for ourselves. Many sources quote him as saying “You can do what I do, if you do what I did.” And what FM did was to work it all out for himself.

As soon as we know that a change in the relationship between our head and our body can make a difference to our freedom and ease of motion; once we understand the power and effectiveness that lies in stopping the unnecessary stuff that is getting in our way; then we have enough basic knowledge to go away and do the Alexander Technique for ourselves.

Everything else is refinement.

Image by Bethany Carlson, stock.xchng