“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” – John Wooden.
Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Tape yourself practicing for an hour and then listen carefully to what the results are, take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or ask your students to pretend they are at home and watch them practice during a lesson. What do you notice?
You’ll notice that the majority of folks practice rather mindlessly, either engaging in mere repetition (“practice this passage 10 times” or “practice this piece for 30 minutes”) or practicing on autopilot (that’s when you sing through the piece until you hear something you don’t like, stop, repeat the passage again until it sounds better, and resume singing through the piece until you hear the next thing you aren’t satisfied with, at which point you begin this whole process over again). There are three major problems with this mindless method of practicing.
1. It is a huge waste of your resources, – time, energy and money. Why? Practicing without apply on purpose your understanding of your vocal technique, proper pronunciation of languages, and doing research on the story so you can take your audience on a journey is unproductive to say the least. You may practice your piece in this manner for hours, days, or weeks, and still not feel that you’ve improved all that much. Even worse, you are actually digging yourself into a huge hole by strengthening undesirable habits and mistakes of all kinds, literally making it more likely that you will screw up more consistently in the future. This makes it even more difficult to correct these habits in the future, which means you are actually adding to the amount of future practice time you will need in order to eliminate these bad habits and tendencies and then create new ones.
2. It makes you less confident. If you can’t be consistent in your vocal technique, pronunciation of the language in which you are singing, and have no idea of the actual meaning of each words, it actually hurts your confidence because you not able to tell the story, therefore are not getting the results you are looking for. You may even wonder how others do get better at what they are doing. On-stage confidence comes from knowing your success isn’t a coincidence but rather a result of having practiced consciously and on purpose for shorter periods of time while being mindful. Then when you perform you have some idea of what happens when there is a glitch somewhere and can often get back on point while making a note to yourself to revisit that particular passage. Repetition done mindfully will always reinforce the correct habits until they become the dominate force. The bad habits will not go away, but will acquiesce and move into the background, allowing the more repeated new and correct habits to reign supreme. Also, science tells us that when you shift over into hyper-analytical left brain mode as you walk out on stage if your tendency is to practice unconsciously, you end up freaking out as you become conscious of all the messages showing up to try to save this performance, instead of being able to perform on demand.
3. Practicing can be a chore, tedious and boring. It’s easy to sing through a piece a bunch of times without paying attention to what you are doing. Is that how you want to spend your time? Practicing with an agenda for five minutes is worth more than spending a half hour of mindless wandering. You need to create specific outcome goals for yourself. It could involve a specific new addition to your vocal technique, memorizing exactly the notation the composer wrote, or perhaps finding the correct pronunciation and translation of the words you are singing. It really doesn’t matter how much time you spend practicing something, only that you know how to produce the results you want and can eventually do so consistently and on demand.
Keep these four ideas in mind that Daniel Coyle has so beautifully expressed in his book, “The Talent Code.” Pick a target – Reach for it – Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach – Return to step one. It’s simple, just not always easy. But if you are really interested in becoming the best performer you can be….
Now you know what I think about practicing, let me hear what you think. Ciao until next time.
Carol
