Practice and Performance Psychology With Greg Spence and Mark Bain: Part 2

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[Music] hi and welcome you’re watching a wind work subscriber update video by mysterymastery.com and the title of today’s video is exploring the psychology and process of practice and performance featuring trumpet and performance psychology guru mark bain of the tasmanian symphony orchestra and yours truly greg spence check this out many people struggle today to improve on the trumpet and this is because they misunderstand how the instrument works and don’t know what or how to practice effectively most methods just offer more and more exercises and this is

where they fall short they fail to uncover the real problems luckily there’s a way to get far better results and it’s much faster than i actually ever thought possible the amazing windworks course helped me to improve much faster than other methods by revealing the flaws in my belief systems and my approach to brass playing with just a few drills and exercises a day i felt my mind and body change like never before and my playing was freer and easier than i could ever imagine it works

by eliminating inefficient playing habits and providing a structured and achievable program suitable for players of all standards simply go to mysterymastery.com that’s mysterydemastery.com and sign up for the wing works course now it takes less than a minute it’s free to sign up now and it’ll change your life forever click the link in the description below to get started and the research has shown that if you’re more certain in what you’re doing as you step on stage then you’ll perform better it’s it’s the one plus one

approach what’s the one plus one approach one plus one equals two obviously yeah although apparently there are studies out there that could argue that but let’s not go down that path what is it 1984 the the book is it two plus two equals five or something like that okay right oh i think that’s let’s scratch yeah um if you or i were to be invited to do a solo performance no orchestra nothing just walk out on stage carnegie hall live streaming to two billion people much

like today live streaming to two billion people we’ve only got two million on this time so hey we’ve only got two million on this time not two billion yet yeah in fact there are there are two other people in the performance there’s the timpani player and there’s the narrator so you get out there and the timpani starts to roll and the narrator says mark bain what is one plus one you’re gonna mess it up you’re not gonna say three by mistake you’re gonna make an accident

four oh i don’t i got it yesterday the day before you’re gonna be pretty confident that you’re gonna say two and so that’s where we want our technique to be what can we do what can we sometimes do what can’t we do what’s one plus one two what’s ten plus five fifteen what’s 21 plus eighteen or 39 what’s 1.763 million plus multiplied by you know what can we do what can we can breathe we can stand up heart’s going to keep pumping we can clap scratch

our head i gotta digress for one second because otherwise i’ll think about it and we’ll finish this and i’ll go i should have just jumped in and said it not everyone can visualize yeah there is a condition called a fantasia yeah and from my recent experiences with a student who’s got adhd whether it’s a fantasia or whether it’s just a different storage issue i haven’t done the research yet but basically um this particular student couldn’t can’t remember the lessons and couldn’t remember walking down the street

three minutes earlier on their way to get a coffee they know what happened but they can’t actually picture it in their mind and they thought it was a real skill that only a few people could do and that he’s watching tv going imagine in your mind and he all his life he thought well not everyone can do that like yeah dude most people can most people but not everyone so no matter what strategies you or i or everyone else comes up with there’s always a percentage

that it’s not going to work for which is just totally fascinating yeah which which i think is absolutely it’s really interesting and and this is where there is no one way to play your instrument as well and that’s why that’s why i love this because it’s like i listen to you and i learn stuff which i can try out but i know that some of it’s going to work and some of it’s not but it’s all in pursuit of what’s going to work best for me

for my circumstance my brother he has a great saying he says test don’t trust test everything out test out what you hear but don’t trust it until it actually works for you right um so you you build that trust through doing through action yeah absolutely so it’s really important just to you know you hear some of the guru teachers and you just go well if they say it has to work and it’s like well no it works for some it may not work for you and

it works sometimes in a certain circumstance and sometimes not so it’s it’s a really testing and and this is where testing things out in pursuit of finding out if it works will mean that you make lots of errors along the way and that’s why we’re coming back to to that sort of stuff and it’s like i like to think of the practice room as like uh have you seen those old movies like frankenstein movies with like a crazy scientist with all the test tubes and everything

around i think of the practice room kind of like that and and you’re getting these different concoctions together and mixing it together seeing if it makes a potion and some of it blows up and some of it is it works but the idea is that you’re testing things out and exploring and being curious to try and find out what works for you absolutely you have to yeah gotta think outside the box totally find what works for you i spent years and years trying to replicate what

i was being taught and it wasn’t from lack of time lack of love dedication but i was not getting where i wanted to get to with my playing to the point where i was about to give up and it got to the point where i can’t just keep doing exercises as you alluded to before and i’ve done a video called you know good days bad days the exercises are the assessment the work you learn in between attempts yep what was wrong what went right how did

that feel we play by feel we play by feel i had to go today i felt terrible just i was fighting the horn and you know i really struggled felt great and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a swimmer or a golfer you know whatever you’re going to have days that feel bad days that feel good so you’ve got to expect when you get on stage and go i remember doing this when i was working eight days a week you know in melbourne in my height of

my performing career okay it’s going to be one of those days you get down you’ve done your preparation and you sit there and you start playing you might have been up all night the night before playing and busting your face teaching all day to school whatever you’ve been doing and you get to the gig and it it just feels horrible what do you do panic there’s only one reality my chops feel terrible i’m tired of this or that use the chops that you’ve got get through

the gig think musically get that musical message out and the more you’re concerned fighting against what the body’s doing are the better the result yeah there’s there’s been a lot of research actually into that sort of areas that when things start feeling or not going so well we start to internalize our focus and we start to think oh try to manipulate your face or try to squeeze and do sorts of things whereas in terms of learning and performance so the research has shown that if we

can have a focus of attention outside of our body so if you can have think that your sound think hear the sound in your head and where it’s going in the hall so you can think that your sound is going to the back row of the of the seats then you get out of your own way you stop trying to control and micromanage everything and you just hear the sound where it’s going and your body aligns to that right and yeah so it’s um i think

i sent you a few videos of that as well greg and it’s fascinating research and i’ve i’ve do this with my students it’s like they’re i see them worrying about oh my chops aren’t feeling good or i’m not really breathing well and it’s like okay where’s your sound going what points on the wall are you aiming for that’s all you need to think about play and then all of a sudden it’s like boom out it comes because the conscious mind gets in the way of the

subconscious wiring and the conscious mind is the powerful part it’s our best friend and it’s our worst enemy right if we learn how to um get along with it properly engage it when we need to disengage it when we don’t need to um the the conscious mind is for learning for reprogramming the subconscious the subconscious is the motor skills get the heck out of the way when it’s time to deliver and let it do its thing that’s really tough to do roger federer trust your practice

right but if you if you’ve got doubt oh i don’t know about this note i don’t know wheel’s turning you’re you’re compromising the skills that you’ve developed from the conscious mind this is a wicked cycle and that’s that’s just technically speaking and then of course the emotions become involved because of the response to the perceived lack of technical ability now of course if you expect to outplay um as a comedian i can’t bill cosby it’s a shame to have to go oh bill cosby but he

goes if i can’t jump my own height i jump why can’t i jump one inch above my own height you know there’s a reality of going don’t expect to be able to do something you’ve never been able to do before during your performance that’s a bit silly right but if you go okay well we’ll just see what happens what does it sound like put the sound there the less your conscious mind is in the way the higher the likelihood of uh success and that external after

watching the videos that you sent please people if you’re watching this friend mark and go and check out all of his material please i’m like because i do that external focus thing okay i’m very visual about i just want to see the ball fly that way and if it goes that way into the trees which it does and that way into the lake which it does and i do it all the time and unlike most people i’ll stand there and hit seven balls into a lake

that’s a true story one after the other best way to learn i don’t care you you’re frustrated in a healthy way not a negative angry we’re going to learn how to harness frustration um andrew huberman yeah but anyway uh if you don’t know who andrew hoogman is please uh check out his podcast check him out his podcast is amazing some episodes go for three hours though but you know it’s chock full of amazing stuff he’s so good so good listen so i um after watching yours

i’m like okay what’s the role of the club head when i’m playing golf what does it do it needs to go around that way and come through that way focus on the clubhead there’s no body there’s just what’s the clubhead doing i want the club head to go roof rope and it will pick the ball up on the way through and hopefully send it on its way so you focus on that and get the mind the sub the conscious mind that you’ve been utilizing to train

these real deep skills we’ve done that we’ve sent the invitations out now let’s see what happens and so you turn that off and go club head amazing when you let go of all these little things in the body i i sent those i said hey greg i sent those videos not only for your music but yeah to help your golf game so you know it’s all sports psychology research no not really but um definitely of a really intricate skills intricate where does the mouthpiece fit sit

on the lips you know it’s we don’t have to think about it we put it there well we don’t have we don’t have conscious control over all of it anyway right and and it’s it’s you’re trying to exert control over something which is uncontrollable and that just um yeah it just constrains it’s uh it’s called the constrained action hypothesis it’s like everything is you’re you’re trying to control it and uh as soon as we let go and focus on something outside of your body then magic

happens and you you you’ll be really surprised as well like the listeners hopefully they’ll try this out try it out and see have a focus of attention outside of your body and where your sound is going experiment with where the point is outside of your body but i think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much easier it is and and uh you probably do it to a certain extent as you said greg um like you do this and i’ve been doing it for years but now reading

the research it’s like now i can consciously do it so that now i’m like ah okay right i know this is going to work so yeah and the the the important part is is to remain the observer see what happens be prepared to miss be prepared to miss be prepared to sound bad be prepared to split be out of tune crack it airy be prepared for it to not be the perfect note because if you want to play the perfect note you’ve turned you’ve flipped over

psychologically into the performer player mode and your consciousness is on play the note not the focus let go of the desired outcome and observe the desired outcome after the assessment you get the results 100 ah failed ah now i know what i need to work on it’s so hard to trust pure process when it comes to activating i’d practice golf with my eyes closed and then put the ball there with my eyes closed right and then hit the ball and you should see the difference in

the swing when you’re looking at the ball must hit ball everything tightens no do practice swing eyes closed what does it feel like optimal replicate the feeling don’t try and hit the ball because you’re gonna bloom and consciously getting in the way of other things that you’ve programmed and you’ve just you’ve put a kink in the programming world isn’t it it’s so hard to let go of controlling that that result and that’s the same thing whether it be in the practice room or in the in

a performance on stage you know what are your main strategies to get people from i walk on stage and i’ve got butterflies uh i’m i’m aware of that i’ve got butterflies or i’m not aware i’ve got butterflies they turn up sometimes right at the moment sometimes they build up what are your main tricks so it really depends on the individual as well but i the first thing i get every one of my students and clients to start to think about is first of all to become

aware of how you respond under stress become aware of what sort of things go on like do you get butterflies does your heart rate go through the roof mine is that i get a dry mouth and so once you can actually recognize that’s going on then you can actually develop some strategies for when that happens then you go okay it’s not taking me by surprise anymore so what can i do as a strategy when that happens again and so so a lot of like you hear

a lot of string players they get shaky bow or we get the shakes as well and it’s like okay when that happens because it probably will happen again that’s okay but then we can actually say okay where’s your focus gonna go now quite often and this is where i do a lot of work with focus of attention is like if you start if you’re starting to shake if your sound’s starting to shake what do you start to focus on and generally the focus goes internal you

start to focus on the muscles and go oh my my chops are shaking so i have to do this whereas then it’s about my focus needs to be externally outside of my body and listening to the sound that i’m producing and also the character and the emotion the effects that i want to create now that’s easier said than done but but the idea is that you’ll recognizing and being an observer of your experience so you’re observing what’s going on observing your body and observing those reactions

and then you’re observing where your focus is going and then you’re diverting your focus onto the thing that’s most important onto the task at hand yeah so it’s really like i do a lot with mindfulness and meditation sort of stuff in in order so that we can become more observant of what we actually experience on stage sure and then then you’re living at course you’re living more proactively or you’re playing more proactively rather than effect you’re not being to to the effect of everything going on

around you you’re not just reacting and you know getting thrown around in the in the waves it’s just like no okay you can make conscious choices um yeah we just i haven’t read it but i’m we have just got a message here through from one of my most dear friends playing colleagues for many many years uh he’s psychic he doesn’t realize he’s psychic but he is he knew what i was going to do when i was playing before i knew he was the second trumpet player

on dancing with the stars one of australia’s great trumpet players mr shane gillard shane thanks for the comment here my shane um i hope you haven’t called us names because i haven’t the fear of a catastrophic performance has definitely been a trigger for performance anxiety i’ve found it helpful to examine the logic of those thoughts and logic and reality can be put in the same little basket the answer for me has been to identify that i have done the work in the practice room i told

you this guy’s an absolute genius you’ve done the work in the practice room trust your practice and therefore the likelihood of a catastroph catastrophe and performance is extremely low and a missed note here and there will not matter if my intention is to play with musicality love your work shane gillard thanks shane right absolutely 100 we’re not saving lives no we’re human we’re going to make mistakes but if we’re not worried about making mistakes we probably won’t and if we keep making mistakes well then there’s

an issue if the car keeps complete conking out on the third lap of the formula one grand prix there’s a mechanical issue but the driver is not sitting there trying to adjust the fuel flow and adjust the brakes and the transmission while going down the straight at 300 mile an hour if you try and i better check that my accelerator pedal’s working properly you’re probably going to crash so we’ve got to that ties in beautifully to the high performance vessel of we are trying to develop

i i believe that every human if they’ve got lips and lungs hands well you can get away with one hand balance can play whatever they want on a brass instrument i really believe that and i know that a lot of people out there go nah nah it takes a special sort of someone to to do that sort of playing or this sort of playing yeah well i mean that that also ties in with like our mindset and whether you have the belief that you can grow

and learn and there’s been a lot of research on this as well with um with a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset and if you believe that you can grow and that you can learn and you can change which through brain plasticity we’ve sh has shown that you can um our brain is not hardwired to you know you’re not a born trumpet player no one is far out if we were then i’m in trouble but the idea is that you can believe that you can change

those skills everything is temporary so if you if you can’t play something yet keep working at it and you can still develop those skills if you’re working at it yeah absolutely i don’t like the term neuroplasticity plastic oh this is interesting is not malleable yeah i’m going to come up with a new word i do that neural neural something that’s malleable [Laughter] eradicative if julie’s watching this is funny because with dystonia a lot of people work trying to come up with ways around it some people

say there are no cures for focal dystonia some people use botox please don’t do that right vocal dystonia it’s a neurological issue right so we need to change the right way that we think because the muscles the muscles are dumb as human says that they respond to the messages from the brain so we’ve got to clarify the messages from the brain i’ve completely lost my train of thought because i thought of two things once just then you’re probably still thinking of brain plasticity and brian brain

rubbery city or something it’s totally that is eradicative yeah thank you well well done um people think that there’s no cure for it and that’s like saying we’re not able to reprogram our thoughts because it’s all about monitoring our thoughts now our thoughts are messages and i believe negative messaging plays obviously a major role in performance anxiety and and focal dystonia i believe there is a finite amount of negative messages that can come from wherever they come from in the brain all right there are messages

come from somewhere and i believe there are a finite amount of negative messages that can be sent from the brain so therefore we want to i don’t want to adapt i don’t want to be adaptive right we can adapt we can come up with strategies to adapt to the current environment whether it be performance or dystonia and we need to do that we need to have survival strategies to get through those moments however ultimately wouldn’t it be great to eradicate any sense of i’m going to

walk on stage i don’t care how many people there are i don’t care what i need to play i can either play it or i can’t i can play it in the practice room and i’m pretty confident so i’ll just see how it goes right imagine if we could get everyone to just go walk on stage and just think music and try their best play their best and enjoy remember that feeling that dopamine rush is the youngster when you learn to play something you heard the

instrument for the first time and you had a love for the sound i want to do that imagine if everyone had the skills of a professional musician and walked out with the love of the performance and the sound of an eight-year-old or ten year old or thirteen-year-old or something imagine the sound that would be made i don’t know that there’s an orchestra on the planet where every single musician gets out there going i’m so excited to play today and there’s not one kind of negative message

going don’t miss that you’re not capable of doing that and that there’s not one message coming i call them scud missiles they come in you stud missiles shoot that negative message down it’s like imagine if all the thoughts going through every musician on stages this is so hip i’m going to give to the orchestra with the best sound i’ve ever played and this is going to be brilliant every single member tell me that’s not going to be the best orchestra you’ve ever heard sign me up

yeah right so i believe that i was using the word eradicative and jules was like there’s no such word you can’t i said i don’t care i’m going to invent a word i do that eradicative and it turns out i said it that many times and she’s gone that’s it she googled it eradicative the process of eradicating there we go it already exists right so what can we do what can we sometimes do what can’t we do one plus one one plus one equals two the

brain tells us it’s three it’s an error so we’ve got to keep making the error until we learn and get it right and i believe that anyone can and i’m coming from a history of performance anxiety and having to deal with it those first three seasons of dancing with the stars i used to walk off the adrenaline was so up i’d still focus and get the job done but the hearts going a million miles an hour and that was the early days when there was only

one trumpet i didn’t have my buddy shane to bloom and nurse me through it you’ve got to just do what you’ve got to do to get through but i got to the stage and this comes back to the visualization of i’m sitting at home practicing and i’m sort of paying it forward in my practice room i’m imagining myself and chong lim the md because we used to have all this bloomin you got two seconds notice and the red lights in your face deliver right and i’m

like i’m tired the energy that it wastes being nervous or hyped or whatever takes a lot of energy we don’t want to waste energy on that we want to put our energy into the love of the music not freaking out the body fight and flight issues so i’d sit at home and put myself in a little bubble and imagine it’s just chong and me and he’s looking at me he’s got his cans on and he’s said something that’s made the band laugh generally with a swear

word it’d be chuckling but then it’s business and i’ll be practicing this in my practice room at home i’m in the studio i’m visualizing the studio i’m visualizing the red lights and this is me and chong so when i got to the show i thought right what did i send forward with my dystonia teaching now it’s building tomorrow what did we send forward from yesterday what do i want to achieve today what well what commands did i set out well yesterday what i sent forward was

i was in my practice room so let’s go back and have a look at that now so i’d be sitting in the studio i’m imagining i’m in in my practice room and it’s just me and chong red light’s on countdown and play and i’d replicate what i did in the practice room and i did that for three seasons until it got to the point where i’ve gone this is freaking ridiculous it’s just a gig i’m getting up on sunday nights in front of people and they’re

dancing i’m getting up on monday night on television and there’s people dancing and there’s an audience get over it just played have fun and eventually got to the point where we just had fun yeah but i reckon greg greg what i’m what i’m hearing from you though is that you’re you’re trying to replicate your experience what you’re experiencing in performance you’re trying to replicate that in practice as well which i think a lot of musicians don’t tend to do is that they go from a calm

controlled environment in the practice room and then they go on stage and freak out because the jump is way too big whereas then if you can um a good quote to remember is practice like you play and you’ll play like you practice right so that you’re you sounds like yeah through visualization and through your preparation then the gap between the actual performance and your practice was like that as opposed to like that so it’s the same thing because i mean you’ve got a little bit of

extra pressure there but uh no it comes down to care factor and i’ve got to be careful when i say this because it doesn’t mean that i don’t care i don’t care if i miss a note yeah so then i just and there’s one reality there’s one now let’s see what happens trust your practice yeah they’re all really powerful statements if you can embrace them yeah and so i’ll try to make them exactly the same hell gulper famous piano player with all the jazz greats he

calls it chaos and when he was talking about the chaos he was talking more about the the sound environment where we practice at home and you can hear yourself and you know what to expect and then you get on stage and there’s amplifiers and singers or percussion sections my brain instantly goes to west side story with melbourne symphony trying to play the um the gymnasium scene and mumbo and thousand freaking percussionists behind me i couldn’t hear a note that i was playing right so rule number

one if you can’t hear yourself play softer don’t try and fight the environment that it goes i know what i sound like i want to sound like that and then you get into a different environment and you can’t hear yourself what’s the first thing we do is throw out all of the beautiful technical things that we’ve been working on and force the body to do all this stuff to try and satisfy the ear you cannot fight the environment so that’s an order like an audible issue

where you just i definitely i definitely hear that with with a lot of inexperienced musicians that come through and all of a sudden big orchestra we play a bit louder and they start to push and stretch and squeeze and you know i think it comes down to trust at the end of the day you really come back to really trusting that what you’ve done in the practice room will flow through um and sometimes it has to be a little bit of blind trust but um definitely

for younger musicians i think it’s coming in and just sitting back on it and and not trying to push and squeeze and just trust all that great work that you’ve done absolutely so when they’re at home practicing guys shut your eyes i’m practicing the second movement of the hiding what does it feel like because you get up in front of the orchestra and all of a sudden environment changes and you go oh oh it’s a lot louder or i can’t hear myself because in a concert

hall as you very well know that the sound gets swallowed up in the vacuum of the room so you’re not going to hear yourself the same so what does it feel like and if you know if you can equate in your mind this feeling equals this sound just because your ear can’t hear it doesn’t mean the sound’s not there so you have to trust the feeling and the sound has to be there because it’s not like your instrument’s not working well quite quite often in the

in the section if i’m playing and i can’t hear myself that’s a good thing because that means that i’m blended in and i’ve my intonation is good whereas if i can hear me if i can hear my own sound i’m like oh i’m either too loud or playing at a tune or something like that so it’s definitely a it’s an indicator but but i think as well it’s important that when you do get in those environments that it’s again less reactive you’re you’re more observing what’s

going on and so we’re you might be you might be sort of freaking out a little bit but if we can take a more observational approach and say okay what’s going on what’s going on and be as flexible as we possibly can in that environment then because as soon as we have pressure we tend to constrict and contract and then become really rigid whereas if we can stay open and observing our experience then we can actually go with the flow a little bit more and get

a better result at the end of the day absolutely absolutely i shared with you when we spoke on friday when we decided to do this one my experience uh working with the queensland symphony and it was the recording of the music two sessions two full days of recording or two three to a three three hour sessions both days and i get there and the butterflies are there it’s an orchestra i don’t know anyone they’re playing a couple of orchestral things and i’m like i have to

sit down with a bunch of players with a book of music this big high notes loud notes two days of playing these guys don’t know who i am it you know i was having butterflies right but thankfully after years and years of experience and lots of teaching getting telling people that playing is no harder than humming talking singing [Music] i was reminding myself don’t play any harder than that greg just get up there and do what you do in the practice room and do what you

teach don’t try and get up there and be a hero play the hell out of the first track waste half of your gas tank and then be struggling for the next two days to have the chops to get through the recording sessions so i’m getting my trumpet out there playing and the butterflies are starting to get quite erratic mmm don’t overblow greg don’t overblow and i’m just humming just reminding myself don’t blow harder than that don’t blow harder than that if you’re not sure what i’m

talking about and you don’t believe me you’re a trumpet player come and check out winworks it’s all explained right [Music] so i did that for a while [Music] and the butterflies went away [Music] that’s weird that’s really weird now i told you that story and what did you say [Music] [Applause] [Music] you