Module Four Lesson One: Transform Your Singing: The Power of Mindset in Practice
LINKS!
Here’s a beautifully-animated short video about practicing. myelin, and your brain from TED Ed.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Your relationship with practicing is everything. And the mindset you bring to each session sets the stage for the work ahead.
As pianist, and master teacher Seymour Bernstein says:
“Mastering an instrument is a constant challenge. Confronting this challenge means confronting yourself. Because musical and technical difficulties will always exist to some degree, the battle is a perpetual one. But confidence comes from knowing how to succeed — how to grapple with problems and eventually solve them through a process.”
In this lesson, we’ll divide that process into three areas of practice: your body, mind, and emotions. You’ll learn why it’s important to practice each one separately, and how they work together to build musical skills.
We’ll also look at how our brains master skills to take advantage of our natural capacity for learning.
PHYSICAL
First, there’s your body. You practice to keep your body healthy, in shape, and to expand your physical capabilities like vocal range, flexibility, and strength.
You also practice so that your physical skills become automatic.
New habits are created by using focused attention. When you focus on each part of a task and then repeat it, your body memorizes it. When skills become automatic, you can focus on other things while you’re doing them.
Remember how hard it was to learn how to ride a bike? No one gets it on the first try. It takes many attempts (and some painful falls) to stay up and in control.
Many of the physical components of singing (like breathing efficiently with your diaphragm) aren’t easy to master either.
But, just like riding a bike, once you learn the sequence of movements and internalize them, they become automatic and embedded deeply enough that they’re impossible to forget
For some people, the physical piece comes easily. For others, it takes many more repetitions for a physical skill to become embedded. But for all of us, repetition is the key to building muscle memory.
MENTAL
The next element in practice is about developing your mental capabilities — increasing your ability to focus, and exercising your brain.
To sing a song, you need to have a mental picture of it in your mind — a musical map. When you’re first learning it, just the barest outlines are visible. With practice, the details of that auditory image begin to emerge. With mastery, you have a complete picture of the path from the beginning of your journey to the end. This mental map acts as a foundation for later exploration, discovery, and improvisation.
Once you’ve memorized the map, you no longer need to reference it to know your way.
Your mind also helps you expand your musical horizons. Whether it’s mastering a new approach to technique, or connecting more deeply with the songs you sing through your imagination, developing your mind creates new possibilities in your art and your performance.
EMOTIONAL
If your body is the vessel, and your mind is what you fill it with, then your emotions are what ignites the fire beneath it.
As you know from previous lessons, emotion is everything in music. A perfect performance without feeling doesn’t move anyone.
When we’re learning new music and improving technique, it’s easy to lose sight of the feelings we’re trying to invoke. When you practice with emotional intention, it weaves those feelings into the fabric of the music you make.
As Seymour Bernstein says,
“...practicing is a process through which thoughts, feelings, and physical gestures become synthesized. Therefore, when your feelings are converted into muscular activity, your automatic pilot or reflex system is fed not only physical impulses but also the feelings implicit within them.”
In other words, the feeling becomes embedded in your muscle memory.
He goes on to say, “This fact is of extreme importance, and understanding it will help you make the following resolution: never approach a passage in a purely mechanistic way; always have, instead, an emotional intention.”
Granted, sometimes you have to put that emotional intention aside for a moment. For example, when you’re working out how to approach a high note, breaking down the timing in a phrase that doesn’t feel right, or experimenting with vowel color, it’s almost impossible to sing with feeling at the same time.
But once you’ve mastered a physical or mental skill, it’s essential to reconnect to your emotional intention as soon as possible. Practicing this connection will ignite your performance, making all that work on your body and mind more powerful.
HOW WE LEARN
So, how do we learn? How can we harness our brain’s natural capacity for creating new connections and then strengthen them? Let’s take a look.
Video: Baby Walking
How do we go from this?
Video: Ballerina
To this?
One step at a time.
It all starts with an overwhelming desire to master a skill.
We’re all born curious. When we’re babies, walking expands our ability to explore and learn about the world. To master any skill, we need to want it badly enough to go through the frustrating process of failing.
Here’s what learning looks like in our brains.
Slide: Learning & The Brain
Slide: Nerve Cells and Axons
Let’s start with nerve cells and axons.
Science writer and educator Alison Pierce Stevens writes:
“The brain is made up of billions of nerve cells called neurons. These cells are chatty. They “talk” to each other, mostly using chemical messengers. Incoming signals cause a listening neuron to fire or send signals of its own. A cell fires when an electrical signal travels through it. The signal moves away from what is called the cell body, down through a long structure called an axon.”
Video: Nerve Cells in Action
When the signal reaches the end of the axon, it triggers the release of those chemical messengers. The chemicals then leap across a tiny gap. This triggers the next cell to fire. And on it goes. — Alison Pierce Stevens
Your neurons fire every time you take a step or perform a behavior. The more steps you take, the stronger that connection (the neural pathway) becomes.
So what makes the connection stronger?
MYELIN
Repetition and myelin.
Myelin consists of a type of glial cell that wraps around the axon and creates a myelin sheath. It’s like a protective coating that insulates the axon so that the signal going down it doesn’t “leak” out.
It also helps move the signal along more quickly.
When you’re first learning a skill, the neural pathway is like the old computer dial-up system. It’s slow going and not very efficient. But when you repeatedly use a pathway, myelin continues to wrap around the axon: the more repetitions, the more myelin. It eventually resembles a high-speed internet connection that’s fast and reliable.
Remember the old saying “Practice makes perfect”? Not really. Practice makes myelin.
And it doesn’t matter how young or old you are. If you engage in focused practice, that’s right at the edge of your ability, over time, and many repetitions, you’ll learn new habits and master new skills.
As author Daniel Coyle writes in “The Talent Code,” “...myelin doesn’t care who you are—it cares what you do.”
And it cares how you do it. There’s a sequence to this kind of deep learning and practice. Here’s how it goes:
TARGET/REACH/GAP/REPEAT
Target, reach, gap, repeat.
As Daniel Coyle writes, “Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it’s about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions. Pick a target. Reach for it. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach. Return to step one.”
First, let’s talk about the target. It needs to be doable, yet one that stretches you beyond your current ability. When you practice at the edge of your ability, your brain stays engaged and focused.
Let’s apply this approach to your practice. Let’s say you want to be able to sing more powerfully, with greater volume. That’s your target. What does it take to reach it? Muscle strength, especially when you’re singing higher in your range.
You begin by finding a volume or intensity that doesn’t strain. Then you experiment and sing just a little bit louder until you fail — the note cracks or loses tone quality. Now you have an idea where the gap is and can work on filling it.
You back off the volume and practice just above the intensity that’s easy for you and doesn’t strain. You test again to see where the outer limit lies. Over the weeks and months ahead, you repeat the process. Your strength and stamina increase and you can sing louder and longer without straining.
Or maybe there’s a song whose melody you constantly fumble over. The notes just won’t stick in your auditory memory. Your goal — the target — is to sing the correct notes from the beginning of the song to the end. You sing the whole thing slowly until you hit the first trouble spot — an incorrect note. Now you’ve found the gap. You sing the correct note, repeat it a few times, and then go back a few notes to see if it sticks when you sing it in context. Over time the correct note becomes embedded in your auditory memory, and you’re able to sing the phrase correctly every time.
You sing the song. Find the mistake. Fix it. Repeat the fix until it feels easy. Go back a phrase and sing it in context to make sure it sticks. Repeat the process until it feels smooth, and the gap no longer exists.
Like this:
[Sings Mary Had A Little Lamb]
As Daniel Coyle writes, “Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.”
Another strategy that will help you test the new neural pathway you’ve created is to sing the corrected phrase extremely fast — faster than you would ever perform it. If you can sing the new note without a hitch, you know it’s deeply embedded in your mind.
Later, when you slow the phrase back down to an actual performance tempo, it will feel much easier to sing.
WILLING AND ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT BEING BAD
You will become clever through your mistakes. —German proverb
Failure is our greatest teacher. But failure doesn’t feel as good as success. That’s why it’s tempting to stick with the skills we know rather than risk feeling bad by attempting to learn new ones.
It’s essential to learn how to embrace failure so you can continue to stretch the boundaries of what you know. Like those staggering babies, you must be willing and even enthusiastic about being bad at the skill you’re trying to learn.
TALENT vs. EFFORT
Which brings us to an important discussion about talent vs. effort:
We all have natural aptitudes, or talent, for skills like singing, writing, mathematics, or sports. But talent isn’t everything. Effort is essential to mastering a skill too. Studies show that your mindset, what you believe about your talent vs. your effort, makes a huge difference in how successful you are at learning new skills.
Psychologist Carol Dweck created an illuminating study around motivation done with four hundred New York fifth graders. Her astonishment at the results made her run the test five times. Each time the result was the same. Here’s what she did.
The students were given four tests. The first one was fairly simple. After taking it, they were given the results along with a single sentence of praise. Half of the children were told, “You must be smart at this.” The other half were told, “You must have worked really hard.”
For the second test, the students were offered a choice. They could take an easy test or one that was hard. Ninety percent of the children who were praised for their effort chose the harder test. Those who were told they “must be smart at this” picked the easier one.
The third test was harder still — both groups of students did poorly. But the students who were praised for their effort enjoyed the challenge. The students who were told that they were smart hated it. They took it as proof that they weren’t so smart after all.
The students then took the fourth and final test, one that was as easy as the first. Those who’d been praised for their effort increased their scores by 30%. The test scores of those who’d been praised for their intelligence dropped by 20%.
Dweck writes, “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that’s the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
So let’s substitute the word talent for intelligence.
If you base the foundation of your vocal life on the belief that you’re talented, every failure — in your practice, rehearsal or performance — will prove that you don’t have what it takes to make it in music.
If you’re a perfectionist like me, it’s easy to become paralyzed and afraid to take chances.
So cultivate the mindset that you’re a hard worker that doesn’t give up. When you fail, give yourself props for trying in the first place, pick yourself up, and try again. Reframe the experience by looking at failure as just another step towards mastery. If you can learn to enjoy the challenges in your musical life, you’re already succeeding.
O.K. Enough about practice mindset. Let’s move on to how and what to practice!
