When it comes to practicing the piano your mindset can make a big difference in how much you get done and how much you enjoy yourself. How you think about your progress, your focus, and even your mistakes directly impacts how you grow as a musician. Here are a few key mindsets that can transform the way you approach the piano and help you improve faster and more consistently.
Progress, Not Perfection
We’ve all heard the phrase “practice makes perfect,” and you’ve likely also heard some of the more accurate versions of that phrase like “practice makes progress” or “practice makes permanent” (whether it’s something you want to make “permanent” or not). Perhaps the most important understanding to start our practice with is that we are never trying to be perfect. Even in the moment of performance, we are not trying to “perfectly” recreate the best practice we have done. Instead, we are trying to take a reasonably step from where we are today. I often tell my students, “We are not trying to be good. We are trying to be better.”
Aiming for perfection is not just unrealistic, it is also unhelpful. This impossible goal sets us up for frustration and discouragement. It also disincentivizes us from looking for improvements when we feel things are going well; if things are perfect now, there are not improvements left to look for. But the biggest argument against aiming for perfection is psychological. People like to feel like they’re winning, but aiming for perfection makes that very difficult. Let’s say you’re aiming for perfection. Your first day with a new piece, you learn lots of notes, start to understand a tricky rhythm, and even spend a little time thinking about what mood you think the music might have. But because it’s nowhere near perfect yet, it’s not a win. The second week, you already have one page flowing fairly smoothly and you’re often hearing dynamics and staccatos clearly. But one page is not steady yet and there are a few notes you often miss. Still not a win. Even after lots of effort and progress, you play it at a festival and the adjudicator has a few new ideas for you to try out. Evidently, not perfect, so still not a win.
Tiny improvements on the other hand are always available no matter what stage of learning you are in. Maybe you are really struggling to get one part hands together, but you can do one bar slowly hands together. That’s better than before, so that’s a win. Maybe you have to change a fingering in a section that is not flowing easily yet. You have some starts and stops, but you can tell each fingering was correct. That’s a win. You’re feeling nervous before a performance, but this time you remember to do your breathing exercise before being called up on stage. Regardless of how you play, that’s something that helps you out. Win.
Most students are not truly aiming for perfection on a daily basis. However a lot have difficulty recognizing their progress, particularly with big challenges where solid progress is still far from the finished product. I recommend going out of your way to to look for and celebrate progress on a daily basis so that when those tougher days to come, students have a brain that is primed to accept those smaller steps as a win.
Tiny Improvements
So you’ve decided to make practice all about making progress. Some days we can see ourselves learning minute by minute. Some days we can’t. What should do when progress feels hard to come by?
The trick is to look for a tiny improvement. How tiny? As long as you can tell for sure that something has improved, you are doing enough. Once you find one tiny improvement, look for another. See how many you can find. Worried your changes are too small? They’re not. Firstly, when you’re stuck, there are often only one or two pieces of information that are missing. Just one small step may be give you all the clarity you need, or at least enough that further helpful steps are now visible. Secondly, if your change are really that small, it’s going to take a lot of focus to assess if your thinking and playing has really changed or not. This extra focus increases the odds of finding further tiny improvements.
My favourite part of tiny improvements is how they start to shift your self-belief. There are many productive, tiny improvements available to you at all times. As you get better at finding them, you show yourself that even in a tricky situation, you can always help yourself get better. This helps foster a growth mindset: the belief that you can increase your skill and intelligence through effort and perseverance. Students who have developed a growth mindset understand that effort makes them stronger, and are more likely to put in extra time and focus in the face of challenges. Not only do our tiny improvements add up, they give us confidence that we can solve the problems that face us, making us more resilient practicers. And best of all, a series of tiny changes is a series of wins. They makes it easier to feel good about the effort we’ve put into our practice.
There is another significant benefit to practicing this way. Searching for tiny improvements can help you when you feel stuck, but it’s actually a really good way to keep yourself focused and working efficiently when things are going wonderfully too. Even in a performance, reaching for tiny improvements in how clearly you think and hear can help you be present and actively involved in your music making when muscle memory threatens to set in (more on that below).
Playing With Your Focus
Expressive playing and enjoyment at the piano are deeply tied to the sounds we create and the way we are able to tell stories and influence emotions. However, control of our fingers, ears, and intentions all comes from our brain. The foundations for expressive and controlled playing lie in robust and resilient thinking. I often tell my students we play the piano with our brain but really, we play the piano with our attention and our focus. I never mind when a student plays in a way that doesn’t sound great yet, but with clear and improving thinking.
Now, your brain would rather not use its full focus, but it’s not because your brain isn’t lazy or not capable. Imagine a pre-historic hunter gatherer; they had to work harder to find food than we do today. If their brain could do a task with less focus, it would burn fewer calories, which is an evolutionary advantage. People with brains that could work more efficiently (get good results with less focus) were more likely to survive. It is not just early humans either; it is was the same for the mammals they evolved from, and the reptiles they evolved from, stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Despite the fact most of us have easy access to food today, we have brains today that have evolved to use as little energy as they could get away with. This is why we have muscle memory: your brain executes a standard set of instructions without giving it’s full attention to what it is doing. (As a aside, muscle memory can help us if we have good habits, but it is unreliable because we are not really in control.)
Practice and performing however require a lot of clear thinking: checking yourself even when everything is likely right, exploring ideas, and creativity. None of these objectives thrive when we are trying to use the minimum of energy. This means that, even for experienced pianists, a big part of your practice can be reminding getting yourself out of lower energy playing so you can be more precise and clear in your thinking. I usually do this by asking questions. Do I think the notes are right, or know the notes are right? Can I hear the dynamics and phrasing? Would someone else listening to me? As it happens, looking for tiny improvements is a wonderful way to engage your focus and be present in performance or in practice. When you are deliberately engaging your focus, you are in a strong position to find little changes, and when you are finding little changes, you know you are effectively deploying your focus. This increase in self-awareness leads to deeper learning, and more secure, fun, and imaginative playing.
A Note About Young Children
If you are looking to apply this advice to your own practice, wonderful! If you have older children, I’d recommend discussing this whole article with them, or at least sections as feels appropriate. However, if you have younger children, that may not be entirely feasible. What I would recommend is going out of your way to demonstrate these principles at every opportunity. Praise your children for making progress, no matter how close or far to their goal they are. Celebrate the effort they put into their practice. If you’re having a tough day, find one place that you know they can make a tiny improvement, and tell them how proud of them you are for trying when they make that small change. Look out for moments where you can see they are doing great problem solving and point out how you can see how well they are using their focus. In a pinch, you can even celebrate improvements that you’re not sure were deliberate just to point out progress and bring their attention to more detail in a positive way. They may be too young to take these steps on their own, but you can start to show them some of the goals of fun and efficient practice.
What Does This Mean For Me?
Hopefully this gives you some ideas about how to get more done in your practice and have more fun doing it. Your practice habits won’t shift overnight, but if you are focused on progress they don’t have to! Keep gently reminding yourself that a tiny improvement is all you need to be on the right path. In my house our practice isn’t over until we have identified and celebrated things from our practice session we tried hard at or are proud of. Keep checking if you are focused during your practice. You’ll often notice you weren’t, but just that awareness is enough that you can make a different choice. And if you have questions about anything you read here or want to let me know how it is going for you, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave me a reply below.
Happy playing!