6 practice destroyers (and how to defeat them)

It’s inevitable. We sit down to practice and we’re interrupted. Maybe it’s a crisis of some sort. Maybe it’s a phone call or text message. Perhaps it’s the list of unfinished tasks that chatter in the backs of our minds until we abandon our practicing efforts, promise ourselves that we’ll do better tomorrow, and walk away. Things keep happening. The days pile up. And then we realize that a week or two have passed and we haven’t touched the keys more than once or twice.

I don’t know why it feels as if having a goal to create music for a certain amount time every day seems to unleash a flood of interruptions. All I know is that carving out space and time to play the piano every day is one of the hardest things adult players face. Sometimes the distractions come from outside of ourselves. Sometimes we’re the architects of our own inability to practice. Either way, when we’re eager enough to make playing the piano a priority, it’s up to us to learn how to stop the interruptions that keep us from this goal. If your practice time is being derailed by distractions, this post is for you. In it you’ll find my biggest practice destroyers and the tricks I use to defeat them. Hopefully you’ll find them helpful in your own efforts to protect your time at the piano.

Other People

Electronic interruptions

Phone, text, social media notifications—it doesn’t ever seem to stop. We’re always on call and always available. This will only take a minute, we say as we interrupt our practice time to answer one more text or take a call. I’ll get back to the piano after this one thing. But then the one text turns into an exchange, or the call runs long, or we get caught up in the latest drama blowing up our social media feed. Our practice time drips away, and when we return to the keys and see how little time we have left, we give up.

My advice? Turn the phone off. Leave it someplace where you can’t see it. Unless someone you know is currently in acute crisis and needs your immediate response, things can wait. Protect your practice time by building a wall of silence around the piano and yourself.

Set a schedule

If you live with other people, find a practice time that works with others’ schedules and tell everyone else in the house what time this will be. We may feel inspired to practice in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, but if the piano is near the TV and your partner is watching football, there will be conflict. Set your schedule and stick to it. If things need to deviate, communicate that to others. Supportive people will disappear while you’re playing, and knowing that you have that time set aside makes it easier to be available to others when you’re not practicing.

Chaos creators

You know these people. There’s at least one in every life. The chaos creator is the person who thrives on crisis. If one doesn’t exist, they’ll manufacture it. Everything is last minute. Everything is an emergency. Everything demands your attention, your help, right now, this instant or you’re a horrible, selfish person who just doesn’t care.

Set firm boundaries. Chaos creators hate them but it’s the only way you’ll be free to get any practicing done. If you feel guilty for denying them access to you, ask yourself what they’d do if you weren’t there to rescue them. Remember that no one will care as much about protecting your creative time as you will. Setting firm boundaries starts with giving ourselves permission to not be at someone else’s beck and call.

How to set boundaries with a chaos creator? Stick to your practice schedule. Every day. I’ve done this with my own beloved chaos creator and it works. Remember that if you give in and let them invade your practice time, they won’t respect your boundaries in the future.

Ourselves

Monkey mind

What should I fix for dinner? The plants need to be watered. I wonder if Katie is going to get that new job. Should I invite the neighbors over next weekend? You get the idea. We don’t see just how much our minds jump around until we sit down to practice. How do we get it to stop? How do we stop finding ourselves halfway through a page of music before we realize we haven’t really heard what we’ve played because our thoughts are elsewhere?

In my experience, practice time needs a brief cushion of quiet around it. Create a ritual for yourself before you sit down to play. Perhaps you brew a cup of tea. Maybe you spend five minutes strolling around while you give yourself space to transition from what you were doing and your work on the piano. And if that doesn’t work? Pull out a piece of paper and “brain drain” all those thoughts onto the page. That way, if they’re important, your mind knows you won’t forget them, making it easier to focus on your music.

Unfinished tasks

This is similar to monkey mind but focuses solely on tasks you need to fulfill. We’ve all got a list of things that must be done. Write them down. If possible, get the most pressing ones finished before you practice. Schedule a time to finish the rest when you’re done playing. To-do lists are eternal, but they need not run our lives.

Perfectionism

You tell yourself you need at least an hour to practice or it isn’t worth doing. Or perhaps you can’t practice if the house isn’t completely clean. Maybe what stops you is your expectation that every note you play needs to be flawless and musical. Welcome to the perfectionist trap. When we’re caught in one we spend more time planning to practice than actually practicing. We forget that doing something—even for just fifteen or twenty minutes—is better than doing nothing at all. We don’t make room for real life or for our own frailties. We use our excuses to avoid facing our own inadequacies at the piano every day.

It’s wonderful to strive for excellence, but perfectionism is the enemy of creativity. It robs us of curiosity and the courage to try new things. It traps us in having to be boringly right rather than finding some brilliantly delicious wrongs.

The only cure I know for perfectionism is to get to the piano even when the house is a mess, or when we don’t have enough time to practice. Stop planning, stop cleaning, stop organizing—just sit down and learn one measure really well. And then learn the next one really well. Take musical risks. Ask yourself why the composer did one thing or another. At the end of your practice time (no matter how long or short), you’ll have made progress.

The job of becoming a pianist lies in consistency, self-respect, curiosity, and self-compassion. Even if we’re in lessons with an instructor, we’re the masters of our own creative destiny. If we long to play but we still can’t find a way to sit down and do regular practicing, start looking for practice destroyers. When you uncover them, honor yourself enough to find ways to circumvent them. Your time and your mind belong to you and you have the power and the right to claim both for yourself.

Photo by Raphael GB, courtesy of UpSplash