Struggling with a Learned Mistake? Try This!
It’s better if it never happens in the first place, but inevitably sometimes it does: You practice a mistake.
And practice helps you learn that mistake. Really well.
Perhaps it’s a mistake you practiced accidentally, without realizing it was there until later. Or maybe it was a mistake you knew you were making repeatedly but couldn’t figure out how to forestall.
The terrible and wonderful thing about practice is that we improve at what we repeat– and, unfortunately, that does sometimes include mistakes.
A practiced mistake is like a heavy suitcase: It weighs us down, preventing us from moving forward with agility and ease. Entrenched mistakes are much harder and more complicated to undo than a brand new mistake, and yet we often take the same approach to both: isolating the phrase or section and trying again from its beginning, sometimes while sternly instructing ourselves not to mess up.
For a mistake that hasn’t yet been cemented by practice, this can work. But if you’ve spent time reinforcing your mistake, the odds are not insignificant that you’ll continue to make it.
So what should you do instead?
Drop the baggage
If you approach a learned mistake in your practice from the same location and direction you’ve approached it in the past, you’re carrying with you all baggage of your previous learning. And that baggage is heavy! You’re simply not going to be nimble enough to navigate the technical obstacle you’re trying to surmount.
Start fresh…
When tangling with a learned mistake, your best bet is to start right on the error. Not from two notes before the error, not even from one note prior, but right at the point of pain. Make the location of the mistake your new home base, and begin by working forward, adding a note or two at a time and repeating each run until you’ve got relaxed and consistent production.
…Then head back
Then, and only then, you’ll want to begin to work backward, adding one note prior to the mistake at a time, again repeating until you’ve got relaxed and consistent production with each new addition. This backwards approach helps to free you of the baggage of your previous learning because you’re working from a different direction, having already reinforced correct production from the point of the mistake.
If you work through this process slowly and deliberately, with attention to minimizing tension as you go, you should be able to smooth out the mistake in much less time, and with more success, than if you’d used a more conventional approach.
Want more practicing tips? Try my Webinar Replay, Secrets of Successful Practice
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