Bravery
Dealing with fear is an essential skill for humans to develop. Eleanor Roosevelt superlatively defined the purpose of fear when she said:
You gain strength, courage, and confidence
by every experience in which you really stop
to look fear in the face.
Helping people work through fear is a special gift to them. A person who has experienced fear and learned to not give up in the face of that fear is going to have a better life than those who have learned to see fear as a stopping point. As a music teacher, one of the best things that you will do is give your students the opportunity to practice facing their fears.
But why you as a teacher of music in particular? What makes music scarier than math, or language, or science? What is it about studying music that makes our students better at dealing with fear than, say, sports or the debate team?
In Chapter 4, I’ll get into the brain reason for why performing music makes people feel vulnerable and exposed, and in Chapter 11, I’ll explore practical ways to work through fear with music. But for now, the key thing to know is that music lives in the same place in your brain as the sensation of being naked. In other words, any time a person is making music, their brain feels exposed, bare, vulnerable, uncomfortable, and possibly even in danger. That feeling is exceptionally intense if they are making music in front of others. This means that any time your students play music for you, they are actually engaging with the fear emotion, whether they realize it or not.
Why do you need to know this?
When music teachers aren’t aware of the very vulnerable place that they ask their students to inhabit when they play, they might unwittingly do or say something that can do harm.
Imagine standing uncovered in front of another person. Keep that exposed feeling in your mind. Now imagine presenting this, your most vulnerable self, to someone whose responds with a frown and a furrowed brow. As you stand there, bared, the person observing looks critically at you and says, “I don’t know . . . I feel like this should be a lot better. Did you even work on this?”
Most of us who have studied music have had this experience somewhere in our pasts. Students who get this kind of response from their teachers learn quickly that being musically vulnerable is too risky. They may begin to disengage from music or music learning itself because they believe it may open them up to pain. They may even interpret the negative feedback as a signal that they shouldn’t even try.
There's a flip side to this, of course. When a teacher who understands what a vulnerable state making music produces, they can support their student appropriately and kindly. A student who experiences this kind of teaching begins to believe over time that being unguarded with their musical selves won’t cause them pain. They learn to anticipate that being musically vulnerable will be met with kindness, safety, and care. They start to understand that there isn’t always danger in failure or vulnerability.
Consider for a moment. What happens if a student of that supportive teacher takes a real risk with their music, but then bombs a piece? In a word—nothing. They aren’t hurt. They haven’t lost money, safety, health, or relationship. If their failure is received and framed correctly, they may even be able to laugh about it and learn to enjoy appropriate risk taking. They learn that if they face their fears, shame and rejection don’t necessarily follow. They learn to try and fail without fear. In short, they learn bravery.
And being brave isn’t just required for performance. It takes bravery to keep going after you’ve made mistakes. It takes courage to try again if you’ve been made fun of or critiqued. It takes great strength of character and a strong will to keep going when things get hard and to learn to power through the natural roadblocks that come up in the long road toward excellent music making.
Bravery, therefore, is a cornerstone trait of any musician; you simply can’t be a musician without it.
Bravery in Action
I love recital time. Twice a year, my students invite their families and their friends to watch them play the pieces they have spent the previous four to six months working on. At my recitals, each of my students is expected to mount the stage, introduce themselves and their pieces, play, and finish up their performance with a bow to their audience.
And each and every one of my students is initially terrified of the idea.
So why is recital time a favorite of mine? Come to a lesson with me, and I’ll show you.
Imagine an 8-year-old boy with blue eyes and brown hair, sitting on my piano bench in northern Oregon.
“Well, Mal,” I say with an expectant tone in my voice, “in about six lessons, you’re going to play this piece at recital.” I pause and put on a subtle thinking face, then ask him, “Do you know what a recital is?”
He purses his lips and gives me a nod. “Yep, I’ve heard of those before. Isn’t that, like, when people go on stage and then play for a bunch of other people, like an audience?”
I nod with a smile, keeping as much eye contact as I can with him so he can see that I’m happy with his answer. “Yep, that’s exactly what it is. You got it.” I then put a questioning look on my face. “So, what does it make you feel, when you imagine playing this song in front of a crowd of people like that?”
He bites his lower lip and starts wiggling his legs. “Well, I don’t know. I think it might be—weird,” he says eventually.
I nod my head a little, and ask, “What makes it feel weird?”
But Mal is distracted. He’s started to picture the recital in his imagination. His eyes are looking off to the side while he’s talking to me; he’s in the prediction and visualization part of the brain. “Cause I am worried about making a mistake, and I don’t really know what’s going to happen.”
I respond with wide eyes. (I am trying to mirror his feelings on my face; more on this later.) “Oh, yeah—you’re right, Mal! Wow.” I take a moment and mirror his sideways look, like I’m imagining things too. And I am imagining. I am trying to imagine what it would feel like to be Mal. “What could happen if you make a mistake? What is the very worst thing that could happen?” I ask him.
He shrugs, but now his eyes are on me. “I dunno.”
“Ooooohh,” I say, nodding sagely like I figured something out. “You are probably afraid of the piano-mistake tigers.”
“The what?” Mal asks me. He’s smiling now; he knows I’m playing. He gives me the knowing look of a wise and seasoned 8-year-old who knows better than this.
“Yeah,” I say seriously. “You know—the tigers that come out and eat you when you make a piano mistake.”
Now he’s laughing. “Miss Allison!” he says as though he is so tired of my nonsense. “There isn’t any such thing as piano-mistake tigers.”
“Really?” I say. Then I go back to imagining. “Well, then, what are you afraid will happen if you make a mistake during the recital, if tigers aren’t going to eat you?”
He thinks again, but I can see the first wave of anxiety has shaken off of him. By getting him to laugh at a terrible but impossible scenario, I’ve gotten him into the right mind for thinking about other fears. Namely, I’ve guided him to the mindset of joy that is the bedrock of bravery.
There will be more about Mal in a later section of this blog. For now, take a minute and consider how I might have done this differently, if my end destination wasn’t encouraging Mal to be brave.
Would I have spent all of the time that it took to have this conversation?
What would have happened if I had just told him that the recital was coming up and I hadn’t asked him how that made him feel?
Do you think I wasted my time with this conversation?
Each moment with our students is an opportunity to build something in them. The truth is, we are always constructing or tearing down something in our students, whether we are aware of it or not.
Are you building bravery in your students?
Are you tearing down negative or scary imaginings?
Consider how you can help your students practice bravery this week.
If we don’t create brave musicians, we could end up:
Producing people who see fear as a stopping point, not a starting point. In other words, we risk developing quitters.
Giving people a life-damaging self-concept. They may think, “When music got hard, I quit; I bet the next time I try something hard, I’ll quit that too.”
What we gain from creating brave musicians
When a music student, of any age, learns bravery, they can:
Recognize fear in themselves and feel confident in their ability to work through it.
Trust themselves to perform under pressure.
Practice perspective—as in, “This feels scary, but is it really as bad as it feels?”
Create a positive self-concept: “I have done hard things before; I know I can do other hard things in the future.”