The Importance of Positivity

This week, I really have been caught up in the concept of positivity, asking "the big questions":

"How important is it?" "What is the power of positive thinking?" "How can I embrace positivity in my life, and how will it positively affect my life?"

I have always been someone who approaches life in a two-fold way. The part that usually comes across is  tentative, exacting, cautious, and "just-so." The other part of me is adventurous, curious, outgoing, a big dreamer. I have often described myself as an "extrovert disguised as an introvert."

Just like my personality types, my thought patterns are often at war with each other. I have experienced some rather loud negative voices, but underneath...

I have a voice that I imagine lies deep within me, somewhere in my lower abdomen. This is the one voice that, while often trumped by negative thoughts, at times comes out. And when it does, something fantastic in my life always happens. This is the voice that represents the best part of me. It feeds my imagination with big dreams, positive visualizations....and it tells me the truth about myself. It gives me images of who I am apart from anyone else's opinion. It shows me my inner artist, happy person, and my inspired, faith-filled side.

I have gone through many bouts of severe negativity in my life. However, that inner positive voice has always has been there telling me that life should be different, that a grand potential lies within each life and I was missing mine somehow.

I believe I am not alone. All of us have voices of negativity and positivity. Humans are naturally wired to look at the negatives, because prior to civilized life, we needed that heightened sense to merely survive. The problem is, we have carried over that "survival instinct" into our modernized lives. This instinct, unless "tamed" and retrained, will consume our potential for progress. 

The music world is full of people who love their art, but also full of negativity. Competition for spots in colleges, performing groups, and other auditions can leave many players feeling anxious. I know I have often felt like I need to "play better" in order to be "good enough." I have felt competitive pressure against others and I have felt others start to push back at me from the same pressure in their own lives.

The negative person starts kicking in the survival instinct and playing for approval rather than for creating a beautiful work of art. This leads to the many negative voices trumping the positive voice with thoughts like: "I'll never play well enough." "I have to be better." "What if I'm never good enough for people to want to hear me?" "What are they thinking about my playing right now?" "There are so many notes on this page, how will I play them correctly?" 

I have gotten to a point in my life in which I am simply tired of suffering on stage. I'm tired of feeling this ball of energy in my abdomen and having it stay stuck there. I'm tired of seeing beautiful videos of my flute potential playing in my imagination and then being drowned in fear on stage.

I no longer want to play to impress others. While I want them to enjoy my music, I want to enjoy it as well. I want to release the ball of energy and share all the pent up musical emotion I carry around with me on a daily basis.  

I decided this week to be positive. 

I started to speak positive words to myself. "I am good enough, just as I am."

I took my iPod to the practice room with me. During every practice break, I turned on a positive Christian song to remind myself what I was doing here in the first place. 

I looked around me and noticed the small blessings in my life, which, cumulatively, added up to very large blessings. 

I channeled my attention to focus on what my body was doing. I discovered what was causing my neck pain, and many of my technical and tone problems (I was tightening at the base of my neck, which channeled tension throughout my body). I found that flute playing should feel easy and free, not difficult and forced.

The more I immersed myself into this positive mindset, the more I enjoyed my practice session. I started enjoying playing my instrument. I became more thankful. And it is beginning to translate into my performances...

Today, I was able to perform without feeling very nervous at all. My music released and sang.

In a fallen world that often seems consumed by the negative, we must choose to take an active role in embracing positivity. Feed it to yourself as much as you can. Don't worry about doing things "right" or to please anyone else as much as to release your gift freely.

"What is the power of positive thinking?" 

It changes everything. 

"I think it's critical that we begin to dismantle the word 'performance,' because somehow it implies perfection or some ideal - or doing something for someone else. When I perform, I don't know how it's going to turn out. And even with a piece of music, I must stay open to the nuances that change it each time and make it present. It's never going to sound like it did yesterday again. Right is - big deal. Beautiful sounds are - big deal. But contact. Real human contact, through music, is rare." 

~ Susan Osborn vocalist

Pacing

I remember my first cross country race. It was the fall of 2008 at the Kearney Country Club. There was a cool breeze on this morning; the weather was perfect for racing. I looked around me as I arrived at the course and saw rolling hills all around me. My teammates were chatting about the course, reminiscing about running here for high school state cross country. I had heard this was a fairly difficult course, but I had never ran it before - not because I wasn't a fast enough runner to be in the high school state meet, but simply: my high school was too small to have a cross country team.

So what was I doing here anyway? How could my first cross country race be with a college team?

I went to a very small high school, the smallest classification of high school even for the agricultural state of Nebraska. We barely had enough girls go out for the track team to make a team. Somehow, we made it work.

And somehow, I had ran a fast enough 800 and 1,600 meter that here I was. Recruited to run middle distance? Cross country came with the package.

How fast was I supposed to run a 6K (3.75 mile) race over grassy hills? I had not a clue. So I did what came naturally to me - I ran fast. I came through the first mile in a little over six minutes, and I was running with our team leader. Something was wrong here.

Cue in THE HILL.

I was about 1.5 miles in when I reached the base of the notorious hill on the course. It was quite steep. I remember making it to the top of the hill and realizing my race was over. About a mile or so later, I was running through the trees, utterly alone. A spectator pointed at me and said, "That girl was at the front at the beginning!" This was one of the most embarrassing moments I would ever experience while racing.

I crossed the line in a fairly slow time. It was then that I realized I couldn't race a 3.75 mile, hilly cross country race the same way I ran guts-out around a track.

When track rolled around, I continued to struggle with the same concept. I always had been able to do well if I tried really hard and ran as fast as I could. Eventually, my coach began to talk to me about a concept called "pacing." He told me I needed to leave a little "in the tank." We began doing paced workouts, in which my coach banned me from going faster than a certain time per repetition.

It took until my sophomore year track season, in February of 2010, to really be able to pull off the "pacing" thing. What happened when I figured it out? I lowered my mile personal best time by 20 seconds.

Recently, I have been doing some thinking about this story and how it applies to me now. I tend to approach all of life in this gutsy, hurried, "go-all-out-all-the-time" way. It worked up to a point. However, expending a lot of energy all at once will eventually lead to fatigue.

I am at the mid-term of my first semester in graduate school, and I have noticed the mental and physical fatigue begin approaching me once again. Yet, this time, I stopped to evaluate. I caught the correlation between my 23-year-old flute playing self and my 16-year-old track runner. Here I am, continuing to push really hard without taking the time to see the value in calm pacing. My body has gotten sick twice this semester already, forcing me to rest, when I would have been better off taking things slowly, one day at a time.

The correlation extends beyond general life. This semester, I have been experiencing some pain and tightness in my neck and right arm. I have been getting chiropractic and massage treatment for it, but couldn't quite figure out the source. This week, I believe I found the culprit. My teacher pointed out that when I take a breath, I dip my flute down and move my head, destabilizing the flute for the next pitch. In the practice room, I discovered this is not an isolated experience, but something I do almost every time I take a breath. My neck pulled in the exact place I have been experiencing pain. All this happened because I was thinking too fast and going ahead mentally to the next phrase before I arrived.

My other discovery reminded me even more of my hurried runner self. I hadn't practiced my concerto with a metronome in awhile, and I turned it on to the given tempo. The tempo felt ridiculously slow under my fingers...yet, it was the exact tempo marked. I remember that same tempo feeling fast and frenzied this summer. I have learned the notes to the point that the marked tempo felt easy, yet I have been continuing to push myself to faster and faster tempos that feel uncomfortable without even realizing it.

I reflect back to the repeated workouts my coach put me through. Time after time after time, perhaps hundreds of times, we practiced pacing. As much as I wanted to "take it to the well," as coach would call it, he pulled me back and reminded me to pace. Once I learned this skill, what happened?

I became faster. My big improvement jump came when I learned how to conserve my energy so my body felt better for longer.

Here I am, my sixth year into training with a professional flutist, and I now am learning how to pace myself with my flute. I now know that the speed my fingers are comfortable pressing the keys is exactly the pace I need to be at during that time. Speed will increase with training, all without going "to the well" and tightening up faster.

I wish I had learned this sooner. It would have saved me a lot of energy, stress, tears, friendships (I'm not exaggerating on any of those).

How many years was it from my freshman year in high school to when I made my running jump?

SIX.

It's going to be a great year.

Running high school track "guts out," on the way to a 1,600 meter gold.

Running a cross country race in 2011, after learning what it meant to "pace."

Stage Presence/Personality Presence

I recently got back to Stillwater after a 4-day excursion to Southwest Nebraska for a friend's wedding. I drove between 3-7 hours each day to make it happen. That's friendship dedication!

I woke up this lovely Tuesday morning with a headache, stuffy sinuses, a general feeling of tiredness. (It also feels VERY warm in my apartment...usually my apartment feels cold in the morning so I think I have at least heated up some.) Apparently, my body had just enough "oomph" to make it there, look pretty for my friend, and come back. Since my body is very slow moving and not-so-good feeling this morning, I decided to take a little extra time sipping my coffee and waiting for my cold medicine to kick in before going to campus. Meaning - time for a new blog post!

I performed in studio for the first time last week. It was nice to perform a solo piece again. With student teaching last semester, my performance opportunities were very limited, and they continued to be limited over the summer.  I played Robert Dick's Lookout for solo flute. The piece was written for high school students as an introductory piece of extended techniques. I enjoy it, because I haven't played multiphonics (2 or more pitches sounding at the same time) before, so this piece has been a great learning tool for me.

In studio here, everyone writes comments to each other about what they liked about the performance and also what aspects could be improved. I really enjoy this open forum and exchange of ideas! The studio here definitely is open to making each other better musicians, which I appreciate.

A recurring theme on my comment cards I received this week was stage presence. One comment really caught my attention. It said, "I'm not sure if it is because you have student taught, or because you are a graduate assistant, but your stage presence is nice to watch."

As an inquisitive person who likes to think about the "whys" of everything, I put some thought into this comment. Why do I have the stage presence I do?

I started by thinking about student teaching and being a teaching assistant here. I realized that, yes, having that experience speaking in front of people definitely helped, but it wasn't the sole reason for my stage presence.

I enjoy researching random topics that come to mind. Lately, I really have been doing some digging into what makes me "tick" as a person and why I am the way I am. I have noticed that I don't process information in quite the same way as most people, even among musicians. It has been my personal quest to figure out why.

I was watching some YouTube videos last summer that were created by Tim VanOrden, a professional masters distance runner. I think I stumbled upon his channel because I was looking for videos on healthy eating and some of his videos popped up. He posted a series of videos labeled "Getting Started" that talked about the day-to-day struggles in training for a race. In one of his videos, he talked about a character trait called "Highly Sensitive Person." I remember being interested at the time, but didn't research further.

As I have noticed continual differences between me and many other people, the HSP term returned to mind. I researched it, and was surprised to find something that explained everything about my personality. This character trait has been shown in research studies to be found in 15-20% of the population, and is characterized by a tendency to process information deeply, feel emotions deeply, have high empathy for others (caring), and increased sensitivity to their environment in comparison to those without the trait. I found a video by the leading psychologist on this subject, Elaine Aron, and she even mentioned giving recitals. People with this character trait often practice a lot but are more easily overwhelmed on stage due to high sensitivity to lights, crowds, etc.

Back to stage presence: I have found that I relate music to emotions, pictures, etc., easier than many that I have met. I have often been confused that connecting emotion and musical performance is something many have to work at, when to me, it is like breathing - involuntary and natural. Sometimes, I can't describe the emotion in words, but it is strong and fills my body with expression.

After my performance on Thursday, I confirmed how I can overcome my stage fright! I have discovered, that if I take my concentration and channel it completely into the musical feeling I want to project, the nerves can't get in as easily. And when I say completely, I mean completely. As soon as I think about which notes come next, or the dynamics on the page, or the people looking at me, or anything else, that is when the mistakes come.

I had a lot of time to think about the topic of stage presence on my drive back from Nebraska yesterday. What creates a strong, convincing performance? I believe good stage presence is one that shows the audience the performer's personality. It could be called "personality presence," in a sense. It comes from reaching deep into ourselves and opening up the depth of our personalities and experiences.

I have often heard other music majors say that they need to practice more and more and more. I believe this is true to an extent, but gathering life experience is also important to a convincing performance. By opening up perception to a variety of experiences and human emotions, the performer can store those emotions and call upon them for future musical expression.

I realized Thursday, after testing the theory of completely focusing on the one message I wanted to project, I felt more in control and confident in my performance. I recognized this feeling as the same one I used to get while competing in high school speech. I used to think I was putting on a confident persona and assuming an acting role. However, after discovering that my best musical performances feel similar, I no longer believe the outspoken role is a "persona." I believe this confident person is my uninhibited self I occasionally set free from my socially acceptable, quieter part of me. Now that I know that the confident person is my true self, I can layer X expressive emotion over that and create a strong message.

My high sensory perception has been mislabeled as many things over the years due to misunderstanding - even my own misunderstanding of myself. Now, I realize I have been given a gift and am accepting the increased sensitivity to emotions and pictures as the greatest expressive tool I have. I will never struggle to find the musical message I want because of this trait. The key is in becoming so mentally enmeshed in that message that my high sensory awareness forgets the eyes watching me or the worry about the notes. I have found if I can dwell and breathe and completely live in my musical feeling and message, all my hard technical work from the practice room comes out easier.

To enhance your stage presence, think of it as personality presence and let the best you shine!