How can failing possibly be good for you?

In common with many others, I hate screwing up.  In fact I go out of my way to avoid it at all costs, even if it involves a bunch of hard work to ensure I'm thoroughly prepared.   Seems to work well enough for most things, but not, apparently, for classical guitar.  One of the things I'm repeatedly told is that to get more confidence when performing, you have to practice performing - even if it's just for your teacher, your mom, or your friends: do lots of performances!  So I've been trying.   At one time I used to play for the Alzheimer's unit at a local nursing home and it really seemed to help,  but I had to give that up when my arm got injured. Since then, it seems I'm right back to square one on performance nerves.   So in an attempt to get more performance practice, this week I tried to play the piece I've been working on at an online masterclass.  Quel disaster!   Took me 3 attempts to get started,  and once I did, I fumbled my way through a mixture of wrong and missed notes that bore only the slightest resemblance to the piece I was trying to play.  What happened? The piece was by no means finished, but it should have been presentable enough to allow suggestions for improvement.  Not exactly an encouraging start to my resolution to practice performing 😟

 I came away from that with the usual negative self-talk -  everything from "What a complete fool I looked!"  to   "I'll never be able to do this - what was I thinking?"   Also tried to forget it, fast.   But maybe there's another way at looking at these apparent disasters. I recently read about an ivy league college offering advice on how to fail successfully because so many of the super-smart students have never actually had the experience of failing and they need to be taught how to cope. Then there's research on what makes kids more resilient  (AKA how do they bounce back from failures? - a mix of intrinsic and learned traits).  Turns out the way we respond to failure is all-important. The question is, can adults who are used to being competent and successful learn to bounce back better when things implode? I certainly hope so!   Of course, it's not exactly a disaster for me if I fail to play the guitar successfully for someone - and honestly, it probably makes not a bit of difference to my life in general.   So perhaps that's the first thing to take away - put it in context!  And when I didn't play well there's a fair chance that others waiting their turn to play were not thinking how foolish I was, but instead breathing a sigh of relief that they didn't have to follow a great performance...   (And if they were thinking how foolish I was, shame on them!)   But really the best way to follow up this episode was suggested by my guitar teacher.  What could I learn from this experience?  What set me on the wrong track to start with?  What should I do differently? What do I need to practice?

So instead of trying to blank out the bad performance, I tried to figure out what happened. Looking back I can see I did a bunch of things wrong.  Right from the beginning I got on the wrong track - First, my short scale guitar was temporarily out of action with new strings so I switched to my 650 - a guitar I haven't played for a couple of months - and proceeded to miss notes left right and center.  Take away?  Obviously I need more time to adapt if I'm going to switch between the 2.   Then I only got to warm up for about 2 minutes because I was watching other people play.  Duh.  I know I can't play when I'm not warmed up, so I need to make sure I allow time to do that before I'm called on to play.  Finally I got rattled when things went wrong right at the beginning. This I need to work on - a strategy for calming down and resetting when I get stressed out.  I don't think I can take anything away from the performance apart from that - the weak areas were no weaker than usual, it was simply I was struggling through in a state of increasing panic because nothing was working.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that practicing failing is a good idea 😉  but maybe when it happens we can look upon the experience more positively.  For more ideas, check out these strategies for coping with adversity from the American Psychological Association.