It's All in the Recovery
What Billy Joel knows about anxiety that you need to know
At the beginning of the new BIlly Joel documentary, And So It Goes, Billy shared some powerful wisdom. He asked a great chef how he did what he did, and the chef replied, “It’s all in the recovery.” That’s brilliant, and it has everything to do with anxiety.
At a basic level, any balancing sport like surfing, skateboarding, skiing and skating, are all about constant recovery. There is no stability in balancing. Rather, it’s a constant search for equilibrium.
Think of walking on a balance beam as recovering your center with each inch you move forward. You’re never “safe,” but you never fall. Even regular walking, which you may take for granted, is a constant recovery of your balance!
Now imagine you’re a chef. You’ve got a meal to make, and you have lots of procedures going on: pans frying, pots boiling, underlings prepping. If everything goes according to plan, you’re fine.
But it doesn’t go according to plan. Ever. There’s always something burning, something boiling over, someone screwing up.
So what do you do? Recover! Make something brilliant out of whatever went astray.
The better you can do this, the better a chef you are.
This is true in Jazz, where mistakes can be turned into original ideas instantly. It’s harder in Classical music where everyone has to stick to the score, but certainly there are places where an ensemble can get out of sync or lose their place, and if the flaw is small enough, a momentary imbalance followed by a recovery can feel more exhilarating than a perfectly executed performance. The audience may not even know what happened, they just like it!
Anxiety interferes with this recovery process. In the first place, anxiety leads us to believe we are already out of balance. We are taking care of problems we don’t have yet. That skews what we think of as the “center,” and it means we might never reach our true center at all.
But suppose by some miracle you do reach your true center. If you’re anxious, you’ll try to freeze in that place, because you don’t believe you could ever recover from a mistake. This is where stage fright comes from.
Anxiety makes us think any mistake we make will derail us…permanently. The pressure of having to be perfect, “or else,” is enormous. It can be enough to even keep you from getting started.
Pro-musicians make mistakes all the time. The reason you may not notice is because they’re good at recovery. They take momentum from an error and use it to move forward even better than before.
When you’re practicing, it’s much better to cultivate a recovery mindset than a perfection mindset. Prepare strategies for what you will do if you lose your place. Practice those strategies.
It’s also important to teach yourself to pay attention to what’s happening now, rather than what might happen later. Be like a rock-climber. When they’re up on the rock face, they only have the bandwidth to attend to the present and very imminent future
Between preparing practical strategies and cultivating an attentive, present, mindset, you can go a long way towards making anxiety irrelevant. Then you’re on the way to a larger recovery: your freedom from anxiety!
Need practical strategies? Need help cultivating an attentive mindset? Contact me!