The Key Lies In What You Do Well
Getting Around Your Fear
What are you good at?
Can it help you do something you’re not so good at?
Last time we talked about how hard it was to learn another language. But that’s only one of the things I struggle with. Jazz is one of the hardest.
I made my first leap into jazz by auditing a class in college. I was terrible. I knew nothing, and trying to get in there and play was like hanging from my fingernails off the side of a cliff.
It stayed bad for a long time. Twenty years of lessons with four teachers, ten years as a bandleader, ten years hanging in Rick Saylor’s house playing with friends.
It was always terrifying. I was never satisfied. The fluidity I lacked and wanted so bad was on the other side of the fear door.
A time came, not so long ago, when something finally shifted. I learned to pay attention to the task at hand, to think about how to use my playing to contribute to the groove, to the success of the other musicians, to the communication of the tune. The more I did that, the less I thought about how scared I was.
If you read my last post, you’ll see that I’m seeking that same fluidity in language.
Now, music isn’t actually a language. The two things don’t map exactly one to the other.
But there are parallels.
Jazz is to music what Italian is to language. Jazz contains specialized musical “vocabulary” and “grammar,” ways of expressing yourself at the instrument that make you intelligible to other jazz musicians. The vocabulary might be little phrases in a solo, and the grammar would be how and when you use them.
In jazz, you actually speak. This is important because jazz musicians are all speaking together at the same time when they play together, and they must have this vocabulary and grammar in common or their collaboration will sound like noise, instead of that wonderful groove that makes you tap your foot.
It was helpful to me to watch myself gain this mastery in jazz, because then I could turn around and say, “Hey. Maybe the process I used there would help me somewhere else. Maybe what I need in my Italian is to learn to pay attention to the task at hand.”
And that’s exactly what I needed. That’s pretty much what everyone was trying to tell me. But my fear was blocking the message.
It took me looking at my own success to finally recognize what everyone else was saying.
My point here is that if you are good at something, if you have succeeded in one area, it’s worth paying attention to how you do it. It may be that your success over there contains the exact lesson you need to address your failure over here.
Fear blocks that process. I’ve seen it a thousand times teaching little kids math. If they’re afraid, they can’t add 2+7. Once they feel comfortable, they start doing multi-step problems.
It’s the same kid, afraid and not afraid. Incompetent and capable. My job is to get them to focus on the task at hand, and once they do that, they start to apply the information I’m teaching.
And my favorite strategy? I tell them to look at a problem they already did, one they do well, and apply what they know to a different problem. Then they start to see that it’s the same character in a different hat, and they can do lots of problems like these.
As adults it can be hard to find a teacher. I’ll be that teacher for you, if you need me. In the meantime, be your own teacher by looking at what you do well and asking yourself, “How am I doing this?”