Fear is a powerful thing. It can make you do things you don’t want to do. It also can prevent you from doing the things you really love.
If you’re reading this, then I suspect it’s safe to assume that playing music is one of your greatest loves in life. Unfortunately, learning to play music and the desire to become a great musician usually brings with it some uncomfortable emotional baggage—and one of the heaviest and most pernicious items of emotional luggage we often carry around with us is fear. Fear is a self-generated mental state that comes to us from a variety of sources, part psychological, part social and even part physical. Yet whatever the root causes of fear, the simplest explanation is that it remains a self-generated mental state, and that means it’s subject to deliberate reconditioning. You may think you have good reasons to be afraid, and in some cases this might be true, but that doesn’t change the fact that fear is a mental state within, and not some outside entity that’s looking to impose its will on you.
One of the biggest fear generators I’ve come across is the overwhelming sense of not being able to master a lot of material in the limited amount of time we all have. Even if you have the luxury of being able to practice 12 hours a day or more, you will never be able to learn all there is to know about every musical style, every genre, every nuance, etc. The conscious knowledge that you are a human being that necessarily has limited memory, learning capacity and time is something we all possess intellectually, but when we sit down to practice we often want to try to master it all in as little time as possible. Well, reality is such that you will never be able to master everything in the time you have.
The answers here are complex, but they generally fall into two main categories.
TOO MUCH TO LEARN, TOO LITTLE TIME
One of the biggest fear generators I’ve come across is the overwhelming sense of not being able to master a lot of material in the limited amount of time we all have. Even if you have the luxury of being able to practice 12 hours a day or more, you will never be able to learn all there is to know about every musical style, every genre, every nuance, etc. The conscious knowledge that you are a human being that necessarily has limited memory, learning capacity and time is something we all possess intellectually, but when we sit down to practice we often want to try to master it all in as little time as possible. Well, reality is such that you will never be able to master everything in the time you have.
Sadly, the attempt to master more than you are ever able to results in the absence of the focused and deliberate practice necessary to get really good on the key techniques that you must master first, if you ever want to be a good player. In this case, the fear comes from an overwhelming sense of too much to learn, and too little time to learn it all. The fear of not being able to learn it all tends to lead you into practicing from fear, which in reality translates into a shotgun approach to practice where you learn a little bit about everything, and not a lot about anything at all. The old adage, “Jack of all trades, master of none,” is the phrase that applies here. The result of your fear of not learning it all results in not learning much very well—and that realization tends to fuel more fears, including those in the second main category.
AN OVERWHELMING SENSE OF BEING OVERWHELMED
When we first pick up our instruments and start learning how to play, nearly every day brings with it a sense of discovery and promise. New chords, new scales, new voicings, new songs, etc.—It’s all a rewarding adventure.
Then you start to wonder if you could actually be good enough to make this hobby something more, something really meaningful to you, and maybe even something professional. It is here when the fear of never becoming a great player starts to creep in.
We know that if we want to be great, we have to practice perfectly, and put in as much quality time as we can. Yet the very realization of this fear tends to cultivate a sense of being utterly overwhelmed at the prospect.
The fear of never “making it” to the level you aspire to has the perverse effect of causing paralysis in your progress. You begin practicing from fear, or more likely you avoid practicing altogether, because you are overwhelmed by the thought that maybe you just don’t have what it takes to be great. If either of these fear categories seem familiar to you, trust me, you’re not alone. We all have these kinds of fears rattling around in our minds. What I’ve discovered through my 30-plus years teaching students is that the only way to overcome practicing from fear is through deliberate, focused, “in the moment” action that takes you from one point of mastery to the next.
I say “mastery” here, because at the very core of overcoming practicing from fear is the mastery of the self. Conditioning your mind to focus on the task at hand (playing in perfect time, using perfect picking technique, reaching for precisely the right note when bending a string) is a process that requires total focus from moment to moment. By concentrating on the task at hand moment to moment, and with the proper instructional assistance, you can achieve mastery of that moment. When you do, that is the point at which you will find your fear melt away, and that’s when you will start to feel at one with your instrument—and with the world.