Perfectionism kills art. I find that if I criticise myself, it spoils the fun. You can get paralysed by analysis – it takes all the playfulness away
Geri Halliwell
Do you teach any perfectionists?
A few years ago I inherited a piano student who was at the more extreme end of the scale. With one wrong note the music immediately stopped, and she would only start playing again if allowed to return to the start.
In some ways this trait, if harnessed correctly, can be beneficial. Perfectionism could be the drive which will lead to improvement and a better player. But there has to be a balance. If a student is paralysed by a need to get it right – and like my student won’t move on until it is perfect – then this can have a very negative impact.
It took a lot of patience and time but slowly my student came around to my way of thinking! I developed strategies to try and help her move away from this mindset and one of the most effective involved some post-it notes and a dice. This particular goal was to get her playing from any point in the score.
- Choose a piece the student is working on
- You will need possibly two or three dice for this activity (Google dice works well as you can use fairly high numbers).
- Number the bars of music (if not already done)
- Roll the dice to reveal a number
- The student plays from that bar (even if it is in the middle of a phrase or a tricky place to start from!)
- Cover up the earlier bars with the post-it notes so the student has no choice but to play from that point!
Suggesting they actually try and play the music wrong deliberately was also a fun task! We rolled the dice and my student had to play that bar with at least one wrong note. Not an easy thing to do but it caused a lot of giggles! This tactic was about giving the student permission to go wrong and making it light-hearted rather than a disaster.
I further demonstrated this myself by asking her to listen to a different piece of music she didn’t know. I played it with a few carefully placed mistakes (and missing out notes here and there), and at the end asked her to tell me how many errors I made. She couldn’t hear any!
This valuable exercise showed her that making mistakes is not the end of the world and sometimes the audience may not even notice.
I was also very careful with my language. I found it important to praise the effort not the outcome and focus on the positives. We also moved our attention away from getting all the right notes to something else – like telling the story of the piece or the dynamics. It was amazing how the notes took care of themselves when the focus was elsewhere.
Setting the student up for success was also hugely important. Assigning a piece that was harder than they could cope with would have been a big mistake and make the perfectionist tendencies much worse. Repertoire was picked carefully and we decided on manageable goals to master the music together.
This particular student will never completely lose that desire to get it perfect as it is part of who they are. But I think they now appreciate and accept that, yes there might be wrong notes, but it is only a couple of errors in a piece containing often hundreds of notes. So perhaps 1% of the entire music!
What strategies do you use with your perfectionist students?
