Did you crawl out of the bed today? Congrats! Here's a 🍪 for you!
Your BEST doesn't always look the same... And it's perfectly okay.
Have you ever had a teacher or lecturer who tried to encourage you to achieve better results by deliberately giving you a lower mark? And expected you to work harder for a better grade? Or a boss who didn’t give you the raise you asked for, because they wanted to see you work harder before it?
You stood there devastated because you gave it your all, but it wasn't enough. And then you try to give more and more of yourself, but you find that your performance is up and down, and you are not even sure if you’re improving at all anymore. You’re tired. You can no longer give ‘your best’. Heck, you don’t even want to. It’s 🦆ing unfair!
I had to realize one thing about this topic, and it was a game changer for me: striving for the ‘best’ does not equal to ‘perfect’. If you want to do your best, you don't have to constantly outdo yourself. We all have days when the best we can do is get out of bed in the morning – and in some cases that's perfectly fine.
The inconsistent performance we sometimes face doesn't mean you are'n’t trying to give it our all. It often means you give it our all in the face of turbulence.
(Illustration by Roberto Ferraro)
Comparison is the thief of joy, we say. But we often forget that this statment is true not only if you compare yourself to tohers, but also when you compare your performance today to how you did yesterday.
Sure, striving for doing a bit better day by day is a good motivation and sounds good in theory. But in practice, you have to give yourself a break when you couldn’t acomplish a think better than last time.
My goal lately is to do something I love every single day, to show up regularly with my habits (workout, meals, practice sessions, recordings, etc.) and at the end of the day if I feel like I did something cool, or I learnt something interesting, or I was kind to myself and was looking out for my need, I’m happy to go to bed.
Maybe your yesterday’s best was that you finally played through that entire Bach prelude with little to no major mistakes and hiccups. Great! And maybe your today’s best was that you changed your strings, cleaned your guitar or just listened to some music. And you know what… it’s great too! :)
It’s not that important how much actual measurable results you get each day. What’s important is that you show up every day and if you do something, do it with your best intentions, best effort, with openness and passion.
What’s new?
YouTube
Siccas recently uploaded a video to their YouTube channel, in which I play a 2023 Adrian Heinzelmann classical guitar. I'm playing a piece by J. K. Mertz, who was originally from Hungary, so this video is particularly close to my heart. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.
Podcast
We had a lovely conversation with guitarist Alexandra Wittingham about similar topics around perfectionism and ‘doing’ your best. We’ve discussed in today’s episode the challenges of social media while focusing on your music, how to deal with judgement and comparison, and the classical guitar community. If you listen to the new podcast, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave a comment there about what 'doing your best' means to you.
The podcast will premier at 3:30 pm CET, and will be available on YouTube as a video podcast, but you can find the audio on many other platforms as well:
That’s all for today! Remember: don't be too hard on yourself! Just pick up that damn guitar and do something fun with it :)
Hugs,
Beatrix