flow

Got a great question from a performer a while back, and I'd like to share my reply with everyone.  If you have a question, I'll be happy to do the same for you!  Anyway here we go:

One of your posts suggest that people try NOT to give it that extra 10% on stage because you might make it worse. It you want to give 110% give it first in practice then duplicate that on stage; don't surprise the rest of the quartet with something they haven't heard before. We went on stage with that goal; to bring our best on stage, no more, no less. In spite of that the energy of performing did something positive. This is obviously one of those Zen issues with contradictory goals. There is clearly a right and a wrong way to use performance energy and tension. Used wrong it can lead to over singing or breaking the unity of the group. Used right it can be great, but what does that mean?

Ran across a fascinating article about how young brains work that really sheds light on the ideal performance state of mind.  It's not every day I read an article that pulls together and explains so many of my pet topics, like being in the moment, creativity, and flow! 

Here's the first quote:

[Editor's Note: Liz has put together a much more detailed article on Flow than the simple review that I wrote.  Enjoy! -Tom]

As Tom writes about here, a ‘flow’ state is one where you are completely immersed in an activity, losing all sense of self-consciousness, with action and awareness completely merged. It’s what athletes mean when they say they are ‘in the zone’. We should care about it because it relates both to high levels of personal satisfaction in what we do and to the development of high-level skills. Happiness and expertise go hand in hand, it seems.

Flow was first explicitly documented by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who derived it from accounts by expert practitioners in all sorts of fields, from artists to airline pilots, from musicians to mountaineers. He found strong common themes in their descriptions that allowed him to identify five key conditions that allow you to get into a flow state:

• There needs to be a balance between challenge and achievability: if the task is too hard you become anxious, if it is too easy, you become bored.
• The task needs to be clearly defined, so that you can tell if you have achieved it or not.
• Related to this, there needs to be direct and immediate feedback, so that you can adjust what you are doing in real time.
• You need to have a sense of personal control over what you are doing.
• The activity itself needs to be intrinsically rewarding, that is, it is an end in itself, not merely a means to an end.

So, it’s clear that musical performance has a very high flow potential –not surprising, given that this was one of the fields Csikszentmihalyi studied to develop the concept. And anyone reading this blog has already experienced it first-hand, whether in an occasional peak experience, or as a regular part of what makes music-making addictive.

But of course, not every performance achieves flow, so it is worth interrogating these points a little to see what implications they have for how we understand what we do.

1. Challenge level. This relates strongly to Tom Metzger’s recent post on choosing the right material. A major reason for anxiety in performance can be doubting your capacity to deliver.Conversely, material that lies so well within your grasp that you could perform it in your sleep can also prove an obstacle to flow, since it doesn’t require your full attention to produce a well-controlled performance. And unfortunately, music performed on autopilot can feel as anticlimactic to audiences as it does to performers - so it is important to maintain a degree of challenge. This is particularly an issue for professional performers who may perform the same material many times – either as part of a run, or as core repertoire they return to year after year.Fortunately, music is a complex thing, and we can continue to find new things to stretch us long after the technical issues are under control. We can seek to deepen our interpretive insight with each repeat performance, or to allow ourselves to become more emotionally vulnerable in our connection with the audience. But we need to keep growing with the music if we are not to find ourselves becoming cynical old hacks.
2. Task definition. It is the nature of music that it can be performed well or it can be performed badly, and – notwithstanding inevitable debates about taste - there is a good general consensus as to which is which. This is one of the things that makes flow possible: if it were a case of ‘anything goes’, then there would be no opportunity to get in the groove and really nail it. So, we have to accept the risk of bombing as part of what makes the artistic heights attainable.Of course, what counts as ‘bombing’ varies according to the level of the performer. For less experienced performers, this may be technical control; for more skilled performers it is more likely to be an artistic issue. Just last week, I heard one of our advanced piano students play Beethoven’s Op. 111 Sonata in a Performance Class. It was a captivating performance - technically impressive and imaginatively authoritative. Still, from her perspective, she hadn’t nailed it: ‘There wasn’t enough passion,’ she said, ‘it’s the end of the day, and I am tired, but it needed more passion.’ She gave her audience a compelling experience, but had not herself, on that occasion, entered into the depths of flow.(Incidentally, as a Music Category judge, this is the primary reason I value the relative strictness of the barbershop style definition for contest purposes. You can’t have a ball playing at the edge unless you know where the edge actually is.)
3. Feedback. In musical performance, we are constantly getting feedback on what we do: from our sound, from our co-performers, from our audience. And so, we are constantly responding, and adjusting what we do as we go.It is worth making the distinction here between self-talk (‘ooh, I was a bit sharp there’) and responsiveness. The former is unhelpful, because it is far too mono-dimensional and slow to feed usefully into what you do. By the time you’ve finished thinking that thought, the music has moved on, and you’ve missed a whole phrase because you were busy talking to yourself about tuning. The latter is glorious, giving that sense of being immersed in and contributing to an experience unfolding in real time – of being in the now.And the extra richness of feedback is why live performance is a heightened experience compared to rehearsal, and why so many performers cherish their work in small ensembles as particularly satisfying. (For a wonderful fictional evocation of the interpersonal magic that is chamber music – as well as an unbearably moving love story – try Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music)
4. Personal control. This one is interesting, because the same activity can give quite different impressions about levels of individual control, depending on your relationship with it. Musical performance has a lot of constraints, things you are expected to do as a matter of course – not just to do with notes and words, but expectations of performing traditions too. If you add in a strong musical leader (within the group, or coaching them) who takes most of the interpretative decisions, it can feel like you’re just a puppet operated by the will of others. But that’s not why people go into music – we all want, at some level, to express ourselves. And however dictatorial our genre’s conventions and our musical peers may be, they can never entirely determine what we do; we always retain the opportunity to use our own hearts and brains to contribute to the performance. And the more we choose to use that opportunity, the more chance we have of finding flow.
5. Intrinsically rewarding. Well, musical performance just is. If you’re here reading Owning the Stage, you don’t need me to make a case for that! Besides, Tom already did.

The book is called "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Thanks to Liz Garnett for bringing it to my attention!

I realize that the title of this post has given away my review, but I'm really enthusiastic about this book because at some level I needed to read it. I'm reviewing it here because I think you might need to read it too. This book is amazing and I can not possibly do it justice in a short review. But I will try.

The subtitle of the book is "the psychology of optimal experience" and it is full of wisdom and insights about how to enjoy yourself in every aspect of your life - your work, your hobby, your creative life, your family life and even your solitude. I had a dozen "aha" moments reading it, and I believe it will help me move my own experience of life to a better place, not that it was awful to start with!  And it's relevant to stage performance too: the various modes of stage performance are a powerful way to express your real self and enter into a flow experience, and organizing your stage performance (or any other) activities so that they encourage flow is a great way to make your whole experience more enjoyable and effective, from rehearsal to stage time.

So first things first - "flow" is a state of mind that becomes possible when you are involved in an activity that has:

1. Clear goals - you know what you're trying to do
2. Instant feedback - you can tell if you're making progress towards your goals
3. Challenges matched to your skills - it's not too easy or too hard
4. Action and awareness are merged - your concentration is entirely focused on what you're doing

Playing music, for example, has clear goals and instant feedback.  You know what notes are coming up, and you know if you hit them right or you didn't.  You can also pick music that is appropriate to your level of skill, so you don't get distracted by boredom or anxiety.  The same could be said of any other stage performance mode like acting, singing or dancing.

When your concentration is completely fixed on what you're doing, you will also be excluding irrelevant things from your attention, such as thoughts of your self that may lead to stage fright.  There is no attention spared to worry about failure.  You cease to be conscious of your self.  Often your perception of time will be distorted as well - this is the same as Eckhart Tolle's idea of being in the Now, unconstrained by the past and the future, hence outside of the perception of time.

Being in "flow" also reminds me of how Stanislavski discusses the ideal state of mind for stage performance, where you have immersed yourself in the "given conditions" of a scene so completely that you cease to be conscious of your self as separate from the action, and the subconscious takes over the direction of your activities.

Once you can get into flow with an activity, it becomes enjoyable for its own sake.  Flow is enjoyment, and if you can spend your whole life in a state of enjoyment, regardless of the conditions in which you find yourself, you will have led a wonderful life.  In order to go along with this idea, you first need to admit that your state of mind is completely in your control, and not produced by your circumstances.

Applying flow to stage performance, just like an great art, is partly a matter of staying in the moment rather than executing a plan:

Whereas a conventional artist starts painting a canvas knowing what she wants to pain, and holds to her original intention until the work is finished, an original artist with equal technical training commences with a deeply felt but undefined goal in mind, keeps modifying the picture in response to the unexpected colors and shapes emerging on the canvas, and ends up with a finished work that is responsive to her inner feelings, knows what she likes and does not like, and pays attention to what is happening on the canvas, a good painting is bound to emerge. On the other hand, if she holds on to a preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite.

In the present day, as it becomes more and more difficult to keep performance and art funded in the school system, it is critically important that we recognize and are able to articulate the value of stage performance and art in our culture.  Otherwise we will quickly lose it, and we will fail to reap its rewards.   The author sees art and culture as the vessel into which we put our hard-earned learning about our own consciousness as a species.  To be successful as a person and find meaning in life, you need to learn from those who have gone before:

The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one's own mind. There is much knowledge - or well-ordered information - accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.

That paragraph makes the point powerfully for me.  Protecting art and performance in our culture is critical if we are to develop as a species in time to save our world.

I sincerely feel that everyone should read this book, and put its advice into practice as I intend to.  I believe that you should read this book, because as a member of the human race I care about you and I want you to enjoy your life more, for your sake, and for the betterment of our world.

When I wrote my review of the classic performance book The Inner Game of Music, I knew that a lot of people wouldn't like it.  It wasn't the most glowing review, to be sure, and the book itself has a lot of ardent fans around the world of musical performance.  One such ardent fan is Liz Garnett, a friend of mine from the UK who publishes her own performance related blog, focusing mostly on harmony singing.  (Liz is also listed in the OTS Coach Directory)  So in light of her comments, I'd like to clarify some of mine!  Hopefully the back-and-forth will be useful for everyone.

I'll quote a few paragraphs from her article, and respond.  First we talk about Self 1 and Self 2:

[Tom's] first point of contention is the division between Self 1, the nasty inner critic, and Self 2, the honest musician who would do a much better job if Self 1 would only shut up and let them get on with it. Tom finds this device unhelpful, and thinks a more holistic, rather than ‘schizophrenic’ approach will be better for performers. But I think that’s actually the Inner Game’s point: the Self1/Self2 idea is presented as a way to describe an essentially dysfunctional state that the book aims to help us leave behind. Describing the split is necessary if people are to diagnose that they have the problem.

The first thing to realize is that we're discussing models and metaphors here, not hard facts.  Of course there is no Self 1 and no Self 2 - they are inventions of Tim Gallwey, which he defines as everything that works for you, and everything that doesn't.  Everyone has things that work for them and things that do not!  It doesn't take a stroke of brilliance to realize that we want to get rid of the latter.

Having said that, a metaphor has value if it works, and this one has worked for a lot of people.  There are many paths to the promised land!  I just don't find the Self 1/Self 2 breakdown a particularly useful model for me.

Next topic is what should the performer hold in their head.  Inner Game of Music author Green says it doesn't much matter - anything to distract you from your negative self-talk and head games.  And to some extent I think that's fine.  I think it would be better to have something up there that pertains to the purpose of the piece, which I have called the "scene."  Liz takes exception to that term:

The focus on the ‘scene’ betrays a very character-based, verbally-defined performance context. Plays have explicit scenes, songs evoke scenes: the performer has a concrete persona to inhabit in these artworlds. But instrumental performers (who are the ones who might be focusing on their instrument) often have a much more intangible set of musical ideas to communicate to their audience. The soloist who is going to build the long, highly structured stretches of musical time in a Brahms sonata into coherent experience needs focal points that will take them into that abstract imaginative world. It’s not ‘navel-gazing’, it’s an important mental skill for that artistic world, just as the ability to focus creating scenes is an important skill for the singer.

Again, if focusing on your instrument works for you, have at it!

I'm a singer, and hardly an instrumental performer at all (not since high school!), but even so I suspect that the very best instrumental performers have something going on in their heads that is more explicitly about the artistry, and less about simply distracting their Self 1.  If the goal is just to rid yourself of stage anxiety, and that's a worthwhile goal for sure, do what you need to do.  If you want to reach higher, it's not going to happen by itself!  It takes focus on the emotional content of the music.  At least, that's my two cents.

I suggested also that "relaxed concentration" may not be the ideal emotional state for all performances.  Liz kind of disagrees with that, and refers to a book called "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" that I have not read.  So I've ordered it!  I'll read it before I comment on it.  Looking forward to that one.

Finally, in my original article I didn't comment much on the trio of Awareness, Will and Trust, and that's basically because, let's be honest, I just didn't get it.  Liz feels it's very important, and I suspect she is right - I hope she will consent to write a blog article about it that helps me understand it better!

Thanks, Liz, for the lively discussion!