The Most Important Practice Habit No One Talks About
1. What Players Think Practice Is
When I was much younger, I believed that practising more always meant more improvement. So much so that I lived by the thought, “If I’m not practising, then someone else is, and they are getting better than me.” Clearly, I wasn’t competitive at all!
However, although this way of thinking does provide some level of motivation to get things done, there are many problems with it. Most importantly, it relies on the misguided idea that longer sessions always mean more improvement.
Many players, beyond just myself, believe that good practice means longer sessions, more discipline, more willpower, and practising until your brain falls out of your head. Practice is often seen as something that you are supposed to endure in pursuit of a result. With this kind of attitude towards playing, you end up creating a cycle where you start strong, overdo it, fatigue, and then eventually avoid practising altogether.
Many players don’t end up quitting because they are lazy, they quit because practice becomes a lot of effort. It’s difficult to sit down at the piano if you think you are going to need to put in a lot of effort. Yet this is just one way of framing practice, and it is not the most useful one. In psychology, there are many studies that show we repeat behaviours that end positively and avoid behaviours that are associated with friction or feel tiring.
2. The Habits That Matter
I’ve told the story many times in these Monday Music Tips of when I decided to change the way that I practised after noticing that many of the other pianists at the conservatory were practising for much less time but getting better results. This was the first step in changing my mindset on practice. If they practised for a lot less time, then it can’t be the case that more hours equals better playing. It must be how they use those hours, right?
This meant that the aim for me changed. I wasn’t going to practise until my brain started falling apart. I was just going to get the job done as efficiently as I could, whatever the tasks that day may have been. When I did this, I found that my concentration didn’t drop as much, I made far fewer mistakes because I was less fatigued, and I felt less frustrated playing the same thing over and over while making the same mistakes.
Each day, when I finished a session, I actually felt great about the fact that I had practised everything I wanted to, and I probably could have done more, but I made myself save it for the next practice session. As mentioned earlier, we repeat behaviours that are positive, and how you end a practice session heavily influences whether you want to practise again.
So my advice is to practise by task, not time, and to finish before you’re tired. Ending a session with some wins and without feeling mentally fatigued will give you confidence and lower the resistance to practise next time. You’ll then be able to stay consistent long term, and that’s where real progress happens.
3. Building Your Practice
So here are some practice ideas that you can implement into your routine.
Firstly, stop while things are still going well rather than when you’re getting tired. Particularly if you are early in your piano learning, the most important thing is to build the habit of practising regularly. Stopping early will help you remember practice as a positive experience and make it much easier to sit down at the piano the next day.
Secondly, leave something unfinished on purpose. Doing this is like a psychological trick you play on yourself. If you have a task that you know you are in the middle of working on, then you’ll be keen to get back to the piano the next day to solve it. It’s a little bit like watching all of a murder mystery except the reveal at the end and then going to bed. The next day, you’re keen to find out who did it.
Thirdly, redefine what a good practice session is. Instead of one where you spent a lot of time practising or achieved lots of things, define it as one where you felt happy or even excited to practise again tomorrow.
These practice habits will help you stay consistent long term, and real progress is made by sticking at something for a long time. Practising less per session but more often is what will quietly turn you into a great player.
Matthew Cawood
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