What Are You Really Practising?
Every Note Trains the Musician. Every Thought Trains the Mind.
Most musicians believe they’re practising scales.
Or chords.
Or songs.
But what if every practice session is shaping something far deeper than your musical ability?
Imagine two students.
Both play exactly the same piece.
Both make exactly the same mistake.
The first sighs, criticises themselves, and thinks, “I’m hopeless.”
The second smiles, becomes curious, and wonders, “What am I missing?”
From the outside, they made the same mistake.
Inside, however, they practised two completely different things.
One practised self-judgment.
The other practised awareness.
This is something I’ve been reflecting on after reading The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. One of the central ideas is that the habits we cultivate during the day don’t simply disappear when we go to sleep. They continue. The mind keeps rehearsing the patterns it knows best.
Whether we’re awake or asleep, we become what we repeatedly practise.
I couldn’t help wondering…
Isn’t music exactly the same?
Every repetition leaves a trace.
When we rush through our practice, we become better at rushing.
When we tense our shoulders every time we encounter a difficult passage, we become better at tension.
When we react with frustration after every wrong note, we become experts at frustration.
Something echoes throughout all of my teaching.
We often treat our thoughts as commands rather than options.
Play a wrong note.
What happens next?
Before you’ve even had a chance to think, your face tightens, your shoulders slump, and you pull that expression that looks like you’ve just bitten into a lemon.
Did you ever stop to consider another possibility?
Or did your mind immediately issue the command:
“I’ve messed up.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“Here we go again.”
We rarely notice the gap between the event and the reaction because we’ve rehearsed it so many times that it feels automatic.
But automatic isn’t the same as inevitable.
Every thought we repeatedly obey strengthens the habit of obeying it again.
The beautiful thing about awareness is that it creates space.
Space to notice.
Space to question.
Space to choose.
Perhaps those old commands were never commands at all.
Perhaps they were simply thoughts waiting to be challenged.
Of course, the opposite is also true.
Every time we pause before reacting…
Every time we breathe instead of judging…
Every time we replace certainty with curiosity…
We’re strengthening a completely different pathway.
We’re no longer just learning music.
We’re learning how to meet life.
This changes the way I think about practice.
The goal is no longer simply to play the correct notes.
The goal is to become the kind of musician who can remain calm when the wrong notes inevitably arrive.
Because they will.
Every performer misses notes.
Every teacher forgets things.
Every concert contains surprises.
The question isn’t whether mistakes will happen.
The question is: Who have you been practising to become when they do?
Perhaps the greatest benefit of music has very little to do with performance.
Perhaps every time we sit down with an instrument, we’re quietly training our nervous system.
We’re teaching ourselves patience.
Presence.
Curiosity.
Compassion.
And after enough repetitions, those qualities begin to appear outside the practice room as naturally as they appear inside it.
Maybe this is why music has always felt like medicine to me.
Not because it removes life’s difficulties.
But because it gives us thousands of opportunities to practise meeting those difficulties differently.
So the next time you pick up your instrument, ask yourself two simple questions:
What am I really practising?
And what thoughts have I mistaken for commands that could become options instead?
Because long before your fingers remember the notes…
Your mind remembers the way you met them.
If this way of thinking about music resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to join our Mat Creedon School of Music community.
Together we’re exploring music as far more than notes, scales and technique. It’s a place to develop your musical understanding while gently becoming aware of the habits, stories and patterns that shape the way you play—and the way you live.
If you’re ready to move beyond simply practising your instrument and begin transforming the way you approach music, you’ll be warmly welcomed.
🎵 Join us here:
https://www.skool.com/mat-creedon-school-of-music-4248/about
I look forward to meeting you.
— Mat