It’s unlikely that you have identified this fear, but it’s likely to be there, and the fear of failure prevents you from successfully learning your instrument.
Our brain is made for survival and not to be happy. Fear has throughout the human existence been an important tool for this. It has kept us safe and secure. To avoid any potential danger, we’ve been very careful about everything, big and small.
It’s been a very successful strategy, and it’s still beneficial in many ways, but in the modern world it is less important, and it creates a big amount of pain as well. The fear prevents us from having the courage to take a chance and make a step towards happiness and joy.
Often does fear prevent us from doing fun things that are 100% safe. The fear of failure is a bit complicated, because it can consist of several other kinds of fear.
Social fear
One of the fears is the social fear. We fear failure because we fear how this will look to other persons. You fear they will think that you are playing bad, don’t have enough progress, that they don’t like your style, or that they expect more from you than you can deliver. All this is part of the social fear.
You’ll probably think “pffft, I don’t care what other think” because that’s what we’re thought to think, but you probably do care. It can often be somehow unconscious. It’s not stupid, because it’s natural.
We naturally care about what other think, but the fear is unnecessary. Because the other persons are just happy for you, happy that you have something you love doing. How hard you’ll work and how much time and money you are willing to use to improve your playing defines the minimum level you want to reach, and all of this are your choice, the people around you respect that.
Most likely they don’t know anything about how hard or easy the instrument is to learn anyways. And, when you play for others, they often know nothing about how much you have practiced, or how the practice sounded like. Therefore they aren’t too hard to impress, as long as it sounds good.
The fear of under-performing
This is a fear closely related to social fear, but I wanted to write about it separately. I wrote at the very end of last section “as long as it sounds good”. And that’s the key of this fear.
You are the only one that has been fully present through your practicing. You know about your struggles, what it should sound like and what you play wrong. When performing for others, you’ll also notice every minor mistake you make, because you’re the one playing. But the people listening would often not recognize the minor faults you do.
If you play something wrong, even just a couple of mistakes, you’ll probably feel it didn’t go well and you messed up everything. But the listener would have another perspective.
They won’t focus on the small mistakes. That focus is only in your head. The listener will focus on how great it sounds overall, and IF they hear any of the mistakes at all, they’ll know that everyone can play wrong no matter how good they are, and they will hear that everything else was beautiful.
The important thing: Never beat yourself up for playing wrong! You are the only one that cares about the small mistakes you do in your play. It’s all in your head, giving you destructive thoughts and fear. Fear of failure.
The fear of exploring your abilities
Part of the fear of failure is often the fear of knowing our true self, our abilities, how talented we are. Or should I say lack of talent. Have you ever got a letter in the mail or digitally, but don’t wanted to open it because you have a bad feeling about it, because it may be bad news? A letter from the hospital, a letter from a company you know you have forgotten to pay, or the answer from an application.
Probably the letter is good news, or not as bad as you thought, but because of the fear of finding out that there is bad news inside, you inflict pain to yourself by delaying it, because your brain think that the pain of not knowing is smaller than the pain of getting the bad news.
Someone I know had pain, but avoided to go to the doctor because she was afraid to get told that she would have trouble to get a baby. It’s completely irrational, but its how our brain works.
It’s a bit like that when learning a new instrument as well. You want to learn it, but you fear that you don’t have the talent. That you’re not able to ever learn it well. That you’ll find out you’re getting too old. Find out you’re not good enough. You’re afraid to find out. Find out whatever it is.
And again, it’s rarely a conscious thing. This is most often unconsciously covered by an endless stream of excuses.
You’ll never tell yourself “I’m avoiding this because I’m afraid to find out this and that about myself”. You’re covering it with “I can do it tomorrow”, or “This isn’t the right time”, or “I should save money for a teacher before trying” (but you’ll never save up that money), or “I won’t disturb the others in the house by practicing now”, or one of thousands of other excuses we make for our self. There are unfortunately no limits for what excuses we make.
Fear of the unknown
This is a fear that limits us a lot. Because things that are unknown has a potential for failure, and we fear that. The fear of the unknown is something we face often throughout our life. Every time we should do something we’ve never done before, we create a lot of limiting believes that we can’t do it. It doesn’t need to be hard, the problem is that we don’t know if it’s hard or not.
Since we don’t know, we assume it’s hard. And if we try, it may seem difficult the first couple of times, but most things in life are easy when we’re used to it. When we’re new to it, it just seems overwhelming, and we’re afraid for doing anything wrong, because there are so many unknown aspects.
For many people, even changing tires on the car is unthinkable. It’s an easy task, but everything about it is unknown, because we haven’t learned anything about it, and never tried. We’re afraid to do something wrong and loose a wheel around the first corner.
What tools? How hard is it to unscrew? How hard to tighten? Am I strong enough? Can I overtighten it? Where to place the jack? What if the car fell down from the jack when doing the change? How much air pressure should the tire have? How to fill? How to get the old wheels clean?
There is a lot of unknown things for such a simple task, and because the fear of the unknown, a lot of people never change the tire themselves. But by doing it a couple of times it becomes easy.
So, face the fear of the unknown. Be curious and willing to explore. Even though this unconscious fear prevent a lot of people from learning, it is not dangerous to learn a new instrument. You can safely work on turning the unknown to known. Build yourself up rather than fearing you’re not talented or good enough, and what others will think of you.
In short
The fear of failure prevents a lot of people to go all in and give it an honest try. If you ask me, that’s the only true failure.
If you have gotten comfortable about what other think, and are not being afraid for finding out that you don’t have the talent, and work yourself around the fear of the unknown, you have done everything you can.
If you find out that the instrument isn’t for you, you haven’t failed. You have learned. You have succeeded. Because you have faced the fears, and grown as a human being.
And most likely, you are talented enough to learn the instrument to a level where it is fun to play and you find yourself comfortable. This is by the way relevant for a lot of situations in life, way beyond learning a new instrument!
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