Comparison, Competition & Negative Thought Processes | Toxic Relationships [Part 2] (ft. Rosie Bennet)
In Part 2 of her series on Toxic Relationships, Rosie dives into the topic of peer-to-peer comparison and competition, a pervasive aspect of the classical guitar landscape. If you missed the first installment [“5 Tips For Strong Student-Teacher Connections”], make sure you check it out here!
Once we have realized that we are/have been part of a toxic relationship with our teachers, we can start to unpick our behaviors.
It can be a confusing time, questioning our knowledge and attitudes can leave us feeling quite lost. In a world where we are so keenly aware that knowing things and having an opinion is part of our intellectual capital, it is unsettling to try and leave our egos behind.
Competition is part of our makeup as human beings. We learn to compete in order to survive. So it is entirely normal that we find ourselves, at any age or stage in our development, in competition with our peers.
When we are young, our subconscious mind is constantly learning how society functions.
Once we have entered a situation, like that of a student teacher relationship, we start to expect reactions that correspond with our actions and we begin to view these reactions as normal. We understand the way that our teacher talks to us, the way they talk about our playing and the way they present us to other people as normal.
The way that our teacher talks about us in comparison with how they talk about other people is the building block of how we view ourselves in comparison with the rest of the world.
If our teacher is incredibly complimentary about our playing and criticizes others, our ego grows, thinking we must be better.
If our teacher compliments others’ playing and only criticizes ours, we start to feel threatened.
If we receive a mix of both of these attitudes, we may develop imposter syndrome, where we feel that we are both better and worse than everybody else; acquiring an ego that is both hugely inflated and incredibly hollow and breakable, assimilating our successes with luck, and feeling that we have tricked whoever is convinced that we are competent.
As so many young musicians experience this feeling, it would seem sensible that we stick together, but unfortunately because we are taught that the music industry does not have room for us all, we are often pitted against each other, become blind to our shared suffering and begin to harbor intense competitive hate for the people who we believe threaten our chances at success.
Unhelpfully, at the same time that we start to compete actively for validation and attention from the people around us, we also begin to ingest an incredible amount of poetic baloney, commonly known as ‘motivational’ or ‘inspirational’ quotes.
‘The only person you’re competing with is who you were yesterday’
‘Anything that one wants to do really, and one loves, one must do everyday.’
‘If you compete with others you become bitter, if you compete with yourself you become better’
These sentences arrive in our lives as motivation to work harder, to be better, but mostly they force us to question even further our right to enjoyment and success.
We are filled with confusion and delusion.
Where it should be pretty obvious how we can improve our playing and what work has to be done, we often have to wade through a sea of guilt for not understanding the gold standard of the music we are studying, for not enjoying every moment of practice that we do, or being crippled with the fear that our competition may do it better than us.
This all takes time and energy from our lives. It is astounding that we even continue considering the emotional overhaul that it takes just to get to work on something we started out of enjoyment.
We need to be kinder, not just to ourselves but also to others.
Part of our regeneration outside of our problematic relationship with our teacher should be realizing that we have also developed toxic attitudes towards a number of patterns in our lives of which competition is a main part.
Competition should not be a thought that crosses your mind daily, after all, we are in this business because we enjoy at least some aspect of playing music.
Competition with ourselves is a lousy explanation of a wish to play something with as much ease as possible so that we may play confidently and gain even more enjoyment from it.
As soon as we start lifting each other up instead of pulling each other apart, the pressure is off, the competition is over, and the toxic thoughts about our own abilities we have harbored our whole lives will pale into insignificance.
About Rosie Bennet
Born in London in 1996, Rosie started playing guitar at age seven. She received her early musical education at The Yehudi Menuhin School of Music and went on to study with Zoran Dukic (The Hague, NL), Johan Fostier (Tilburg, NL), Rene Izquierdo (Milwaukee, USA) and Raphaella Smits (Leuven, BE). She has performed in festivals all over Europe, including Open Guitar Festival in Křivoklát, Czech Republic, Glasgow’s Big Guitar Weekend, Scotland, Porziano Music Festival, Italy and the West Dean guitar Festival, UK. Highlights of her concert career include performances at Wigmore Hall, London, The North Wall, Oxford and concerts given on El Camino De Santiago.
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