Self Doubt | The Millennial Edit (ft. Rosie Bennet)
In this week’s guest post, Rosie share her thoughts around the topic of “self doubt” and how learning to focus instead on “self trust” can help you approach a musical performance with confidence. Tune in every week for more thoughtful insights from Rosie, right here in the tonebase Blog!
Self doubt — the ultimate self sabotage. It is a force that seemingly creeps into our every day lives, causing us to procrastinate, to criticize ourselves brutally, and to not take chances that we believe we should.
But is it really a matter of feeling not good enough?
Honestly, I don’t think so.
We are sensible creatures at heart, our minds wired to find the easiest path. It just isn’t feasible that we would continue in a career which is so mentally demanding if we seriously believed deep down that we are not good enough to succeed.
We return again and again to the same adrenaline pumping situations, and somehow with pleasure. It is not necessary to our survival that we get up on stage, far more money and happiness could be found in much less dramatic settings than the classical concert hall, so whether we acknowledge it fully or not, if we are performing, and we choose time and time again to keep performing, nerves, dread and what have you, really we love it.
Somewhere in our beings we believe in ourselves, that’s a good start!
At the age that most of us start to experience self doubt, we may have already been playing at a high level for years; dealing with the very rational fears of performing in front of many people and the threat of choosing a career that is inherently ‘arty’ or ‘unstable’.
Yet it hits us, usually coupled with our adolescence, a new view on the world causing us to hone in on other people’s qualities and compare them with our own, usually ending in frustration and tears.
We become embroiled in a mental battle, our ‘potential’ is running out, our ‘talent’, we sadly realize, is objective, and now new language is starting to emerge, we are introduced to ‘success’, ‘making it’, and we start to realize the world doesn’t owe us anything even if we do our best.
We experience our first moral dilemmas within the school system, where for every good/bad action we partake in, equally serious praise/punishment is given.
So why wouldn’t we grow up expecting that for hard work, equal reward is due?
Unfortunately our understandably slow realization that life is not like this, coupled with the criticism we receive from well meaning teachers/audience members means we begin to expect the worst — that our perception of our own skill must be incorrect.
We no longer trust ourselves.
The problem with the word ‘doubt’ is that the connotations are of panic, nervousness and fleeting moments of dread, where actually the experience of doubt is much more solid and enduring.
Self doubt/mistrust is sensible and natural. We learn to be skeptical and questioning of information, why wouldn’t we take this process into our daily lives?
We have all come from a background that has skewed our opinions on just about everything, so we are right to analyse our thought processes, trace our judgments, in fact it is wise and humbling to do so.
Doubting yourself because you doubt yourself is foolish, you are human and doubt is a positive reaction to realizing that there are more viewpoints than yours in the world.
Self doubt, even in massive amounts is a fantastic catalyst for change, so long as we can still justify our actions, and enjoy to enough of an extent what we do.
It is learning how to focus on that doubt that leads us closer to what really worries us about what we do, even if that thing is unsolvable.
We should understand that it is not the ridding ourselves of self doubt that will make the difference, but instead learning to trust ourselves. These things are opposites, but also coexist as elements of our questioning minds.
Ultimately, we must come to a realization that out of everybody alive, we trust ourselves the most with who we are and what we want to do. Walking on stage will rarely end in death(!), people’s opinions of your playing are just as flimsy as your opinions of other people’s playing and pretty much everybody you meet will be either positive or indifferent to you.
We are all just looking after ourselves, living in our own worlds, concentrating on our own emotions and actions.
Self trust isn’t walking on stage and knowing you won’t make mistakes/have memory slips/fall in your heels, self trust is knowing that if those things do happen, it won’t make a blind bit of difference to how you see yourself.
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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