Being There

I have a book that has been hanging around for some time, it was paused for a while and now I’m back on it with renewed interest. Its title is “Effortless Mastery” from the well-known jazz musician and educator Kenny Werner. It’s an amazing book written for musicians aiming to find a way to practice that is purified from concerns or psychological burdens and only focused on getting familiar with the Music.

Kenny’s website main page has this strong message:
Kenny believes in achieving mastery and joy in music through surrendering thoughts, which are the source of all unrest. Playing and practicing from “the space” brings one into the moment and away from the difficulties of the mind. Detaching from the mind’s thought habits connects one with their heart and their true intellect.

To me, after many years of struggling to find a way and a means to progress, it means that the purpose of the musician is to find the way to “the space” mentioned by Kenny. Music is the GPS to reach that place. The musician acts as a guide to himself and the audience to bring them there, no matter the style or the technique, it’s a matter of how the music resonates. In this sense, the musician truly becomes the master of himself.

I love this idea of giving up to one’s self and letting it happen. It is what people wiser than me call being there. To me it is also related to presence.

Presence is often misunderstood for the capability to stand in front of an audience, of being listened to, watched, remembered. People struggle to chase it for a whole life, often unsuccessfully. Being present, instead, is the purest act of being in the moment by surrendering thoughts and letting them go. It is a mindful approach to what happens around us.
Presence is strongly connected to human emotions. For example, if you have ever tried to practice ear training drills, you would probably have noticed that it doesn’t take too much time to begin performing quite well and identifying specific intervals, but when a song is played it becomes harder to recognize them. However, everything changes when we attach emotions to them. If a specific feeling arises from, let’s say, a Major 9th chord with the 9th as lead, that feeling will be triggered every time, without the need of rationally recalling the interval. Being aware of one’s emotions means being present and connected.

Continuous Presence

This kind of mindset can be used in everyday life, not just in music. The way we behave in a work context, with a customer or with a team, is the product of our experiences and our awareness. As Kenny says, one of the first steps is to learn to go beyond our inner critic. The concept of inner critic is also beautifully expressed in the book “Leadership Presence”, written by Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar, a book that I read for my TTLA program in Red Hat.

Self-judgement inhibits productiveness and creativity: that’s the old “bully of the block” that is always waiting for us behind the corner, who constantly judges our behaviors and inhibits further actions and creativity. The inner critic is the voice that says you are not prepared enough for an exam, that you can’t boldly smile in front of an audience or you can’t develop a good ear or sing well because you are not a natural born talent. Well, these are traps set up by ourselves that are somehow there to protect us from the outside world but in the end they don’t let us live our lives completely.

Disengaging from the inner critic can be tough and require time. Instead of fighting it back, there are some techniques that can work effectively, like humor, mindfulness practice, focusing on the goals instead of the audience (internal and external) reaction. We need to re-learn to be kind to ourselves.
In interpersonal relationships this also allows us to create a “protective barrier” from aggressive people: imagine a conversation with a rude CIO that indulges in verbal attacks. If we are focused on our moment (presence) and stay kind to ourselves, words can be less effective in triggering our constantly exposed fear of judgement.

Wow, it is so ridiculously easy? NO. This is, obviously, a self-development work that spans years. My personal purpose, with a mindful stretch, and time, is aiming to reach what I have called a state of “Continuous Presence”.

My open-ended conclusion

My warm invitation for next time we listen to a song, play our instrument, or make a presentation to somebody, is to try to do it with that kindness that we deserve, trying to live that moment as our unique experience.

I want to close this post with an observation that can become a useful self-reflection: everything that happens is truly happening inside us. The external world exists only as the product of our observation and how we “filter” the reality: the music flow of a song, a talk with somebody we like or dislike, a talk to a crowded stage, they are meaningless events until they reach us, consciously or not. I will develop this topic in a new blog post.

Be kind to yourself.