As I was listening to my daughter to practice her piano piece, I heard how she was struggling to put both hands together, particularly when she was still unfamiliar with her left hand, and couldn’t really put 2 hands together without mistake in either the right or left hand, whilst trying to maintain the speed of the piece. Being a music teacher back in my early days, I taught her to concentrate on her left hand whilst paging attention to the notes on the page. I told her she had to familiarise herself with the connection of notes prior and after her “problematic” part, going over that over and over again, until it becomes “second nature” before attempting once again to put both hands together. And it worked! She began to make the music flow through her “difficult part”, the original place where she had a massive issue with.

It got me thinking… Practising using our mental faculties, or in changing our paradigms are very much the same as practising the piano (or in my case, the organ, my musical passion). There’s a difference between knowing what you’re supposed to do, what it’s supposed to sound like and actually CO-ORDINATING the different components to make it flow. And it’s because of the difficult coordination of all the components that makes people quit doing something new, or using their mental faculties which are the mental muscles which are hardly used by the general population

In music, we know what the notes are, just as we know consciously what we are supposed to do if we want to achieve our goal. For popular pieces, we know what it’s supposed to sound like, because we have heard it before, and we associate our emotions with the musical part. The same goes for the visualisation of our goals: we see ourselves there and feel the need, our passion to get there. However, the problem lies in getting us there: the coordination between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind.

We need to practice our co-ordination, no matter how difficult it is, to get to our goals. And this is where passion and will comes into play: it buoys us to continue on despite not seeing the results right before us.

So, the next time you hit a difficult path in trying to change your paradigm, remember to PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!