The other day I was driving home from errands with the girls and I turned down a city street I usually avoid.  As I should have remembered would happen, we found ourselves in a long line of traffic at a stubborn red light.  I said to Greta, “Remind me to never ever do this again.”  She decided to tell Siri to send me a note and so the next day at 9 a.m. I saw this on my phone.

As I enter the land of more intentional practice my bad habits are on display, habits I wish I would never ever do again:

1. Read music without thinking about what I’m playing, without listening carefully to my sound, or without observing what is happening technically

2. Play the same passage with the same bad fingering, or a different fingering each time

3. Forget to mark the score when I make a reading mistake more than once (“B#, dummy!”)

4. Whirl through a piece without addressing the problem spots, as if they will magically take care of themselves some day

5. Start faster than I can handle throughout the whole piece, resulting in a messy mix of speeds

6. Fill up my practice time with simply “playing” rather than “working” — forgetting to set one goal at a time and work towards an assessable outcome

These habits are human, so human that of course to expect to never ever do again is a set up for failure. Sometimes I need to play rather than work and some mistakes need to be made a few times before I am convinced there is a better way.  But I know my foibles and how much time they can waste.  I also know what I try to teach.  This new project is a good exercise in aligning intention with action and in matching my advice with my own reality, with plenty of grace to balance the “never ever” hyperbole.