9. Changing Your Embouchure? (Be Kind to Yourself)

Video #9 of 18 in the series: Up Your Mental & Emotional Game (for Trumpet Playing)

English transcript of available on: www.AdamRapa.com
You can watch the full series there, and find lots of other goodies!

Some key take-aways from this video:

"Embouchure problems make people absolutely f'ing neurotic; turns perfectly good, reasonable, happy people into miserable shadows of themselves. Because, a lot of times our ego... gets a seat at the table that it does not deserve."

"When the ego is in that type of situation, if you've attached your sense of self - your self-image - if your ego identifies as a trumpet player... you're gonna be miserable because having embouchure problems means YOU have a problem. There's not just something wrong with your technique at this moment; there's something wrong with YOU."

"And if that's what you feel like your ego is experiencing... It's hard to be a scientist and gather data, gather valuable information about the cause and effect of what you've just done; and formulate a new plan about how to move forward."

"If you're having these emotional responses, then you are not thinking clearly. You're not feeling clearly. You're not gonna be open for the information about what you're doing; what are you actually physically doing..."

"You have got to detach your self-worth from the current state of your playing."

"It starts with taking a breath, being kind to yourself, and not just succumbing to the emotional response of failure, not letting your ego torture you because it's not satisfied with where you're at. That's really, really huge. That is a really big, really important piece of advice; that you have got to detach your self-worth from the current state of your playing.

"Detach your sense of self-worth from your ability to play the trumpet; completely!"

"Focus on being happy with how you are developing yourself. And then you can be a perfectly happy person, who maybe isn't playing the trumpet very well right now; but you can work on that. And a person who has control of their emotional state can do lots of great work, on the technical side of things."

" If you feel like your worth as a human being depends on your ability to play the trumpet, then one day you're gonna f'ing crash and burn.

"But if you have a different metric for your self-worth, then you can be kind to yourself during the, of course, the potentially very stressful process of changing your technique. But at least if you can do it with some compassion for yourself..."