How can we influence our habits? Specifically of interest for musicians – our practice habits! How can we reach our peak potential? How can we make our time in the practice room most effective?
These are questions that have interested me for as long as I have been doing music. I devour books on learning psychology, sports psychology, brain plasticity, brain health, habits and so on. For a while I took a detour from music to focus on these topics exclusively. NLP helped me personally with some issues, so I wanted to study it and became a Master Practitioner and Trainer, trained by the folks who developed it, such as Richard Bandler, Judith DeLozier, Robert Dilts, Betty-Alice Erickson and others; I also attended Saybrook University’s PhD program for a year;
NLP focuses on how language affects our behavior to achieve better results, be it the language we use with ourselves or how we talk to others. I assisted people with changing their habits for a while, but I could not stay away from playing and teaching music for too long and returned to it as a career. My interest in these matters and what I have learned from NLP and Psychology (and continue to learn) continues to benefit me every day.
