Your Inner Happy Child in Music

The Schema Model has a concept called the Happy Child mode. For me, it really captures those parts of us where we're in the moment, enjoying ourselves, absorbed in the sound, the touch, the mood, the character, the movement, the feeling of playing.

When our inner Happy Child is in the room, it brings joy, energy and motivation to our playing.

When we follow our intuition and focus on what we enjoy, like or love about learning and playing, it really keeps us going.

We want to be there. We want to know more. We try again, with a sense of adventure. 

And our fingers just get better at doing their thing. 

Joy = Less tension = better technique and more accuracy.

But Then Our Happy Child Vanishes...

However, it's not always easy to access this part or side of us.

In fact, sometimes it can seem very far away, crowded out by performance-related stress, anxiety, and self-doubt. It's like it goes into hiding or simply vanishes.

We may even feel we're failing because we can't feel joy for music that maybe we feel we should.

But from a Schema Coaching perspective, our inability to feel or access that enthusiasm isn't a fault.

It's a sign of potential negative or maladaptive schemas getting triggered. In other words, something about our current situation activates negative memories somewhere in our psyche, and with them related negative emotions, thoughts, and physical feelings around music.

It can simply be a matter of mental association.

Let's say we had lots of experiences playing your instrument in stressful situations (in front of a difficult teacher, a scary examiner or auditioner or critic, for example), we can build a bank of negative memories around music, around our instrument.

When we then go to play for people, it can trigger the same kinds of negative emotions we had in the past.

The past is here in our present.

These negative schemas can really affect our ability to play effectively. They can take over our experience, activating our threat-detection and survival systems. We're on the look out for similar kinds of unhelpful comments, criticism, and even rejection or humiliation we may have received or seen carried out.

Our bodies respond with stress hormones. Our muscles contract. Our posture stiffens and shrinks.

In this state, it can become very difficult to play with the joy, spontaneity and emotional engagement we may desire.

We may even fall apart as we play, creating yet another negative experience and memory to add to the 'bank of bad plays.'

Bringing Joy Back Online

The good news is:

We absolutely can change this kinds of situations around.

We can shift out of negative schemas and activate positive-adaptive thoughts, emotions, and feelings around music.

We can accumulate more and more positive experiences in music, which can eventually override our negative associations of playing for others.

We can bring that inner Happy Child back into the music room and make it much more likely that it will appear most consistently.

The Happy Child Needs a Safe Space to Play

We can do this by learning how to meet our core emotional needs as we make music.

We can create a safe place in our music, so our inner Happy Child can come out of hiding.

It can take time to do this work. Time for the old memories of negative experiences to fade and be replaced by something more positive.

This is the work of Schema Coaching for Musicians.