The Try-Harder Trap

You’re a few bars out from the passage you’ve flubbed before. You know it’s coming — the fast run, the shift into the high position, the entrance that has to be clean — and without ever deciding to, you get ready for it. Your grip tightens. Your breath goes shallow. Your shoulders lift a little to meet the thing. By the time you actually arrive, you have already braced, and the bracing is most of what makes it hard.

Almost every musician I work with has fallen into this, and it makes complete sense that we do. One way or another, we were all taught that playing better requires effort and control. Practice harder.

Concentrate harder. Hold it correctly and don’t let go. So when the stakes climb, we reach for the tool we were handed, which is to try harder. I call this the try-harder trap, and it stands on a belief that feels obviously true right until you test it: that more effort equals more effectiveness.

The first thing to notice is that your tension is not spread evenly through your playing. It arrives at particular moments — the shift, the high note, the fast run, the page turn, the audition — and it is scarce or absent everywhere else. This is why I call tension a “when problem” rather than a “where problem.”

You can chase it around your body for years, loosening the shoulder, buying a different shoulder rest, stretching the wrist before you play, and it will keep moving somewhere else, because you are answering where when the real question is when. The tension has an appointment in the music, and it keeps it faithfully.

Which means the first move is not a stretch or a new piece of gear, but a little detective work. Play through something you know well and simply watch for the instant the tightening switches on. Most people are surprised to find it fires before the hard note — in the preparation, the moment you see the thing coming. That early flinch is the whole habit in miniature, and it is also the opening, because a habit you can feel starting is a habit you can let go of.

One place to notice this is at the top of your spine. Your head is heavy, and it sits at the very top of your spine, so the smallest thing it does ripples down through everything below. When a hard moment comes and you move to take charge of it, the most common thing you do is to tighten the back of your neck so your head pushes down and forward, a tiny tightening you would never catch on its own.

In vertebrates the head leads the body; for example, this is the reason a cat rights itself by finding the horizon with its eyes first and letting the spine and limbs follow. So when your head dives, your back shortens, your breath catches, and the tightening you started at your neck arrives in your hands a half-second later. It is, more or less, like sitting on a horse and hauling back on your own reins at the very moment you are asking it to move.

I built this habit as well as anyone. For a long time I built it so thoroughly that it took my playing away from me through severe tendinitis, and I got it back not by trying harder but by learning, slowly, to stop pulling my own reins.

The fix is not to hold your head up. That is just more effort in the other direction. It is to stop agreeing to pull it down.

It helps to see how little the extra effort was ever buying you. Think about opening a stuck jar. Does scrunching your face, clenching your jaw and hauling with your whole shoulder actually help the lid turn?

The hands do the work, and everything else you recruited was just interference. Playing is full of this. Your violin, your piano, your voice does not play itself, so some effort is real and necessary. But a great deal of what we pile on at the hard moment is the jar-face version, effort aimed at our own bodies instead of at the music.

I want to give this a different name than the one you were probably taught. A lot of teachers talk about alignment, about stacking yourself correctly, ears over shoulders over hips. There is nothing wrong with the picture, but the word suggests a position you get into and then hold, and holding a position is, by definition, stopping.

You are meant for movement. The moment you stop moving, you are holding tension. So I don’t teach alignment.

I teach poise, a live, balanced readiness that never quite settles, the way a dancer or a good athlete is never locked. Poise is something you find by doing a little less, not a little more.

Here is something to try in the next five minutes, with your instrument or without it. Take the passage that always tightens you, and before you play it, do nothing on purpose. Not a big relaxation ritual, not a deep breath you turn into a project, just a small, deliberate pause, a couple of seconds of stillness before the hard thing, where you refrain from diving your head down to meet it.

Then play. I call this the Magic Pause, because the freedom it allows can feel like magic. You simply refrain from giving in to your usual habit (like your head tightening down towards your hands or the sheet music), and the passage comes out freer, and your first thought is that you finally got something right when really you just undid something.

If you want to know whether it is working, put a number on it. Play the passage the way you normally would and rate the tension zero to ten, zero being loose and ten being a brick. Then take the pause, refrain from the dive, and play it again, and rate it a second time. Most people watch that number come down a few points inside a single pause. Try it and see what happens!

There is one distinction worth keeping as you do this. There is effort a task actually needs, and there is tension, which is effort that has lost touch with what the task needs. You have felt the difference.

You brace to lift a milk jug you think is full, it turns out to be empty, and you nearly send it through the ceiling, because your body prepared for a load that was not there. Tension at the instrument is that same misread, running unconsciously, all the time. The pause buys you the half-second to find out how much the moment is actually asking of you, which is almost always less than you were about to give it.

None of this asks you to care less about the notes. It asks you to stop meeting the music with force, because force was never the thing that made it music. We call it “playing music” for a reason, not working music, not striving music, not killing-yourself-over-it music.

The hard passage will still be hard. But you can stop being hard with it, and you can start at the one moment just before, where the whole habit either fires or doesn’t. Take the pause, and see what your number does.

Join my free monthly online class, the Musician’s Tension Reset Lab: soulforcearts.com/tensionreset

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