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Hey — your weekly Rx. No filler, I promise.
Words Worth Keeping
"The first pancake is always lumpy."
— Russian proverb, which is why they invented the second one
Nobody photographs the first pancake. There's a reason for that.
This Week
This week I stood in front of a room of players taking mock auditions and gave them my favorite piece of kitchen wisdom.
You know how when you make pancakes, sometimes the first one kinda sucks? It's lumpy. It's misshapen. It looks like a hot mess.
So you throw it out. Or you give it to the dog.
At an audition, you don't get to do that. You get one pancake per excerpt, and the committee eats it.
But here's the good news I told them. Think of an excerpt that opens with something tricky — a hard entrance, a nasty little run right at the top. Composers love to bring that same phrase back a few bars later, after you're already playing. Already in motion. Already in the zone.
And you nail it the second time. Every time.
Why? Were you more warmed up? No — you were just as warm the first time.
Is it because you'd already played it once? No — six bars back isn't practice. Same fingers, same phrase.
It's because the second time you weren't in your own head about starting.
The notes were never the problem. The gap between the first one and the second is almost all mental.
The Prescription
Haven't read Bob Rotella's Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect? Read it. It's a golf book about a thing that isn't golf.
Rotella splits your brain into two modes:
- Training — on the practice range. You pick the swing apart, fix it, analyze.
- Trusting — on the course. You stop steering and let the trained swing go.
His whole point: most players never leave training-brain when it counts. They stand over the shot still trying to fix it, and it comes out tight.
That's your first pancake. Careful, over-managed, a little stiff — because you're still in training-brain.
The second one is better because you finally quit fighting it and trust it.
So the job isn't more reps. It's walking into the room already in trusting-brain, so pancake one comes out like pancake two. Do the fixing at home. Do the trusting on stage.
You don't get to toss the first pancake at an audition. So make it your best one.
Happy practicing,
Chris @ Honesty Pill Coaching
Something land? Something miss? Hit reply. I read them.
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