By the end of a long and satisfying practice session, your fingers are flying, your piano is singing with nary a misplaced note, your mind and body are fully aligned with the music (and the stars). You’ve unequivocally conquered the piece. The next day, you come back and cannot play a correct note to save your life. What happened?

No, you did not forget how to play the piano overnight. In motor learning jargon, what you experienced was a peak of self-efficacy followed by an utter loss thereof. Self-efficacy is the anticipatory expectation that the task to be executed will be done successfully. It is not fortune telling, and it is more than just confidence. Rather, it is the unshakeable sureness that the successful outcome will simply manifest itself due to your intrinsic abilities and willpower.

Where does self-efficacy come from?

My first figure skating coach back in Singapore had an particular insight,

靠感觉：to rely on the feeling or sensation

To rely on the feeling is to remember how a successful outcome feels like (proprioceptively, kinesthetically, musically, etc.) and to project oneself into that eventuality. When the feeling is vivid in your mind, this produces a strong degree of self-efficacy.

While I agree with this pearl of wisdom, I would also argue that it is only one part of a larger picture. One obvious unspoken assumption is that the learner must have made enough successful outcomes during practice¹, the feelings of which she must then commit to memory. But the less obvious part is, how does one remember a feeling, and how does one reliably recall the feeling at times where it matters, such as in a stressful performance setting? Is it as rote as memorizing the ABCs?

I posit that the “feeling” is associated to, and triggered by, an external focus of attention. Say, you’re learning for the first time how to play a rolled chord. To play it smoothly, being the conscientious external focus learner that you are, you decide to try using imagery (also a type of external focus), by imagining the word “sweep”. After achieving several successful attempts with fluid sweeps of your arm and hand, you start to get a feel for rolling the chord, and associate the feeling of the gesture with “sweeping”. The next time you play the piece for your teacher, you reach the measure with the rolled chord and you remind yourself to ____?

If you reminded yourself of your “sweep” imagery, well done! The imagery evokes the associated feeling and thereby increases your assuredness of rolling the chord beautifully. This illustrates the interplay between attentional focus and self-efficacy: the external focus that worked when learning a motor skill also triggers a sense of confidence about the skill. As the connection between the external focus and the feeling of the motor movement strengthens over repeated practice, the movements become more automatic and ingrained—this is what we commonly refer to as muscle memory. You may eventually outgrow the need to continually recall the initial external focus you used, and the external focus you use may also evolve as your learning progresses, typically graduating towards more distal focuses². Therefore, the “sweep” imagery may gradually evolve into instead imagining the sound of the rolled chord with the top note voiced beautifully.

How do I Practice this Association?

To rethink the wildly divergent practice sessions in this light, the inability to reproduce the feeling from one day to the next can be attributed to the inadequacy of the triggers needed for evoking the feeling. Perhaps the association between the triggers and the feeling are not yet strong enough, and it just takes more time and practice to strengthen it. Perhaps the triggers are ineffective, such as when using internal focuses or negative instructions; when it is not task-related; or when you are unable to personally identify with the imagery. Perhaps you don’t have, or are not aware of, the focuses that you practice with.

With this in mind, whenever I close out a good practice session, I always make a conscious effort to review the external focuses I used to get to the point of fluency. I have found that this is the ideal time to strengthen the association between my external focuses and the feeling of playing at my best. On the flip side, whenever I encounter a bad practice day, I return to the most basic focuses and work my way back up to regain the feeling. Even before I knew the academic jargon to recognize that my practice habits were serving to build my self-efficacy via attentional focuses, I had observed that this approach greatly help my performance skills. I had informally coined it as “practicing concentration”.

Footnote

1. Another unspoken part of this unspoken assumption is that the learner must have a positive feedback mechanism to know when her attempts were successful. This topic warrants a future post!
2. Distal focuses include imagining the mood or expression of a phrase in order to play it. They are far removed from any tangible cause-and-effect of one’s physical movement, but encompass a higher level complexity in movement patterns. In contrast, proximal focuses are more directly related to specific movements, and include the “sweep” example above or intangible objects like mirror images. Early stage learning generally is more responsive to proximal focuses, whereas distal focuses become more relevant after basic movement patterns have been mastered.