Playing Your Best When It Counts

[...] the mental skills necessary to develop and refine your technique will get in your way during performance. In other words, as your technique becomes well-learned and complex, your conscious mind must become less involved or, as suggested in a quote, from Dr. Frank Wilson, you must release conscious control over correctness and trust the motor programs you have trained in practice: Ultimately, the musician must relinquish the illusion of moment-by-moment control, trusting the program to remember exactly how each finger must move. Self-doubt, fear of mistakes, over-analysis of technique and heightened anxiety are examples of cognitions that interrupt the automatic transfer of information necessary to execute your motor programs automatically.\n It is the retrieval of separate motor programs from repetition to repetition that makes this practice variable.