The Perils and Purpose of Discipline

When I was in my mid-twenties, I worked for one summer as a counselor at an infamous practice boot camp in upstate New York. The place, in accordance with venerable music festival tradition, was old-school rustic to say the least: bland cafeteria food, mosquitoes the size of your head, the occasional rabid bat flying around inside one of the cabins. I actually looked forward to my lessons, because my teacher's studio was the only place on the entire campus besides the concert hall with air conditioning.

But what the place was really known for was discipline. “Practice Time,” as it was called, began promptly at 8 a.m. and lasted until 12, with ten-minute breaks each hour. As if that weren't enough, there was another hour after lunch. Students had a few hours before dinner to relax and be kids—that is, apart from their lessons, chamber music coachings, and rehearsals.

My primary job, apart from making sure my dorm didn't catch fire and none of the teens died (or escaped), was to enforce Practice Time with an iron pen: at random times throughout the hour, I would patrol the dorm, listening at doors. If I heard no telltale signs of industriousness, the pen came out, marking a menacing black “X” on the chart next to the student's name. One X in a week was merely a warning, two carried the risk of consequences, and three meant that Sunday, the only day of true leisure in this place, was spent alone in one's sweaty dorm room instead of on a trip to the lake or the mall with the rest of the inmates.

One afternoon, I walked into my dorm and found one of my campers (who I'll call Emily) sitting on the couch in tears, surrounded by a couple of her friends, one of whom was holding her hand consolingly. Her room was immediately down the hall from mine, and while she seemed like a nice young woman, over the first few weeks of camp I'd gradually gotten more and more annoyed at hearing the same out-of-tune page of the Dvorak violin concerto emanating from her room for hours on end, even after Practice Time had ended.

I set down my case and took a seat across from the girls. “What's going on, sweetheart?”

“Well,” she sobbed, “when I played for Mr. ________ in my lesson today, he said he was really disappointed in me. And--he asked if I'd used all of my practice time.” I could tell that, in addition to the teacher's lack of approval, what really hurt Emily was the second arrow--his accusation that she was lazy, insufficiently committed, a delinquent. Especially when she was so obviously striving for the opposite.

I nodded and paused for a moment. “Would it make you feel better if I told your teacher that you not only practiced the full five hours like everyone else, that you actually did even more than that?”

After dinner, I gathered my nerve and approached the teacher.

“Hi, I know you don't know me, but I'm Emily's counselor, and she mentioned today that you asked in her lesson if she'd used all of her practice time this week. Well, I just wanted to let you know that, not only does she always practice the full five hours, she actually does extra.”

He raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

“The thing is,” I continued, “I don't think she really knows how to practice. I just hear her repeating the same passages over and over again, and I think she needs more guidance on how to use her time well.”

The teacher thanked me genuinely for letting him know, and I walked off to join the dessert line.

Discipline Without Discernment

My story about Emily might sound a little extreme, and yet how many of us have fallen into the trap of measuring our effectiveness of our work merely through the volume of our output? For years following this camp, I thought that five hours of practice per day was the standard requisite for a “serious” musician. Even later, when a more relaxed teacher convinced me to knock it down to three, I put an absurd amount of emphasis on that arbitrary metric. Once, over dinner, my husband asked what I'd done that day, and with a straight face I said I'd practiced for exactly two hours and 45 minutes.

“Oh,” he laughed, teasing me, “so round down to zero hours, right?”

And you know what? He was right. The quality of my work during those two hours and 45 minutes wasn't even present in my assessment. In my mind, those missing fifteen minutes simply meant I'd failed.

The thing is, discipline isn't bad. In fact, for pretty much everyone, it's a required ingredient in the recipe for success. It's what keeps us committed and focused when we'd rather watch TV, brings us back to our practice when we're discouraged, and enables momentary triumphs and insights to expand and deepen over time. But when we're after sustained growth rather than mere maintenance, I'd say that discipline is only one part of the equation. While it's true that practicing scales for an hour each day will probably help your intonation, understanding what makes you play out of tune and working on that is more efficient in the long run.

So, from a growth perspective, discipline without accompanying insight is largely a waste of time. And from any perspective, discipline without discernment can be dangerous. More is not necessarily better, after all—in fact, when it comes to practicing, more time spent doing things improperly (like my student Emily) just causes frustration. Worse, when we don't understand the physical or cognitive mechanisms behind the results we're getting (e.g. it's out of tune, but we don't know why), our efforts to shore up our playing through sheer discipline can lead to tension, pain, and injury.

Showing Up for Ourselves

One of the healing (and maddening) things about recovering from focal dystonia was that my understanding of discipline got totally turned on its head. I couldn't practice for three hours a day anymore—Sophie, the violinist guiding me, strongly discouraged it, and anyway it didn't make sense based on the kind of work we were doing. What my brain needed in order to recover, she insisted, was reasonable quantities of good information, an appropriate amount of repetition, and time—time to rest in between rounds and time to absorb the information in a deep, long-term, structural way. “Discipline “transformed from mere minutes on a stopwatch to other much more vital elements: a keen sense of perception and observation, privileging the healthy quality of my movements over the quantity, and knowing when to stop.

And, as it turns out, those are the most useful features of any kind of learning. Even now that dystonia is behind me, my priority is on applying the tools I've learned to the music in the most sensible and efficient way possible, and while I doubt I've hit the three-hour mark anytime in the last four years, my husband insists that I play better now than I did prior to my injury. And the beauty of skill-based practice and harmonizes with the body's natural function is that things just keep getting better.

But there was one enduring feature of my “old” sense of discipline that I'll admit came in handy during my recovery, especially in the face of despair: good, old-fashioned refusal to give up. I couldn't be 100% sure that I would ever regain my playing by soldiering on day after day, but I knew very well what would happen if I didn't. During the moments of deepest, darkest doubt, when the histrionic voices in my head were telling me to toss my viola out the window in a temper tantrum, I instead leaned on the quiet strength I'd honed through years of training—an inclination to sticking with it.

Even in my most misguided years of hammering away hour after hour at practice boot camp, what got the viola out of the case each day was not only a sense of responsibility or a fear of failure, but an enduring love for the music and a drive to express it fully. I believe we all possess, in different ways, a deep wish to bring our gifts to the world effectively in our lifetime and the capacity to do it. And that, to me, is a discipline worth cultivating.

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