I don’t know about you, but I’m impatient. I have trouble learning an instrument because I find it tedious to work on the basics.  I want to get right in and start with a song. And I don’t want to play it poorly, I want to start at the level of a virtuoso, I want to be an instantaneous expert. It’s taken me a very long time to learn that it just doesn’t work that way.

Practice Makes Perfect

In the past few years I’ve been exposed to the wonders of growth mindset, which helps flip the mental story of a perfectionist from “I can’t do that, I’m useless”, to “okay, that was really difficult, I didn’t accomplish the task this time, but the challenge has helped me grow, and I can try again with that new knowledge.”

As an American actress living in Ireland, it is important for me to do a British dialect (accent)  well. It is relatively far from my own, but even in the US, actors’ training includes British dialect work. About a year ago I had taped a scene for my agent with a British dialect because I love a good Jane Austen costume drama, and hope to someday be cast in one. The feedback was disappointing, though not unexpected.  My accent wasn’t good enough, it felt fake, something I was putting on. 

Now I could have reacted two ways. “I guess I can’t do it” and give up or say, “thank you for the feedback”, and find a way to improve. Maybe I chose something in between the two. It took me a year to find the right course, but when the opportunity came, and the timing worked with my schedule, I took the chance. 

“I can do this, just you watch.”

Not Giving Up

For all my bravado, I very nearly gave up on day one (it was only a two-day course). My accent was over-exaggerated and my “l’s” were completely wrong - so wrong neither the coach nor I knew how to rectify them. I couldn’t hear the issue. “Why bother,” I thought, “it’s hopeless.” However, instead of giving up, that night I recorded myself having read something with a lot of “I’s” and listened back.  

Voila!  that small act opened up new possibilities. I heard where I was going wrong, and worked on fixing it. I fully expected to return on day two for more work on my I’s, but that issue seemed to have resolved itself with my added awareness. Now there was the issue of the rounding of my vowels and of using my own voice. 

Somehow I sounded like a 1950s British newsreader instead of me.  This is very frustrating. The goal is to sound like you, not as if you were doing an impression of someone else, which is what my teacher said it sounded like I was doing.  This hurt me to hear.  But the feedback enabled me to settle back and play around with the accent in my own mouth, until I found a version that sounded more like the British version of me.

Slowing Down

One of the most revealing guidelines that the teacher continued to give to us was to slow down because we got sloppy when we went fast.

As the student it felt good to go fast, but this teacher slowed us down, and reminded us that if this was a dialect we wanted to use, that we needed to practice it every day. We needed to retrain our muscles so we could get to a point where we didn’t even have to think about rounding our lips.

That note made me think of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. If you want to do something well, you have to put in the time. I had acquired bad habits, so taking it slow was the only way to fix those habits.

I have to say that everyone in the class came along in leaps and bounds. The students were all at different levels, from novice to pretty good. I had written off some of my classmates as lost causes on day one. By the end of day two, I was duly impressed. By slowing down, practising regularly, and doing the work, every one of them improved.

I Can Do This

I came to that class wanting a quick fix, “let’s use the accent in a scene, now”, but on day two adding a bit of emotion made my accent go all wobbly. 

So, I now know, I have to take it little by little, keep practicing and it will get better. Somehow by slowing me down and allowing me to witness the change in my fellow classmates, I was able to trust the process. 

Keep practicing. I may not be perfect, but I’m well on my way, and in this case learning the scales (or my vowel sounds) was the only way. We had to break it down, not dive into the deep end. There is no quick fix.

Sometimes we all need that reassurance of a good teacher, you are improving, just take it slow, one step at a time. Mountains can be scaled with this approach, oceans can be crossed. 

In a world that is always looking for a short cut, or life hack, where can you let go of the need for a quick fix?