I used to work as a sous-chef in a kitchen that produced a certain amount of meals a day for a mid-size company. Each day there was a menu that had to be prepared, and the chef that day would see the menu as they came in that morning. One day I was working with a secondary chef who was very good but still somewhat in training, and she admitted that she wasn’t exactly sure how to make the specific soup that she had to make that day. When I asked her what she planned to do she said, “If I can’t make something I just pretend I am someone who can”. She did not laugh when she said this, and it was clear that this was a very real mental exercise that she used to boost confidence and allow her trained culinary intuition to work as intended when a challenge was encountered. The soup came out great, even if it was a variant of its more typical rendering.
All practicing artists experience a similar challenge that is often referred to as “the plateau”. This is often described as a phenomenon wherein the artist feels as though they do not have access to the combination of skill and/or knowledge to create work that they feel is reflective of growth in their field. The plateau may manifest as the musician thinking they have sounded the same for too long, being blocked from being able to create the kind of work they really want to create, not knowing how to work with certain tools and ensembles effectively, not being able to compose effectively, or any number of related stumbling blocks. The experience of this kind of plateau is that progress is out of your hands, and you do not know how to proceed. This article offers some practical advice to allow you to work through the plateau and achieve the kind of work that you intend with your practice.
The first thing to be aware of is the developmental structure of the plateau.
In order to overcome a plateau we will utilize a powerful feature of the brain: the ability to process information subconsciously. When I refer to the subconscious I mean the processes that the brain engages in without us being consciously aware. A simple example of this: You are having dinner with friends and you forget the name of your cousin’s colleague in the story, you leave it at that and 5 minutes later the name comes to you. This is so common that often in this scenario you say, “forget it, it will come to me later”— and it almost always does, and always at times when you’re thinking of something completely different. The processing power of the subconscious mind is much greater than the conscious mind, in that the way it functions is non-linear, highly relational, and creative, and searches for answers from many more points of view simultaneously than our conscious mind does. This agility in combination with the reinforcing of neural pathways when done intentionally can greatly aid in overcoming feelings of stasis in artistic endeavors.
One of the first mistakes we make in learning and developing an artistic practice is that we set up many points of resistance where they need not be. A few examples of these self imposed blockages might manifest in the following non-comprehensive list of sentiments:
1. The teacher on your shoulder - Relying only on a value system set up by an overly dogmatic teacher. “Harmonically simple music is sub-par”, “Playing with drum set will obscure the richness of your instrument” “Simple expositions are for pop music which is facile” etc.
2. Fear of wading too deep into the water - Self-doubt around your own ability to innovate or work at the scale you ultimately want to leading you to hedge your bet when it comes to conceiving of projects.
3. You can’t get there from here - Inventing preliminary steps that act as ways to procrastinate working towards your goal. “I need a better instrument” “I shouldn’t make a full show’s worth of work until I have a commission” “I’ll start taking lessons again after I master the stuff I already know” “I can’t write this work until I know who the other players will be”.
4. Lost in the field - Basing your own work on someone else’s who has had success and feeling like you have to emulate them.
Setting up these points of resistance actually fortifies naturally occurring blockages instead of allowing them to work as intended. Yes, that is correct, I did just assert that artistic blockages or plateaus serve a function, and understanding that function is the key to working with them. We often think that we are practicing effectively if we are making steady progress, but this is rarely accessible to advanced practitioners and more typical of beginners absorbing a lot of rudimentary ability right at the start of the learning process. This is because at the start of the endeavor the questions we are answering are simple questions, such as “how can I hold my finger in this place for the proper duration” or “what pitch does that symbol on the page equate to”. This stage of learning is involved with a lot of memorization and rudimentary, albeit fine, motor skills. There are, of course, difficult plateaus in the beginning stages as well, but the keys to them are a bit more readily available as a teacher might simply point out that the student should relax their shoulder or minimize movement in some way to achieve a desired effect. At higher levels of proficiency, where style, developing instincts, and perspective come into play, progress is slower and can often only be found through personal exploration and inquiry, and that is where this method becomes useful. The beneficial function of the plateau is that it serves as a digesting and assimilation period for all that you have learned so far. It serves to codify your style so you can build on your current knowledge base. Compare it to learning a language. At first you are translating from your native language and eventually you get to a point of fluency where you are thinking in your second language but perhaps you could expand your precision with verbs and add more precise vocabulary. That would not be possible if you were still tenuously gripping the information you learned before moving on. The previous lessons should be embedded in instinct and a period of time with this relationship to a stage of achievement is experienced as a plateau. Thus the first part of this method is realizing that the plateau is both foundation and frontier, the plateau is the door that is its own key and this paradox disguises its nature.
Step 1: Assess your practice
Start with looking at or reading your work. If you are a musician make a short recording of yourself “performing” for 5 or 10 minutes after each practice session and listen to it before you go to bed and then again before you start practice the next day. You won’t have to do this for very long before you can write down or mentally identify the current state of your work, its habits, and patterns. The first step is also the point at which you get a sense of your experience up to that point, make a note of where you think your style and ability is and what key influences in your practice are the most apparent. These influences can be other practitioners but also contexts, for example the context of a recital hall or a certain kind of gallery can be a contextual backdrop against which you have been forming your style, in some cases you might not have considered this before but try to identify it.
Step 2: Set your goals
The second step is to identify where you want to go beyond your plateau. This is the most creative step in this process as you have to essentially give qualities to a level of achievement that is currently outside your reach. Here you will imagine the kind of sound, look, or quality you want to achieve insofar as you are able to experience it. To do this you will simply use any terms that you have at your disposal to describe and imagine the feeling or quality that this level of achievement creates for someone experiencing the work. Write it down or make a mental note. This step can be simple like a short list of words or elaborate like imagining a simple narrative of some kind that might evoke the qualities you are trying to achieve, art galleries or travel are good inspirations for this. If you want to get very elaborate, imagine this level as an alter ego that has free access to this level of achievement, and develop a detailed mental conception of this character’s life, their body language, habits, and general pace of life. Plenty of very well-known artists have created under pseudonyms for this reason. We also often hear professional fighters and other athletes talk about “channelling” a certain quality when they perform their work, this is the same thing. In this step, imagine the context that the next level will work in and how it feels to experience someone in your field operating at that level. This can be very specific. If you have been struggling to improve a very specific thing in your work and are not exactly sure how to fix this, think in detail about how it feels when you experience someone in your field doing it perfectly.
Step 3: Pose The question
The third step is to formulate the question of how to arrive at this new level in your practice. It is important that you make this a question, say it out loud or write it down and remember that the information that comes back at you will directly, sometimes annoyingly specifically or generally, answer that question. I am reminded of a successful composer I was speaking to who told me that when they get stuck on a piece they take their hands off of their instrument, close their eyes, and ask out loud, “what’s next?”, the answer would always come to them based on the stated goal of the composition of course (step two). Some examples of questions might be, “how can I bring out balanced range of dynamics in my playing as I imagined”, “how do I improve my sense of depth in my paintings as I imagined”, “how can I extend my dynamic range without sacrificing power like these artists that are my influences.” Essentially you have to pose the question to yourself specifically so your subconscious can get working on it.
Step 4: Make inroads for the answer
This is a step that sends the message to your mind that you are ready to receive this information. It also reinforces the feeling that not only are you ready to receive it but that from where you are, you are accessible to it and it to you and that the information you need is available. For this step get into a scenario where you can visualize. Sit, relax, be quiet, or get in some kind of state where you can play out a scenario in your mind like the following. This example will work for a musician but can be adapted for any discipline. Imagine you see yourself on a path outside and a short distance ahead of you there is a large library. You walk into the library and take a seat in one of the tables suitable for seating multiple people. You might chose to be aided by a librarian or browse the shelves after setting the intention to find the sound or answer you are looking for. You look through the shelves and eventually you see a spine with your name on it. You pull it out, take a seat and look at the volume knowing that it contains some information regarding your question. Open the book in the middle and wait for a word or even a moving image with sound to appear that tells you something about your question. Alternatively you can imagine going into a concert hall and taking a seat in the audience and seeing the aspect of you that has achieved this goal take the stage and begin to play sounds that have an answer to your artistic riddle. As with the question, the more detail the better. If you want to utilize the natural power of the sleep cycle, just remind yourself of the question before you go to bed and upon waking or in a dream you may get some information.
One thing to keep in mind when formulating these kinds of questions is that you are asking them of a higher level of awareness from the standpoint of a relatively lower level of awareness. That being the case you might ask the question in a way that contains assumptions that are rendered moot when the answer comes back, and that is ok. Sometimes the real power of specificity in a question is that it engages the mind more thoroughly and adds something like weight to the question. Taking time to pose your question well will tell the subconscious, “this is a priority”. Equally as importantly, It also tells your subconscious that you want to be aware of the answer when it is done processing. We have plenty of information coming from our subconscious that causes us to have attractions or aversions that we are not consciously aware of. Creating the question with firm intentionality and awareness helps to ensure that the answer will follow the same path back out, one that we are aware of.
We can work beyond our limits in this way because, while the conscious mind is well suited to grasping things it can see and understand in a demonstrable and linear way, the subconscious is fine working with feelings, symbols, abstract qualities, and unanswered questions. It will access a vast store of experiences to generate possible answers for your questions, and the answers are often incredibly effective. Sometimes the answers are far from anything you would have come to trying to grind out a problem with your conscious mind.
Here are some examples of the kinds of new directions you can get from this realm: You might want to improve your punching power and have been working to little effect until you realize that it was actually footwork that was the key. You were working hard on depth in painting using light and dark, but realized it was actually about texture. You wanted to play faster, and realized that it was all about relaxing. You wanted to be more flexible, but realized that isolating muscles that you were trying to stretch was actually working against you. You wanted to find the perfect texture for a string quartet, but you realized that what is keeping your textures from working like you want is the use of texture over time in a form. You want to play louder, have been using heavier strings and hitting harder, but realize that lighter strings with even technique bring out much more sound and choke out the sound table of the instrument less, resulting in much more volume, and you also realized that a very minor change in the angle of the hand vibrates the strings in a way that makes it work with the sound table of the instrument instead of against it.
Finally, these ideas are not meant to replace rational, conscious thought or set creative thinking up against linear rational thinking. Rather this technique is meant to accompany modes of thinking we are more familiar with, not supplant them.
It is worth a word of caution that we can feed our subconscious all manner of information to process on purpose or accidentally, so it is alway best to use language that avoids any sense of negativity, fear, or inequity towards oneself or others. We don’t take vitamins with dirty water, so while you are reflecting on your goals you could do much worse than to begin and end with an affirmation that you wish for equanimous prosperity for all beings and make sure you really feel that.