The Long Arc of Performance Development and Contextual Interference

The Long Arc of Performance Development and Contextual Interference

There is an element of time over the long term that does something to our playing which can’t be duplicated in the short term.

We could do all of the right things at the right times in the right ways from at, or near, the beginning of day one of our practice journey. As a practical matter that is not possible, but even if we did nobody, ever in the history of ever, has or will go from nothing to world class performance in a few months or years.

We know we make major leaps in ability in short periods by applying the right learning principles, so why can’t we just keep making those leaps day in and day out and get there not in 10,000+ hours, but, like 100, or 1,000?

I’ve struggled to understand this dichotomy for a long time, and now have some ideas about how the longer term process may work. That knowledge can help us not only in the long term, but all along the way.

This is all an educated guess. I have not found compelling evidence to prove or disprove the specific hypothesis…yet! Still looking, always looking…

Some of it is related to mindset, and that is what the next and final Lightbulb Masterclasses Series will be about next month.

The most recent LMS was on contextual interference, and that, I suspect, plays a major role in this.

In theory shouldn’t we be able to just keep doing contextual interference with different and harder and harder variations until we end up at pro-level speed and control?

But we can’t.

Actually we can and we do, we just don’t notice it. We do it by accident, and haphazardly, over the long term. If we don’t notice it we can’t control it and use it to our advantage.

One thing that happens inevitably over time is learning new music. At some point we get bored and move on, or our teacher moves us on, or it is a new semester in music school and we start new music, but over time we always move on to new/different things.

If we really think about it, any music we learn at that point is contextual interference for the music we have already learned.

It is on the same instrument, uses the same notes, fingerings, etc, the same motor skills with variations in similar, and sometimes wildly different, ways.

And think about how long it takes just to get all of that up to 85% accuracy before it starts to lose its CI value. It is long term CI. Even though much of this time is spent struggling to learn new challenges it is also a gold mine for ‘macro contextual interference’.

Of course, we are shooting for close to 100% with this new music because we will perform it, and that is not a bad thing. I would also recommend having some music like etudes in the background that we work up to 85% and then drop them. This would provide a continuous stream of long term CI work along with the CI from performance development.

Also, some of us are aware that returning to previous music after taking a long time off makes us better at everything from wherever we left it off. Why not schedule this into our learning?

We can always go back to those etudes, or anything else that we have learned in the past, and not only return to it by retrieving it, but try and get it to a higher level of performance.

Of course, while we are doing all of this in our macro practice we can do the three step process we learned about in our Contextual Interference Masterclass LMS. If any of the above is a bit confusing to you I explain the concept there in a way anyone can understand.

This idea of long term ‘macro’ contextual interference is one of several areas that are part of the larger picture of mindset. Understanding these things helps us stay with it, and choose the best strategies, over time all while watching our skills get better and better.