This is episode number 108. It's all in your head.

Welcome to the mindset for life podcast, I'm so glad you're here talking about mindset. Things that we think. And the way that our brain controls literally everything we do. There's so much out there that tells us that our thoughts about something create the future. Whatever we're thinking we are capable of doing, or what is possible for us, becomes our reality. Ultimately.

Now, if you think about it, that really does have a lot of truth. I'm going to give you just a little bit of an example from my own life. And this will have to do with my trumpet playing in band. I don't know if I've mentioned this here on the podcast, but I chose to graduate high school one year early. So, I completed high school with all the necessary credits,  a little summer school in there, and some zero period classes. And because of meeting the requirements in a shorter time, I just, I was a freshman, a sophomore, and then a senior, and I graduated. And when I went to college, my high school band director told me that I was missing an entire year of performance experience.

So he was cautioning me. He was a little worried for me that when I went to college, and I wanted to play music (I was going to be a music major), that I would be behind. Less developed than my peers. And I would really struggle. And he was right.

I got there, and I really did need a little bit more musical maturity. So I was in the lowest band, the lowest jazz band, the last chair in the ensemble. And I started to develop this thinking about myself that maybe I just wasn't good enough in music generally. And perhaps I should just not be doing that. And by the second year of college, I actually dropped out of the music degree and decided not to major in music, and I turned my efforts to a different subject matter.

Now, that's kind of a funny story. Because in the end, I did end up turning back to music. I did graduate, I became a band director and a music teacher. And I went on to get a doctoral degree in music later. I had a 21 year career in music. And I've been pretty successful as a musician and a music teacher. Even though that's the case, there was an experience I had in there that kind of builds off of that first experience, where I went to college thinking, Oh, I'm behind, I'm less-than. I might not measure up, maybe I should quit.

So this other experience was that eventually, when I returned to major in music as a trumpet player, I had to take trumpet lessons. And I would watch these other people who I highly respected--other students in the music degree--and I would see them performing with the Philharmonic at the university, or with the Wind Symphony, or taking solos in the Synthesis jazz band, which at Brigham Young University is a really high, well-performing jazz band. I would watch all of these things happening.

And I would think to myself, "I would really love to be that person one day, I would love to have a chair in one of those ensembles, first of all, but I'd like it to be first chair. I would like to play the fun parts that have the melodies to them. And I want to be really good at playing those screaming high notes." And one day, it just dawned on me that I was never going to get the opportunity to do any of that until I was already qualified as if I was in those ensembles.

And at that moment, I just realized I had better start putting in the effort, as if I was first chair in this synthesis jazz band, or putting in the effort, as if I was first chair in the Wind Symphony. And I started practicing literally three and a half hours a day. And I would space that out. So it did not exhaust me and did not destroy my emboucher, which is the setting of your lips on the trumpet mouthpiece. And I would go in the practice room for the hour that I had scheduled.