Why Does It Feel Like I've Stopped Improving?

You've put in real work. Practicing consistently, paying attention, doing the things you're supposed to do. And somehow it feels like nothing is improving, at least as fast as it should be. Some days it feels like you''ve're actually playing worse than you were a few months ago.

Before you believe that feeling, it might be telling you something true. Just not what you think.

Your Ear Is Growing Too

People doing any kind of creative work, not just musicians, know this feeling. Ira Glass, the host and creator of This American Life, talked about something he called "the gap." People get into creative work because they have good taste.

They know what excellent work sounds like, looks like, feels like. But when they start actually making their art, their skill hasn't yet caught up with their taste. That gap is what convinces them that they're not improving, at least not as much as they expect.

For a musician, the "taste" Glass is talking about is your ear. And your ear develops right along with your playing. As you get better, you also get better at hearing what's wrong. The standard you're judging yourself against isn't fixed, it could be rising faster than your technical ability can keep up with. A year ago, you couldn't hear as many of the things that bother you now. That's not a sign you've gotten worse as a plyer. It's a sign your ear hears more. Deeper. That's good!.

Listen to a recording from a year ago. It feels worse because the player judging the recording is no longer the same player who made it.

You've upgraded your ears and so the bar moved.

But that sharper ear isn't just amplifying your discomfort. It's also helping you hear what you want to change about your playing.

You can't fix what you can't hear. Every time your ear picks up something it used to miss like rushed time, poor intonation, overly scale-oriented improvisation, or a note that doesn't sit where it should, it gives you something to work on. That's how you get better. The ear leads, and the technique eventually catches up to where it's pointing.

Growth Doesn't Move in a Straight Line

There's another piece of this that frustrates people: real growth doesn't arrive in a smooth, steady climb. It moves kind of like in stairsteps. Long stretches where nothing much moticably changes, then a jump that feels sudden, even though nothing about it actually was.

A lot of what you're working on is being absorbed in your subconscious before it ever shows up in your playing. Your ear is noticing new things. Your instincts are improving in ways you can't yet hear. None of that looks like progress from the inside while it's happening.

If you've ever had a skill suddenly click after a time where it felt completely stuck, you already know this. The click wasn't sudden. The result just became apparent.

Real Stagnation vs. Perceived Stagnation

To be fair to the feeling, it isn't always wrong. You can hit a real plateau. You're just practicing the wrong things, working on symptoms instead of causes, or repeating the same things over and over without focus. If that sounds familiar, that's a different problem with a different fix, and it's worth reading Are You Practicing with Intention? to learn more.

But a lot of the time, what feels like stagnation is actually your rising standards outpacing your existing skill. Those are very different, and they call for two very different responses. One needs you to change what you're practicing. The other needs you to stop fretting so much over your own in-the-moment judgment of your playing.

How to Accurately Judge

The problem with judging your growth in real time is that you're judging today's playing with today's ears. You can hear things now that you couldn't hear before, but you also can't yet hear what you'll hear as you continue to grow. So today's reaction to your playing isn't a very good measure of how far you've come.

So don't rely on how you feel about today's practice session. Get outside evidence. Record yourself now. Then go find a recording of yourself from six months ago, or a year ago, and actually listen to it. Not with the ear that's been living inside your playing every day since. Just listen the way you'd listen to a player you don't know.

You might be surprised by what you hear. The playing you remember as "not that bad" sounds noticeably less developed than you expected. That's the real measurement. Not how today felt, but what the tape actually shows you from the past.

The feeling of having stopped improving doesn't tell you whether you've actually stopped. Your judgment has changed along with your playing, and that makes day-to-day perception a poor measuring stick.

The gap between what you can hear and what you can yet play isn't evidence that you're standing still. It's often where the next stage of your playing begins..