Metacognition and Effective Rehearsals and Better Gigs

"Metacognition - Wikipedia
Metacognition is "cognition about cognition", "thinking about thinking", or "knowing about knowing" and higher order thinking skills. It comes from the root word "meta", meaning beyond. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving."

In short, taking responsibility for our own learning to avoid the following.

“Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence” (2003).  They found that “people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence,” lacking “insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills.”  They identified this pattern across domains—from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters’ knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians’ knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills.  In short, “if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong”. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/

This short article is worth a quick read and a moment of reflection. The authors present several helpful suggestions to help us grow as learners (musicians). I will leave you with this strategy which I've adapted for musicians.

"How did the gig go last night?"
"I don't know, but I made a recording off the bandstand. Let's listen and discuss the results at the next rehearsal"

Competence or incompetence exposed. To grow as humans, we got to man up to the truth. Or woman up as the case may be.

Cheers,

​David Story