When I meet with a student for the first time, I’m observing as much as I possibly can, trying to get as much information about the student as possible. I’m watching movement habits, breathing, balance and posture, amongst other things.

Everything I’m looking at is giving me clues about my student’s thinking. Because I can’t help until I gain at least a cursory glimpse into how my student thinks.

And of course I’m also listening quite mindfully so that I can gain even more insight into my student’s thinking process. One of the first things I often notice with some students is how harshly they speak to themselves.

I hear things like:

“My posture is terrible!”

“I’m a complete hopeless klutz.”

Or if it’s a musician, “My intonation sucks!”, or “My jazz playing is feeble.”

Such harsh words! If I said to students in the first lesson, “You’re a complete hopeless klutz” or, “Your jazz playing is feeble”, I’d probably never see them again. They might walk away thinking, “What a jerk!” And even if they did continue to take lessons from me, they would most likely be in a constant state of fear during their lessons. Not a good environment for learning.

Yet these same people create this negative learning environment for themselves within the realm of their own thoughts.

So part of my job is to get my students to notice how they’re talking to themselves. I tell them that there are two problems with speaking to themselves in such a negative way:

First (as I’ve stated above), this creates a feeling of fear, and fear is not helpful to learn such a subtle thing as music (or the Alexander Technique). Second, this kind of language provides no useful information. Words like good, bad, fantastic, terrible, hopeless or awesome, really don’t give much more than a subjective impression of a situation or a thing. This is the language of judgment.

This is not the same thing as discerning objectively what the situation or thing really is. Discernment provides useful information.

So part of what I teach my students is to differentiate between judgment and discernment.

When I hear something like, “My posture is terrible”, I start asking questions. My first question is, “What is terrible about it?” Often my student replies with more judgment answers. But I just keep on with this line of questioning until my student begins to find tangible, objective information about his or herself.

Eventually, I’ll start hearing things like, “I lock my knees by throwing them backwards.” Or, “I stiffen my neck as pinch my shoulders together.” This language has no immediate qualitative judgment. No “good-bad” type words. It has instead words like “lock” or “stiffen” or “throw backwards” or “pinch” to describe more accurately what the student is actually doing. Now we have useful information. We know specifically what needs to be addressed.

As the lessons progress, I begin to hear a shift in the self talk. As the student learns to discern objectively, he or she starts making lasting improvements. Lasting because there has been a shift in the thinking process.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with judgment. In fact, we need it. Once we discern what something actually is, we can then assign it a quality. We can judge it. If it’s good we can keep it. If it’s bad we can throw it away. But we must first learn what that thing is. We must discern.

I remember reading in one of F.M. Alexander’s books about direction. In Alexander lingo, direction can be thought of as the quality of your thinking as it pertains to and influences your movement and postural habits.

As Alexander discovered, how you think has a huge impact on how you move, maintain balance, breathe, perform, or otherwise react. If your direction is downward, tense or unclear, you’re not going to move very well. If your direction is upward, clear, expansive and easy, you’ll be fine.

When directing, Alexander thought it a good idea to “speak gently” to ourselves, to “ask” for release, ease and expansive movement. No matter what you do, or are endeavoring to do, give yourself respect always, be kind to yourself, and take comfort in this fact: If you can discern, you can improve.