Feel vs. Real

I remember one day taking a golf lesson. We were working through a specific problem in my swing: my hands were dragging behind my body too quickly. For 20 minutes, I attempted to move differently, feeling very awkward in the process. Coach kept saying, "Not quite enough, try and exaggerate it even more." After a few more failed attempts, Coach took out his phone, recorded me, and showed what my Real swing looked like (no different than my regular swing).

That moment opened my eyes to the difference between Feel and Real. Feel is my mind feeling completely awkward in my swing. It is a guess, a mental prediction of how the motions we are trying to make are actually occurring in the world.

Real, however, is brutally honest. It doesn't care how good we Feel we do or how confident we are. Real tells the truth, and only the truth.

And just like in golf, Feel and Real are often not aligned in our practice. Most of the time, there is a delta between how straight we Feel our bow is and how straight it Really is when we look in the mirror. Or when we Feel we dropped to a piano, but Real says we barely moved past forte.

The central reason we practice is to bridge the gap between Feel and Real. We solicit feedback from friends and teachers, we use tools like a metronome, recording, and tuners. These tools tell us the brutally honest truth of how we are playing.

The more we can use these tools, the closer we can get to Feel and Real being the same. The most important thing is constant attention to the lies Feel tells us.

I didn't solve my swing in one lesson. But I stopped trusting how a swing felt, and started trusting the reality the camera showed me. That's the only way real change happens, in golf or in music: not by feeling more confident, but by closing the gap between what you feel and what's actually true.

This is one of the reasons we built Embrace Studio: to create one practice environment so nothing stands between you and the truth of how you are actually playing.

Play freely,