What lasts after the audition

A girl in Kafr El Sheikh has been practising the violin for six years, and next month she auditions for a music school in Cairo.

Her family wants to help, and most of what they say is reassurance. You will definitely get in. You are the best they will hear. There is nothing to worry about.

It is kindly meant, and it does not hold. Reassurance is a promise about the outcome, and nobody in that house controls the outcome. Each time she plays a wrong note in practice, the promise looks thinner. On the morning of the audition it will be no help at all, because by then she will know that nobody can guarantee anything. And if she is not accepted, every one of those sentences will turn out to have been untrue.

Worse, it teaches her that she should walk in only because success is guaranteed. Take away the certainty and the reason goes with it.

Her teacher says something different. I have heard how you practise. I know how far you have come. I believe in the musician you are becoming, and that does not depend on what three strangers decide in one afternoon.

That is encouragement, and it runs on another fuel. It does not rest on a result, so a bad result cannot use it up. It says that someone has seen her clearly and is staying, whichever way it goes. She can carry it into the room, and she can carry it out again if the answer is no.

Reassurance has to be topped up and still runs dry. Encouragement, once she believes it, feeds itself.