Honesty. If you can't be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with other people? It may actually be more difficult to be honest with yourself. The key is detachment. How adept are you at observing yourself from an impartial third person perspective? Stress and emotions can prevent detachment and overcome the ability to look at an issue rationally.
Sometimes it can be very difficult to listen objectively to your own work. There is familiarity to overcome - indeed, this is a sadness all composers must deal with - but there are other aspects like the perspective a particular person may bring. In essence, I'm modeling the personality of someone I know, to more fairly judge my own work. But, isn't this the core of empathy? To understand an issue from someone else's perspective? Is empathy a skill that can be practiced?
One of the ways the brain learns is through repetition. The human mind is a very elaborate pattern recognition and matching machine. Correctly predicting the future is pleasurable. We shoot the arrow not at the running prey, but where the prey WILL be. Repetition in music eases familiarity, but predicting the same thing over and over ceases to be pleasurable. Overly repetitive music is quick to enjoy and quick to deplete. Music devoid of repetition may not get a second chance with a listener.
Memories fade, but repetition reinforces. Feedback is a kind of synthetic repetition. Instead of repeated external exposure, feedback feeds itself. In this way, feedback is very powerful. Dark thoughts, obsessive-compulsive behavior, anxiety all become more potent through the application of feedback. This is one reason why bad habits are difficult to exonerate. Feedback isn't inherently good or bad any more than an amplifier is good or bad. Through an application of will, feedback can be applied to desirable habits.
The older I get, the longer the periods become of cycles I recognize. I detach myself, and look at my failure. Before me is a decision: how do I deal with this? Roughly two paths emerge, one of anger and one of humility. Both can be unpleasant. In one, I get to be 'right' and defiant. The other, wrong and repentant.
In one of the choirs I was a member of, if you flubbed something up in rehearsal, you raised your hand to indicate to the director that you knew you messed up. There were several nice things about this. Raising your hand didn't interrupt the piece. You were transmitting information to the director that, yes, you made a mistake, and you were aware of it. The alternative is the time consuming practice of subdividing the group into smaller and smaller sections to find the offending voice. In this way, admitting the mistake was less humiliating than hiding it, because you will eventually be exposed… in front of everyone. Admitting my mistakes became a habit.
The stigma of being wrong is something we learn in childhood and bring with us to adulthood. If you're wrong, we associate that with a penance. Admitting you're wrong and apologizing may be unpleasant, but afterwards, you're not carrying it anymore. Being right, even to just yourself may avoid the stigma, but carry a long term psychological weight.
