What do you do when you’ve reached excellence and then taken a break?
At that point, it’s time to brush off the dust. The skills are still there, the experience is still there – but these things can get dusty with time, and need to be refreshed if you want your next performance to be at the same level as your last one. It’s the same whether it’s an artistic act, like a performance, or a technical one, like mixing an album.
You must take action on two fronts to get that dust off.
Mental work: intentionally think through your actions. How did I do this last time? What were my challenges? What took the most work to get to excellence?
Physical work: intentionally practice well ahead of time. Don’t make your “brush up” in front of an audience or when it counts. We can get in our heads and be afraid to restart the work after the break, but that just postpones the inevitable.
The good news is that dust brushes off quickly: much more quickly than the pace at which you first built the skill. The bad news is that the dust doesn’t come off on its own. It comes off because you brush it off, intentionally.