Cooking a bad meal is great metaphor for learning to accept our own mistakes.
One of the reasons that cooking is so challenging, I think, for people who want to pick it up and learn it, is that the sorrow I feel when I make something not tasty feels like an outsized punishment. If you make something that you don’t like, I think it is heartbreaking in a certain way.
Brennan Lee Mulligan, on Last Meal
The only way to get past the heartbreak Mulligan describes is repetition. Cook enough things and two things happen: (a) you get more reliable and (b) you learn to accept and move past your mistakes more quickly.
Making mistakes in performance is a lot like this. Only instead of cooking dinner every night, young performers often only a get a handful of performances for year. In that spirit, I like to give my students as many performance opportunities I can manage and I like to not be the one criticizing them after performance. They can do that themselves…they’re feeling that certain kind of heartbreak. It’s my job to remind them that there will be more chance, more music to make. More dinners to cook.