The metronome isn’t there to judge you. It’s there so you can’t lie to yourself about the tempo.

Playing alone, your sense of time bends towards what you find easy, hurrying where you are comfortable and dragging where you are not, and you genuinely cannot hear it happening. An external reference has no opinion about you; it simply refuses to move. That refusal is the gift, because it shows you what your ear is covering up. Tools like that are allies rather than examiners.

Practise with a fixed reference this week and resist switching it off when it exposes something. A metronome, a timer, a tape measure, a written record. Work on whichever spot it keeps catching, and keep the reference until that spot stops appearing.