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Practicing Guitar: Self Discipline or Fun?
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Summary: 7 Steps to Effective Balancing of Discipline and Fun
Make your practice fulfilling! Without the feeling of accomplishment, your motivation and desire will fade. If are having trouble achieving fulfillment, try the following:
1. Soak yourself in inspiration - Think back to what made you want to play guitar. Relive the excitement you felt when you got your first instrument. Finally, look ahead to the day when you will have the skills you desire! Focus your mind on the satisfaction of reaching your goals instead of obstacles!
2. Become self-reliant - even if you are working with the very best teacher, you are still practicing on your own most of the time. You must make sure that whatever instructions your teacher gives you (or that you assign yourself) get carried out correctly and consistently!
3. Never give up! Remember YOU CAN learn to play guitar as well as you want to, if you have all of your fingers, a strong desire to improve and follow an effective approach to practicing! Never give up!
4. Have specific goals. You have to be absolutely clear about what level of playing you want to achieve and what you plan to do with these skills once you have them! This is not only critical for guitar playing, but also for everything in life. You need to identify where you want to arrive before you can get there. This means keeping the goal in the FOREFRONT of your mind in order to enable yourself to harness the power of your intentions and desire. Set goals for your practicing, find out how to reach them, and take consistent action to get yourself there.
5. Incorporate intelligent variety into your practicing. Doing this will help you prevent boredom and burn out. At the same time, by “structuring” your variety in an intelligent way, you will be able to make consistent and measurable progress. Both things can be achieved if your practice schedule is efficient and effective (and proper mindset is applied).
6. Find an effective way to measure your progress. This is useful for many reasons. First, it is fun to compare your current skill level to your playing from several weeks, months or years ago, and second, it will help to keep you on track toward reaching your goals. Few people do this consistently; most wander aimlessly with no clear sense of direction. This leads to inability to make significant progress.
7. Keep your mind focused on the item you are practicing until you go on to the next thing on your practice schedule. Don’t switch between different things at random. If you understand the reason why practicing a specific item is important for your goals, this becomes easy to do.
8.Design an effective and flexible practice schedule. You need to organize all the things you want to learn in a system that is effective enough to bring results and also one that can be adjusted to introduce variety. If you cannot do this well on your own, there is help for you here.
9. Find ways to apply your musical tools. The easiest way to have fun while practicing is through application of skills to real music. This sounds obvious, but far too many students think that practicing should be all about "learning new things". Because of this, they don’t schedule time for application, integration and mastery of what they already know. As a result, many end up with lots of isolated things “they can do”, but no ability to actually use their skills. Learning more things is important but it shouldn't be your top priority all of the time. It is also not much fun to practice things that you can not really integrate with your other musical skills in a real musical context. Great players aren’t great because they ‘know more’, it’s usually because they can integrate and apply more than the common player.
About the author: Tom Hess is a professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He teaches, trains and mentors musicians from around the world. Visit http://www.tomhess.net/ to discover highly effective music learning resources, lessons and tools including free online assessments, surveys, mini courses and more.
Above all else, remember to keep at it! Use the advice from this article to make your practicing both fun and focused in order to decrease the time needed to reach your goals! If you haven’t yet taken the survey mentioned at the beginning of the article, you can do so here .
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