I don’t know about you, but I’m impatient. In many areas of my life, I don’t want to be patient, I want results NOW! For me, that showed up frequently in practicing and learning music. I wanted to skip the work part of it, and have the song learned as soon as I could.
So let’s back up for a second. What does progress look like? I’ve found an image that helps.
It isn’t always a straight line. In fact, about 99.9% of the time it isn’t! You could spend a week in practicing, feel like you’re making progress and getting the concepts and then the next week….you’re back to square 1. It’s frustrating, isn’t it?
In teaching children, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that parents have expectations of where their child should be. I am quick to inform them at the beginning that music is a difficult thing to learn, and progress can be slow. And thankfully, I haven’t had parents take children out of lessons for “lack of progress”. But I have heard from many other teachers that this is the case. That’s really disappointing, because the reality in music is that there isn’t ever a 100% mastery of it. There’s always room for improvement and growing your skills.
Learning music not only gives you the joy of being able to make music and make music well, it teaches you skills that translate outside of music. You learn discipline, focus, being in connection with your emotions, goal setting and in this case, the important skill of….patience. You knew I was going to say it, right? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sightread a difficult piece and play it flawlessly? Yeah…keep dreaming. But being patient, persistent and working at your skills and abilities to better them, seeing that progress line move in some shape or fashion, you can see the improvement.
The final thing about progress. While it’s sometimes difficult to see in the moment, stopping to review and look back helps to show the progress. Whether that’s 3 months, 6 months, a year or more, pausing to look back and review makes a huge difference and can be that shot in the arm to remind you why you’re doing it and to see how you’re growing.