We know it is good for us, and we want to do more, a lot more, because we want to get better, a lot better, but the way we go about it does not seem to work most of the time does it? The few of us that can do it seem very talented. The desire is there for the rest of us, but how do we make up for not having that magical gift of dedication?
A couple of examples;
College music student in the summer before right before fall semester, “I’m going to practice two, 4, a bajillion, whatever hours a day until my recital in April.” What usually happens? A day or two of that, and it feels like climbing Everest because we’ve never done it before, then a missed day, then we are behind which makes it even harder to start doing more of the work we could not motivate ourselves to do in the first place. We are right back where we started pretty quickly, and April isn’t getting any farther away.
Teacher – “You (student) need to practice X minutes a day, now go do it.” Sure we try practice logs (which are not a bad thing at all!) and many other methods, but let’s face it there is nothing that seems to work consistently with everyone, is there?
What if developing regular, weekly dedication to practice time was like developing walking? Start small, fall down a lot, stand before we step, step before we walk, walk before we run, don’t let it disappoint us and then reach a level of competence in which it kind of just does what we want.
The answer is in intelligent habit pattern development.
I’ve found that a significant problem can be that we are trying to develop things several steps ahead of our current needs. We can only learn what we are ready to learn. Trying to develop a habit pattern that is too much at first, is the equivalent of cognitive load theory as described in the scientific literature. 20-30-60 minutes is a colossal feat when you have not even developed the ability to break yourself away from what you are doing to then begin practicing.
Doing that is called orienting selective attention and guess what – humans really, really don’t like doing it. Think about trying to get a young person to take out the garbage. Yeah, like that. The good news is it is a buildable skill. Start with working on getting started not trying to build amount of minutes.
Some recommend keeping the instrument out of the case, and having a practice area ready to go, and this is good and helpful advice. However it rarely has the significant long-term impact on getting started that strengthening selective attention at the moment one needs to change tasks does.
It is very important to be transparent with the student, or yourself. For doing this, success is not measured by how long we practice. Success is measured by actually starting and staying with it past the initial minutes. Start with a manageable number like 10 minutes total for daily practice. This will not feel like success as it will look and feel a lot like the slacker version of practicing especially if we are learning to really focus for the first time.
Make sure we know exactly what to do during those minutes. Learn to focus very hard on one thing in technique, or phrasing, or whatever, and work that for several minutes, then do one or two more with that exact focus. THE AMOUNT OF MUSIC WE WORK ON DOES NOT MATTER. Just learn what to look for and what to correct. If we don’t know ASK!
We will notice all kinds of mistakes and problems and it will be frustrating. What we are working on here is orienting selective attention, and if we do this, no matter how our feelings may want us to asses it, we are doing excellent work. No joke.
After one week of these small very focused session, at the lesson or in rehearsal, the student will notice a slight difference in their technique. It will be a little stronger, certain things that were harder will seem easier. There is nothing quite like this to fuel a little motivation and self-esteem (they earned it!). If you notice it point it out and help them to acknowledge that they earned that through their work. And mention that if they like that wait until they see what happens if they keep it up. Of course this is borne out in Dweck’s work on Mindset.
After the second week it gets even better. See what is happening here? Getting started is like tying one’s shoes – no big deal, they just do it – and practice is seen as rewarding. And guess what is happening to the strength of their technical ability at the same time? Yep.
At this point we can add minutes to the practice sessions and grow our total time. The motivation to push through is MUCH stronger because we are now experiencing serious improvement in our playing. That feels good, really good, and if we want more this is how we get it. Teachers can now start to cash in some of that self-efficacy capital with the student. They’ve proven to themselves they’ve got the psychic energy to do it, so there is really no good reason not to, and the results feel awesome.
Motivation shifts from external locus of control (outside motivation set up by teacher) to internal locus of control (intrinsic motivation built by participating in and experiencing the benefits of said motivation) and we have created an autotelic learner.
That’s the Holy Grail in any teaching.
By the way do you know how well this student is playing at this point? And we’ve just gotten started. Yeah!
The recital is still in April. Where would we rather be in week 6? Ready give up, or having built a satisfying and productive regular practice routine through small and growing sessions. What is a few weeks of ramping up practice going to hurt if we can establish months and years of future practice?