S1Ep9: Progress, Goals & Discipline When Learning A Musical Instrument

I asked AI to write this description. I think it sounds a little O.T.T. but apparently will be good for SEO, so here goes...

"Embrace the Rhythm: Unleashing Your Potential in Musical Instrument Studies"

Join Will Bennett, the visionary founder of Grooveline Music Education, as he takes you on a mind-bending journey through the electrifying world of musical education. In this dynamic podcast episode, aptly titled "Progress, Discipline, and Goal Setting For Your Musical Instrument Studies," Will unravels the secrets to unlocking your full musical potential.

Get ready for an exploration of goal-setting strategies, discipline techniques, and the exhilarating path to musical greatness. Will challenges conventional notions and reveals how setting ambitious goals and staying disciplined are the key ingredients to manifesting your wildest musical dreams.

From performing at  concerts to conquering challenging musical pieces, each step in this electrifying adventure propels you closer to your goals. Will exposes the hidden power of dedication, engagement, and confidence, urging you to harness your inner musical genius and shatter the limits of what you thought possible.

But it doesn't stop there. This is more than just musical education—it's the blueprint for personal growth. Will's wisdom transcends the realm of music, empowering you to cultivate discipline, overcome obstacles, and soar to new heights in every aspect of life.

So, buckle up and prepare to be enthralled as Will Bennett invites you to craft your own symphony of success. Together, let's compose a masterpiece that will resonate for a lifetime. Unleash the rhythm within and embrace the extraordinary journey that lies ahead."

Told you it was a bit much.....


00:02 Introduction and Welcome

00:22 The Importance of Setting Goals

02:51 Understanding Type One and Type Two Goals

05:41 Creating an Action Plan for Your Goals

06:19 Overcoming Challenges and Staying Committed

07:28 The Impact of Quitting and the Importance of Perseverance

08:24 Committing to Your Child's Goals

11:12 Creating Great Young People Through Music

12:01 Looking Forward to Part Two: Practice Routines

12:53 Conclusion and Farewell

www.groovelinemusiceducation.com
@groovelinemusiceducation on social media!

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We believe that engaging with music education at an early age is a crucial part of a child’s development. It provides an extraordinary range of cognitive, emotional, and social benefits that help children to thrive in all areas of their lives.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of Heard It Through The Grooveline. My name is Will Bennett and I'm the founder of Grooveline Music Education. I'm here to help you know how to best support the musical education of your child, even if you are not musical yourself.  At Grooveline, when the lesson ends, the learning doesn't stop.

And so as part of our wrap around approach to music education, this episode, I'll be discussing making progress, remaining disciplined, and setting goals for the year ahead. 

 I find that this time have you always went, everyone starts talking about setting goals. They start to think about what they want this year to be for them. What. What do you want? 20, 24 to be like, what do you want to happen this year?  I also find that it's quite interesting. 

I find a lot of people have their best ideas around this time of year because.  It's a break from routine. And a lot of times people don't get the Headspace required to have creative thought and to just take a step back. Just reassess. Look at the bigger picture. Think about the tapestry. Notice the stitches you've put in it this year and just check. Are we still creating the picture that we wanted to create? Or as it going a bit off path, or maybe the picture that we want to create itself has changed. 

And now's a good time to kind of reassess all of those things. So in today's episode, I really want to talk to you about goal setting. It's a two-part. Episode, actually. So this week I'm going to talk about setting goals. And then next week, we're going to talk about practice routines and how are we going to help achieve those goals? 



So, what are your goals for this year? 

And in particular I'm of course, referring to. Within music within music education and on your instrument. 



Perhaps it's something like to perform at the summer concert or to achieve a certain grade. Or to play a certain really difficult song. Or achieve an exercise, a certain temper.  I went to think about what your long term medium term and short term goals are, or more to the point. What they would be for your child as they are learning an instrument.  So maybe you want to set yourself a 12 month goal. 

Where do you want to be this time? Next year? When it's Christmas again, everyone's got the Headspace again. We're reassessing again.  What do you want to have achieved in that time? Maybe in six months time. So by summer, Or even by the summer holidays.  What about in three months time? What about by Easter? What about this month in January? What about this week? 

What are we going to do this week? Or even today? What can we achieve?  The goals could be achievements themselves such as I mentioned the grade or learning a new skill performing at a certain event.  For today, I'm going to call these type one goals. I'm going to refer back to this.  Or your goals can be a little bit deeper  if you analyze a little bit more closely, maybe your goal could be to be more disciplined. To be more engaged, more dedicated, more confident and outgoing. And all of those things. That was actually my Resolution for this year, if you like. Was to be more disciplined.  

 These will be your type two goals. And I think both types type one and type two, a perfectly valid.  And it's probably good to have both as well.  The second type are probably the most important. But they're quite hard to measure. How do you measure discipline? How do you measure effort? 

How do you measure engagement? It's a little bit more tricky. 

And so it's harder to stick to them or feel rewarded by them in the short term. And that's where type one, the more tangible goals come in. 

 So let's look at an example. What could some goals be? 

For example, you might discuss with your child, that type one goals. They may say, I want to achieve grade three of this year.  Which means at one to achieve grade two in the next three months, because I've already been working on that. And in six months time, I want to learn all the skills. And learnt some of my favorite songs and gain more confidence performing live so that when I get to grade three, I'm ready to smash it. And have it completed by Christmas. As an example, they're all type one goals. 

Now, this is where as the adults, as the teachers, as the parents, as the role models, we need to help them with this and say, okay,  Let's tell you about type two goals, because this is how you're going to achieve those goals.  You need to be more disciplined. You need to be more engaged. We need to put more effort in. 

If you want to achieve grade three this year, we need to be more dedicated. 





And whilst on the theme of effort, if we go right back to the very first episode of this podcast series, I said that EFA is what we want to praise for children. Type on goals are cool, but we don't want to put all of our praise on two type one goals. We want to put our praise into type two goals cause that's more effective. And that is because.  Type one goals can feel harder to achieve, to suddenly get better, to suddenly achieve a grade that we're not yet playing that is difficult or impossible to do it. You know, within an instant. But within an instant within one momentary decision. We can achieve type two goals. 

We can decide. As of now we're going to put more effort in and that's something a child has more control over. And therefore it's more effective to praise that and encourage those types of things. 

So when you've come up with your goals, perhaps you've got three type one goals and maybe two or three type two goals that are going to help you along the way to achieve those goals.



I want you to write them down and put them into some kind of action plan. Maybe it's a bullet point list. 

Maybe it's a timeline, something like that. Maybe even stick it on the fridge. So that they're visible a constant reminder, even if it's subconscious, even if you don't actually read it every day. Every time they walk past the fridge. They're reminded that those goals still exist and are still relevant.  You could even assign some kind of reward to some of the goals. 

If you wanted to, as a incentivization.  Although I do ultimately think that achieving the goals themselves will become their own reward. But in the short term, you could add in some incentivization, if you want. 



Now will your child always be motivated? No. Will they be distracted? Will they have other commitments? 

Will they sometimes feel lazy? Feel like they don't want to practice? Yes, of course. And that is where we need to be there. Again, as adults, as role models as parents to help them. Get through this phrase. It will be such a great life lesson for them to look back on. And  know that they have overcome some difficulties.  And they're going to need our help. In the short-term when those tough times come, when they find a lesson difficult, when they're struggling academically. When their friends are all out playing for four hours and they've got us come home half an hour early because they've got a list of things they need to do. 

That's going to be what separates them ultimately. And it's the same for us, you know, I think about it even now, , in my adulthood. What can I do to separate myself from others to become the best I can be to separate myself from my old self as well. How can I be the best version this year? Better than I was last year. 

And I really do get frustrated when children learn music, let's say they've booked 10 lessons. The first seven are brilliant and they love them and they're having fun and they clearly love music. The eighth lesson, however, they struggle because maybe we're moving on to some more difficult topics. They get a bit stuck, a bit frustrated. They go home and they don't practice. 



Week nine. Because they haven't practiced. They struggle in the lesson. And now it's been two weeks since they've had a really positive lesson, they lose some motivation and they display this to their parents. So their parents noticed they have a practice and that's it. By the 10th lesson, they've quit.  And this does happen and it's really frustrating. Because I think. It's  during those times when it gets a little bit tricky, that's when we need to be there for the children, we need to really motivate them and push them through and not let them give up. 



They need to learn. 

We're not going to quit. That's not what we do here. 



When we find things difficult, we work harder when we get through them. We can't go over it. Can't go into it. We've got to get through it kind of thing. 



So when we've set these goals with our children and we expect them to commit to them. We are also committing to these goals as well. And we are committing to the fact that we know they're going to struggle. At some point, they're going to lose motivation. At some point, they're going to be distracted. Whatever it may be. But we are also committed to these goals and we're not going to let them give up when it gets to that bit. We're going to help them encourage them. And. By working with them and knowing what's best for them. 

In some cases, even if they don't know it for themselves, we're going to help them prove to themself that they can do it and they can overcome things. And the confidence they're going to get from that is going to be amazing, their own little piece of evidence to themselves that they have overcome something and they know. That they can do it again in the future. 

As opposed to the child who quit after nine or 10 lessons. Who has now been taught that when things are a bit difficult, it's perfectly fine to give up.  That's not what we want. I'm sure that's not you on. And I'm sure also that the parents who allowed the child to give up didn't intentionally. Teach that lesson to their child, but that is what's happening and it's our responsibility to make sure we're teaching our children life lessons. 

It's not just about getting better at an instrument. The instrument is almost a way to learn. These things and these important lessons. 



So this is going to be a great year. I know that because I've just decided it. It's not going to necessarily be a great year because loads of great things are gonna happen. And  I'm going to be really lucky and X, Y, and Z, it's going to fall into my lap. That would be great, but that's not realistic. 

And we know everyone knows difficult things happen all the time.  But if we decide it's going to be a great year and we work hard and we set these goals and we're motivated  and remain disciplined to work towards these goals. We can have a great year and we can actually force this year to be great. No matter what happens. 



I want us to be able to listen to this again. 

In fact, I might even post this episode again next year. We'll listen to it again. And see how we feel. See if we did what we thought we were going to do. See if we even set those goals. If after listening to this podcast, did you even. Set those goals or did we just listen, think that it would be a good idea that, but we never actually quite got round to it for whatever reason. Let's actually do it. 

Let's make these goals. I'm going to do it too. Let's commit to these goals. In fact, I will I'll share it on social media. How about that? So it's like social proof. LeT's set these goals, that's achieve these goals and let's remain disciplined throughout the year in order to do this. 

It's going to be so good for your child to have that first hand experience, to know they set goals, they achieved them and it was difficult. When they first set the goals, maybe they thought it was going to be easy. And they were feeling motivated at the time when they were doing it. But three months down the line. On a cold Tuesday night, they didn't feel so motivated. 

Let's do it anyway. We're going to have the discipline and that's when we're going to be there to support them. 



It's not just about creating great young musicians this year. Why don't we make sure we create great young people, people with confidence. People who know they can work hard people with perseverance, tough people. We can get through hard times. It seems silly. We're only talking about, you know, a guitar lesson or whatever it is, but these are life lessons and, you know, for me,  I always look back on this and any time I can get through something difficult, I really always think it's because of something that I learned through music one way or another. 



And also through business, your business is so hard.  This is really difficult to start the business, run the business, grow the business. You know, it's very difficult and I have to rely on the lessons that I've learned and I think I've got good characteristics. You know, within my own personality that can help me with this. 

And it's because of what I'd learned through music.

So we're going to go to part two in the next episode. We're going to talk about practice routines. So this week, I'd love you to have a think about these goals, type one goals and type two goals. See if you can set, so maybe write it down. In discussion with your child to make sure that they are kind of relevant and realistic. And of course something they want to achieve so that they can feel the motivation towards it. 



And the next week we're going to zoom in. We're going to think about what we can do these little tiny things each day, each week that we can do. We're going to take the great tapestry of music education. We're going to zoom in on the stitches. We're going to zoom in even more on every fiber that made us each stitch and see what we can do. In, you know, in the first five minutes of a practice routine, what are these micro actions we can take that are going to help us get towards these bigger goals that could take a month, three months, six months, 12 months to achieve. 

So have a fantastic week. Let's all have a fantastic week. Let's decide now that this week's going to be fantastic. And let's have a great year, you know, it's the start of the, let's make sure that we're going to do that.  Next week, we're going to have part two of this discussion. We're going to be talking about practice routines. 

I'll see you there.