Never mind your child—why didn’t YOU practice?!

 After sending last week’s Reveal “So why isn’t MY child practicing?” I realized that this topic is relevant to anyone who ever struggled with music lessons. Think about your own experience. Was practicing the reason that you gave up trying music at all? Asking yourself these five questions may help you see the problem in a whole new light.

1- Were you (or are you) too creative for practicing?
Practicing is designed to do one thing: help the student master an instrument. When mastery is the right path for the learner, then practicing scales, exercises, etudes and repertoire is what they need to get them there. But suppose an individual is inclined to create: make up songs, improvise, or experiment with sound? The creative Muse does not take kindly to being ignored! Therefore, one of two things is likely to happen. Either the student will spend the practice time making things up instead of doing the assigned practicing, or not “practice” at all and find other outlets for their creativity.

2- Was it the right instrument for you?
The choice of an instrument is a personal matter: Some people express themselves strumming strings or plunking a piano, other, with their breath. The only way to figure out which instrument is right for you is through hands-on exposure to a variety of instruments. Without that, choosing an instrument to study is pretty much a wild guess. Individuals who have been able to spend time trying a variety of instruments have a better chance for success when they do begin formal instrument study. Without that, little Molly may quit her flute lessons, never realizing that in their heart, it was the guitar that could have been her soul mate.

3- Were you too autonomous to just follow instructions?
If you’re someone who likes to figure things out for yourself, and needs time and psychic space to do that, having a teacher hovering over you correcting mistakes and offering “helpful” suggestions may not work! Giving up agency over your learning can be a deal breaker for the autonomous learner.

4- Are you an intellectual?
There’s a lot of “fuzz” around practicing, and intellectuals don’t do well with “fuzz.” They want to understand. Assignments are given as duties, not broken down in a way that helps the learner connect the dots and really understand the process. They know what they’re supposed to practice, but have little if any understanding of how the process works. And rote practicing does not stimulate the intellectual’s mind.

5- Are you an intuitive learner?
Practicing is based on breaking skills down into modules: learning note names, symbols and terms as separate entities. For the intuitive individual who conceives of music as a whole, learning isolated elements confuses and alienates them. The feeling they get can be likened to covering a Picasso painting with a sheet, cutting a hole in the sheet to expose a tiny portion of the painting, and telling them they’re learning about Picasso. Therefore, the intuitive learner is apt to have a particularly difficult time with practicing.

6-Were you confused?
There is more to practicing than rote repetition of the assignment. Too often, the student is told what to practice, but not how to practice. Too often, practicing assignments are not broken down in a way that the student can relate to the process, step by step, movement by movement. Without the dots being connected one by one for the student to understand, they can become disconnected and apathetic about practicing at all.
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What’s done is done—why return to this now? Because at the very least, you need to know that if practicing prevented you from engaging in music, you were not the problem.

Most of the adults I work with in my Music House program have something in common: They took lessons as children, couldn’t deal with the practicing, and quit, assuming they just weren’t cut out for music. For almost every one of these people, returning to music is an act of courage, and most come to me trembling or in tears, traumatized by their previous experience. Music House all about aligning the process with the individual learner. Once my adult students are helped to “untie the knot” or “melt the iron bar,” as so many of them describe the feeling, they find ways to engage in music that are gratifying, relevant, and even life changing.

If you consider returning to music lessons, interview teachers. Find someone who understands what happened in the past, what does and doesn’t work for you, and find someone who is more interested in helping you find your musical connection than in using a “tried and true” method. It’s better to to try learning things on your own and getting help from a friend who “gets you” than going to a music teacher who doesn’t! And this can be applied to any practice-based activity. There is almost always a way to achieve what you would like to achieve, but the way to get there must be aligned with who you are.