Whether you’re starting out with guitar lessons or you’ve been playing for a while, watching these short videos will help you approach your lessons, materials and practice time at home in the most enjoyable and productive way.
Setting goals for your playing as explained above and learning how to break them down will really help you stay on the right track with your playing. It also helps combat overwhelm.
Setting goals is not something that will make your playing boring or reduce it to just another thing you have to keep track of – it helps you really pinpoint what you need to work on at a given time so that you know you’re always learning or training on skills that are going to take you to what you most want to be able to do. It also gives you the opportunity to celebrate your accomplishments – very often we make some gains in what we can do and soon take for granted something we initially found difficult, but this way it’s easier to appreciate and acknowledge the skills you gain as you along.
The way you’re going to start keeping track of your goals is by using a set of cards that you’ll be given. The different colours correspond with long, medium and short term goals and there’s a description and examples above of the type of thing that you might enter as each one.
What is a good goal ?
The handouts and video explain this a bit further, and there’s a recap here:
– Specific : so you know exactly what you’re aiming for and even if you only have ten minutes for guitar and you’re tired, you don’t have to use brain energy working out what you’re supposed to be doing.
– Measurable : you need to be able to track your progression so you can see how far you are from achieving them and how ;much work remains to be done.
– Achievable : you really need to dream big, for sure, but if your goal is too unrealistic it will discourage you. There must be a logical link between your goal and the time you give to yourself to achieve it.
– Relevant : don’t set goals that have no link with how you ultimately want to play. Goals have to be congruent with your longer term interests – if you get interested in a new direction, then we can revise your goals.
– Timely : a goal without a deadline is a daydream. By setting deadlines, you will guide yourself to work on that topic constructively.
It isn’t necessarily obvious at the start of the process how you reverse engineer what you want to be able to do in the long term with your guitar playing, but you’ll understand more about it after watching these videos, and we will help you. There will be some short term goals that we will give you depending on what we know about your interests and longer term goals also.
This is a quick reminder of your different cards :
– Yellow : the reasons why you want to play guitar
– Green : 1 Long Term Goal (6 months – a few years)
– Blue : 1 Medium Term Goal (2 – 6 months)
– 3x White : Short Term Goals (30-60 days). Be specific about these.
– Hologram/reflective : a list of the songs you would like to play
