Guitar Article Written by “Friend Of Mike Walsh”
Being Okay With Where You Are
by Derk Stiepelmann
A big mistake I commonly see in students is the inability to be okay with starting out. I once had a beginning student who just started working on his first open chords. After a couple of lessons, he told me that he saw a sweep picking video on YouTube and wanted to learn that technique right away, otherwise he would not be motivated to learn guitar anymore. Imagine - the guy was just a few hours into the process!!! Jesus! Talk about a bad mindset. It’s like hiring a weight lifting coach and then demanding that you will be able to lift huge amounts of weight after a few weeks of training or you won’t be motivated to continue. How do you think the weight lifting coach will react? He will send you home to play video games!
The ability to be patient when learning something new and enjoying the process seems to become more and more of a lost art in our world of instant gratification and notoriously short attention spans. People want everything right away and nobody wants to wait, just like clicking a button or downloading an app. With this attitude, life will become very superficial and very unrewarding. Think about it. Any skill that's worth anything demands a lot of time, attention, dedication, focus and discipline. This lack of patience is therefore a huge pitfall, because even when you make great progress, you will be constantly sabotaging yourself mentally and turn the journey into an arduous process instead of a joyful journey.
So, let’s say that you are just starting out as a beginning guitarist and you are impatient with the learning process - what can you do?
Developing awareness
The first step is to develop a basic awareness of what is going on in your mind at any point in time. My tool of choice to develop that skill is meditation. Sitting in silence, witnessing my inner dialogue every day for a set amount of time. If you keep up a steady meditation routine it will dramatically increase the amount of awareness of your thoughts, emotions and inner processes and this is invaluable for everything you do in life and also transfers to your guitar practice. You will be able to observe your inner world more and more during your practice and will be able to see how your mind wants to be some place else in the future or how it constantly wants to rush an exercise.
You can start noting this mental pattern without fighting it. Just pay attention and observe. You can also state it loud to yourself: “Ah, here is the pattern again.” Just don´t do it when other people are around, for obvious reasons. The more you are able to witness your mental patterns, the less they are automatic and the more conscious choice you have.
Train your focus
Our inability to focus is a bad habit that we slipped into, we are rarely present in anything we do and it's never encouraged to pay attention in the moment. Instead, we try to do multiple things at once and get distracted by notifications on our phone or the urge to check our mails for the tenth time today. Being focused over long periods of time is exhausting and that's why we shy away from it, but to regain the ability to focus we have to do what´s hard in tiny chunks each day and expand from there.
Being a beginner is a journey of discovery - enjoy it!
Who is your favorite comedian? Can you remember when you first discovered him? You laughed your butt off, watched all the material you could find and when there was no more content to watch, you were disappointed and wished you could discover that guy again to experience going through it from the beginning. This is how you should approach learning guitar. Enjoy every bit: reading about guitars, going into a guitar store and taking in that specific smell of guitars and amps - enjoy every freaking bit of the experience. It's all wonderful!
About the author:
Derk Stiepelmann is a guitar teacher in Dortmund, Germany and the owner of the Songwriter´s Shed guitar school. He passionately loves music and helping people reach their musical goals. If you are looking for guitar lessons in Dortmund, Germany, visit him at his website by clicking the highlighted link above.