Guitar Instructor in Tulsa | The Law of Recognition
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hi, guys, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy here with another podcast that relates to music in general. This one is about a book that we are reading as a group of instructors at Curtis Music Academy, The Law of Recognition by Mike Murdock. And it’s a great book. I am about halfway through and this has become a subject for us as instructors. We have an excellent guitar instructor in Tulsa, as well as piano and voice lessons and a variety of other music lessons as well, all relating to music. But we gather every Thursday night and we just have this really amazing family atmosphere.
Ron’s wife, Kelly, always makes amazing food that is so awesome and delicious. And we just laugh and we talk about our ups and downs of the week. It’s just so much fun every Thursday night. And recently Ron was talking about a book, The of Recognition, and ultimately he ended up buying a copy for all of us. We’ve been reading through it. It’s really been amazing. We got it in context for recognizing students and to be really excellent teachers and about how to recognize certain things and draw out the greatness in them. And so my favorite sentence from this book is actually on page nine.
So it’s pretty much right at the beginning. It says everything you need in life is already in your life, merely awaiting your recognition of it. So I love deep sentences like that that you just can really unpack for hours and really just think about and apply it to your life. But how different would our lives be if we recognized the greatness and the total potential that is available to us? And this definitely applies to music lessons or guitar lessons, voice lessons, because oftentimes when we recognize certain things in our students, they grow. So at Curtis Music Academy, we really focus on when our students achieve something great. In fact, our guitar instructor in Tulsa really has a lot of value to say at our meetings
So if they come in and they’ve practiced a song from last week and for the most part it’s good, but it has a couple of things in it that need to be corrected. Our philosophy at Curtis Music Academy is to really celebrate what they did. Well, it could be things like I noticed if you’re in music lessons, for example, I noticed that your fingering for the chords was perfect and we really just focus on providing recognition of what they’re doing. Well, and Ron’s wife, Kelly, because I’m just a storyteller. So I like to tell, like what she had an aspect of at our meeting.
She said, well, even if there’s a student who hasn’t really practiced and they come in and they see their guitar instructor in Tulsa play through the song in the lesson, and it’s just it’s very obvious that there was no practice. Find something positive to say about the song that they just played, even if it’s your hands were in the right spot for the entire song. Awesome. Did you realize that? High five. And so it’s just creating this positive environment for them. And so as we were talking about this as instructors on Thursday nights, the guitar instructor in Tulsa who teaches music lessons at Curtis Music Academy, he said that I guess there was a study done for Rice.
I believe it is. And you had to speak like three cans of rice for a period of time. And in one kind of rice, you spoke something positive in another can of rice, you spoke something negative. And in the third kind of rice, you just didn’t say something either positive or negative. And after the period of time was over, obviously the first kind of rice when you opened it up, it was still fresh. It was still good. It was still full of life. The second kind of rice wasn’t the negative one. It wasn’t terrible. Like you could see that it had some decay in it.
But surprisingly, the one in which there were no positive words or negative words spoken into it was the most decayed, which was shocking to me. You would think that there were negative words spoken around all the time, you’d think that that would be the one that was full of decay. But in fact, it was the one who there was nothing spoken about. And so the moral of that story is even negative attention is better than no attention. And so that. Just a profound loss to apply to our own lives is that we should be speaking life, definitely, but sometimes we think that, well, we’re just not speaking things that are negative.
So we’re OK. Actually, that’s even worse than speaking negative words. So we definitely apply this to our music lessons through our guitar instructor in Tulsa as well. I mean, if a student were to come in and play a song they practiced from last week and we don’t really celebrate it, but we don’t really criticize it, I don’t know. To me, that just seems like maybe it’s hard to get excited about something like that. So we just have this celebratory environment at Curtis Music Academy where we just celebrate every inch that people move forward.
And so I’ve seen this really come to life in the music lessons that our guitar instructor in Tulsa teaches. And it’s just so important for the students to come in and associate guitar lessons or music lessons with positive, upbeat environments, with fun, with games, with learning, with a good time. And so that is always our goal. And so that is a little bit about the law of recognition and how it applies to music lessons and guitar lessons. And obviously, we could unpack this book in many podcasts, but thank you for listening to this amazing podcast from Curtis Music Academy and about how to recognize and cultivate the greatness in our guitar lessons and music lessons. I will catch you at the next podcast.