Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Setting Musical Goals

This content was created for Curtis Music Academy

All right. My name is Steven and this is the Curtis music Academy podcast where I’m going to be talking about how to set musical goals and how important it is to set them, know how to set them, achieve them, things like that. But this one is simply going to be how to set musical goals. It’s really important that we understand how to set a goal in general. This is going to be your crash course on setting musical goals or setting goals in general. One Oh one. Now, without further ado, my name is Steven. I have been an instructor at the Curtis music Academy for almost a year and I’ve loved every single minute of it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. I love my job. I want to keep my job and it is just been a heck of a time teaching guitar lessons in Tulsa.

I’ve enjoyed every single minute of every single lesson, getting to enjoy and, and learn and meet new students, new people, new parents, learn new things.As an instructor, I’ve had an amazing time just teaching music in general in my life. I’ve, I’m on my going on my sixth year of teaching music and I’ve had a range of students from anywhere from five years old to 55 years old to 65 years old. And there’s a lot of nuggets that I’ve taken and there’s a lot of notes that I’ve taken along the way and I hope that this helps you to become the best that you can be as well. And so without further ado setting musical goals for students in guitar lessons in Tulsa.

So one of the first things we want to keep in mind is setting smart goals. And you may ask, how do you set a smart goal? Well, a smart goal is an acronym and the acronym is for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive or timely time bound goals. So the first one we’re going to talk about is specific. What do you want to do when setting a goal? You want to make sure that you are setting a specific goal and your goal must be written out and clear. It must be concise. There must be a bullet point or a laser focus to your, your goal. Why? Because that will let you know whether you’ve achieved it or not. So it’s gotta be specific. A specific goal would not be, Hey, I just want to learn a guitar in guitar lessons in Tulsa. No

A more specific goal would be, Hey, I really want to learn a classical finger style guitar. That’s a very specific goal. And even more specific goal would be, Hey, I wanted to learn flamenco, this song in flamenco style guitar finger style as well. Yeah, that’s a more specific, you’re, you’re hitting the, the type, the style, the, the, the cultural relevance. You’re hitting all of that. You’re hitting, you’re making it very precise and concise in guitar lessons in Tulsa. Goal number two is you want to make it measurable. You know, a measurable goal is just the ability to track your progress and also, it, it’s, it provides, you need to provide a way to alleviate, evaluate. You need to use metrics or even data targets, to make this possible, you need to be able to track your progress. So it used to be measurable while in guitar lessons in Tulsa.

You need to be able to say, all right, here’s the big goal, and then break it down into smaller goals or smaller steps. Maybe you know, step one to play this specific song at your talent show would be, Hey, first with the learn the chords. Second, let’s learn the strum pattern or the picking pattern depending on what style you’re going for. Thirdly, let’s, let’s play and transition through the chords with the strong pattern. Step four, let’s learn the words. Step five is to let’s play the music and sing the words in their corresponding order.

And then step five is practice, practice, practice those, the same song over and over about five times a day. And up until, and I would say five times a day, five days a week until the day of your talent show where you are going to be performing that song. This will ensure that you have the most and the best chance of success and a possible. And not only will you become competent, but you will become through that confident, which will allow you to play even better because you know what you’re playing and you don’t have to think too hard about it in guitar lessons in Tulsa.

So that is one way you could be into set up a big, large goal and then break it down into even smaller pieces or smaller sections or smaller nuggets so that you can track your progress. And then third, you want to set an achievable goal. Making sure that it is not overly ambitious, or outrageous. You know, a good quote would be make your goal ambitious but not outrageous. So you want to make it to where your, you know, it’s, it’s big enough. It’s specific enough, it’s measurable enough to where you know, you, you know, your mind doesn’t discount.

It is basically the key, you know, set such a large goal that your mind doesn’t to where your mind doesn’t discount it or set it until your mind begins to discount it. And then it come a little bit below that. That’s how you know, it’s, it’s achievable. You don’t want to, and it’s over, you know, you don’t want to overwork yourself with the goals. We always want to set achievable goals. Something that is able to be attacked or achieved or succeeded. Next. Do you want to make it relevant? It’s important that our that our goals are, you know, relevant. We don’t want them to be outdated or even like not even pertaining to anything or random.

We want them to make sense with our job function or what’s w you know, we want it to make sense with our liking. Maybe you like rock. You would set a relevant goal as, as like you like rock, not maybe jazz. So you’d set your goal to play a, a rock song, had a jazz song, right? That’s kind of staying relevant, or just improves your ability or your, you know, in some way, shape or form. It’s relevant. It’s not out of the ordinary. It’s not random. And so, the next one in our last one’s going to be a time-bound goal.

You want to make sure that that one of the characteristics of your goal is that it is time bound. It States, you know when you’ll get it done on this specific day or and time, maybe even location, you know you want to make it as tangible as you possibly can to where it is undoubtedly clear when the goal is to be achieved, at what time, how much time you have to achieve it. And it’s a, it’s a measuring game, it’s a management game. You know where this is the management of goals and so we want to make sure that we are being specific enough to where we can know exactly when we’ve hit the goal. We want it to be miserable, we want to be able to track it, we want to be able to break it down. We want to be able to then achieve it.
We have to make sure it’s achievable. It’s not too far down the line. We want to make sure that what we’re asking of ourselves is doable and not impossible. However, in my own opinion, nothing is impossible. But if you said, I want to play so well, that birds come and fly down to listen to me play, I guess I’d call that impossible. So, but we want to be as good as we possibly can, right? And also, we want to set achievable goals. We don’t want to set, you know, we want to set achievable goals, not outrageous goals or things that simply can’t be done in the timeframe that you’re wanting.

And then you know, you want to set time-bound goals. You know, what is the timeframe of the school? Is it one month, three months, six months, a year? You know, do you want to achieve that goal and you know, a year, do you want to achieve it in 10 years? You know, I’d set a goal anywhere from six months to about, you know, a one year goal. This will help you to just know that it’s not too far and you won’t get discouraged, but encouraged that you can achieve it.