Music Lessons Tulsa | How To Persevere

This content was created for Curtis Music Academy

In this edition of the Curtis music Academy podcast, we are going to be discussing how you can persevere and stay the course through your guitar lessons. Now, without further ado, my name is Steven. I have been a music instructor for five years going on six years now and I’ve loved every single bit of it, every single minute of it. I’ve also been a musician for 12 years coming up this March. And man, have I enjoyed learning and growing and experimenting and learning so many different instruments to where it is going to be very, very helpful for you in music lessons Tulsa. As I teach you, it’s important that we continuously grow and learn in our lives. It’s important that we grow as students and,learners of our trade.

Are there tricks of the trade and really grow, when it comes to finances with music, our fun with music, our performance, you know, anything when it comes to that. And so we’ve got to definitely persevere and stay the course in music lessons Tulsa because we’ve got places to go. We’ve got people to see, we’ve got, you know, hurdles to leap over. We’ve got and we can become professionals at leaping over just as a, as a professional runner, you know, leaps over multiple, you know, multiple, you know, what do they call those, these days Obstacles in their way. You know, it’s going to be key that we can leap over those hurdles and do it in music lessons Tulsa, do so skillfully so that we can still not lose momentum when running. And so without further ado, I’ve got tons to have information and an experience to share and I hope that anyone listening can and or reading can grab something from this and how you can persevere and stay the course in your music lessons Tulsa.

I think one of the key points and persevering, being able to persevere and really being able to stay the course and stay focused, it’s going to be in our ability to celebrate the little wins in music lessons Tulsa. It’s important that you can, celebrate little wins and big wins. But I think more importantly, it’s important to celebrate the little wins because without celebrating the little wins, you may never get to the big. And so what does that look like? What does it look like to celebrate the little wins? Well, in my opinion with your students, celebrating the little wins means that you first of all created milestones for your students. You have created markers where they have learned or are learning to up to that point.

And when they’ve learned that, then you can begin to further breakdown each lesson or you can further achieve those little milestones. They’re basically just little milestones along the way. And so those are the wins that I’m, that I’m describing, the celebrating, the little wins, those are the ones that we are wanting to celebrate and accomplish and celebrate. So you know, whenever they hit one of those milestones, we want to go ahead and celebrate in some way, shape or form, whether that’s through a high five, whether that’s through purchasing your student a bag of chips or a soda or you know, creating a guitar pick with their name on it and putting it on a necklace. Whatever you want to do. You want to celebrate that little win in some way, shape or form. Whether that’s do a quick, you know, party where you just buy a little bag of kazoos and everyone walks in and just celebrates the fact that you just created a milestone.

You know, you just hit a milestone in your, in your music journey, your musical learning journey. And so it’s going to be important that you are able to do that. And so I just want to put this out there. I love my job. I love that I can create podcasts and get money for it. I love that I can teach students how to play music. Something I’ve been doing my entire life and pay would get paid for it. It’s such a blessing. I just want to put that out there. I’m just going to grateful and thankful mood which I want to encourage you to also be grateful and thankful. We just past Thanksgiving and my job is one of the things I was thankful for this year. And so I’m celebrating the little wins. It’s, it’s important to do that.

Second point is don’t be so hard on yourself. Whenever we are learning, we experience this in early on the journey hiccups, we experienced hiccups we experience, you know, falling over and over, kind of like a baby does whenever they’re learning how to walk. You know, in a sense you’re trying to learn how to walk and you’re, you’re maturing. You’re, you’re becoming a mature musician, you’re growing, you’re, you’re in the beginning baby phases. You’re a baby learning to walk. You’re a beginner learning a skill in music lessons Tulsa. And so yes, there will be many failed attempts. There will be many. I stood up and I fell or I tried playing this, the scale and I messed up many hundreds of times. Well, there are some principles we can apply to kind of help us execute better.

But at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, your ability to persevere and stay the course is going to be huge. Your ability to persevere and to stay focused even through the adversity, even though you’ve been applying the principles and yet your, your, your fingers are not doing what you want them to do. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s part of the process. Enjoy it. Be okay with it except accepted, except that you’re going to mess up many times. But don’t be discouraged, but be encouraged whenever you keep moving forward. And so my point is, don’t be so hard on yourself, you know, be gracious of yourself through this time. Say, you know what, I’m learning and expect to, you know, make mistakes.

Expect to, you know, not hit the right notes on the scale. Expect to strike the wrong chord, expect to play at the wrong fretboard. So everyone’s at Fred every once in awhile, you know, expect to not play so fast, expect to play slow. It’s drudgery, but Hey, it’s, it’s what works. And so that is my advice to you. And then the other part of that is really don’t be so critical of yourself. You know, credit criticizing every little thing. And I’ve seen people do it with the vocals. I’ve seen people do it with guitar. I’ve seen people do it with their driving or their cars. I know that rhymed. I’ve seen people when it comes to sports be critical of themselves and beat themselves up over the little things that they didn’t do.

Right. But we have to ask ourselves, are we, are we creating smart goals for ourselves? Are we, are we, you know, creating specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time limited goals. You know, that’s being gracious on yourself is giving yourself plenty of time and a space to, to, to meet the goals and execute the goals correctly in music lessons Tulsa. So don’t be so hard or critical of yourself in your beginning phase. It’s kind of like, and I think a good example of this is when a baby cries, you know, there’s an innocence with a baby, right? There’s an innocence and there’s, they’re going to keep trying and keep trying. Cause that’s all I know how to do. That’s all we know how to do. And I think if we keep that, we maintain that, all we know how to do is just to keep it going forward. I only have to, all we know to do is just to keep trying. I think that naive ness, that lack of knowledge, you know, the innocence is what’s needed to become successful.

And if we didn’t have it, if we didn’t have that ignorance in the, in our beginning stages, in our baby stages, we would give up way too quickly and none of us would be able to walk. So my last point is just to stay inspired throughout music lessons Tulsa. Ask yourself what, what inspires you? You know, is it watching YouTube videos of Sean Mendez playing guitar? Is it videos of John Mayer? Is it videos of Tommy manual? What is it, you know, is it, is it playing guitar out in a, at a bar or a coffee shop? Is it watching people play live? I love live performances on YouTube. I love it. That’s what inspires me to become a musician and artists. But how to stay in, persevere the course. That is how you do it. My friends.