And what to do about it!

I want to share with you the top three reasons why you might not be making the progress in your music practice that you'd like to be making. 

I'm also going to share with you a practice or a process that I like to teach to help people to overcome that hurdle and start actually making the progress that they're looking for.

If you're super keen, you can jump ahead and get a free step-by-step cheatsheet for how do do this here.

You can watch the YouTube video on this below. If you'd prefer to read than watch - scroll down to see the video transcript - plus a bonus reason not included in the video!

So here are the reasons - plus a bonus one - for why you're not making the progress you'd like to be making in music practice.

1. You don't know WHAT to practice.

I don't mean that you don't know what song or what piece that you're learning that you haven't decided what it is that you want to learn yet. Of course that would be step one. But once you already know what you're learning and what's that appropriate level for you but you're still not making progress with that, you need to drill down a little further into exactly what it is that's tripping you up.

And more than likely, you do know exactly what this is. It's that moment in the music where you pause or you hesitate or you stumble. That's the precise moment in the music that needs your attention in order for you to make progress. 

It could be that you've just started learning a song or a piece of music, in which case you're just going to start at the beginning, or you're going to start at the part that your teacher has given you to learn, and you're going to identify within that part precisely what is the tricky moment. 

Because there's always a moment like that, even in short pieces of music, even in short passages or phrases. There's always a moment that's going to cause a little bit of a pause or a hesitation. It's something that's impeding the flow of the music, and we want to be able to identify and isolate that.

So the first thing you need to know how to do is to pinpoint this moment. To pick out the exact phrase or the exact action or the exact moment in the music that's causing this impedance of flow, that's causing this challenge, obstacle or stumbling block. 

Which flows into the next reason...

2. You're biting off more than you can chew. 

It's a case of too much information. For many people, the way that they learn a piece or a song, is to decide what it's going to be and then start at the beginning and play to the end. This is too much information for you to process at any given time, especially when you first start learning, and especially when you're just embarking on a new piece or song.

Playing a song from the start to the finish is playing a song. It's not practicing. 

It's really important to make the distinction between these two modes of playing music. 

Just like I outlined in the first reason why you might not be making progress, it's because we haven't pinpointed what it is that is creating the challenge or the stumbling block. So if all you're doing when you're practicing is just playing from the start of the song to the end of the song, you're essentially just overloading your system with too much information and not identifying the information that's the most important for you to be focusing on. 

And because you're not making progress, because you haven't identified what really needs your attention, it's just so easy to get overwhelmed with all of this stuff that you have to do in the song. There's too many things to process, and it's a surefire way just to create resistance, start procrastinating, and then just not practicing at all because you've just overloaded yourself. 

For this reason, it's really important to narrow the amount that you're practicing, choose a section, choose one action, as I just described, and make sure that you're reducing the amount that you have to process in any one moment for your learning. 

3. You're going too fast.

This is just flowing on from the last point, and is such a common issue. I've experienced it myself quite a lot and I see it in my clients all the time. 

So what we need to do is ask music, what is it asking of us? 

It's asking us to slow down. 

Our minds and bodies have a certain pace that they need to go at in order to truly learn, and if we're trying to force things or go too fast or get there too quickly, we're just not giving our body and mind a chance.

So first of all, you're trying to do too much. You're trying to do too much of a piece, or you're trying to learn a whole song at one time, and then you're moving through it too quickly. 

So you just end up on this merry-go-round, going around and around in circles. 

Every time you pick up your instrument or you sit down to sing or whatever it is that you're learning, you're just back in the same place that you were before because nothing's actually sunk in. 

And also when you're going too fast, you just can't see where you're going. And that's a really important thing in playing music, is to be able to see where you're headed. 

I often compare it to just walking down the street or riding a bike. If you're not looking ahead and you can't see the environment around you, you're going to run into something. You don't have your bearings.

So if you're going too fast you've just lost those bearings. You need to give your system a chance to utilize all of this information that it's been given, and then build its capacity to process that information. 

So once again, music is asking us to slow down, really become mindful, really create a meditative approach to our music practice, to these moments that we are stumbling on in our music practice, in the pieces that we're learning. 

Bonus Reason: You're Not Aware of Your Own Resistance.

What is resistance? It's something we all experience, in relation to various things in life - and it's often unconscious. Our resistances have to do with unacknowledged feelings, expectations and judgements that we make about ourselves and the world around us. When these feelings are hidden beneath the surface, they tend to control us more than we'd like. 

When we feel resistance to something, it's like herding cats. We just can't get ourselves to do something we really don't want to do - but what about the things we DO want to do? Even though we say we want to learn music and make more progress, sometimes we still can't get ourselves to do it, right? We let life get in the way, we procrastinate, and we avoid the uncomfortable learnings that promise to get us to the next level.

When we are experiencing this, Music is asking us to become more aware of ourselves. It's asking us to inquire into what we are feeling, and the thoughts that go along with that. Perhaps we have self-doubt about our ability to be musical. Maybe we're not acknowledging some impatience, or discomfort. It could be that we need ways to relate to ourselves with more kindness and patience in the process of learning something new. 

When we are able to pinpoint exactly what our resistance is made up of, we have an opportunity then to find the tools we need to move through it.

Ok, so what to do about it?

Here, I will outline a process you can use in your music practice that will help you identify what will really help you focus and gather momentum. 

First, you need to identify a very isolated piece of the music that you're learning that's causing you trouble, and you need to be able to construct that into a little loop, something that you can just play repetitively over and over again. Once you've identified that loop, then create tiny practices (aka 'Micro Practice').

Micro practices are just about sitting down for one minute, two minutes, maybe even five minutes if you're really feeling in the flow. 

But it can be as little as one minute, and just sitting with that one action, that one tiny action that you've identified from your music and practicing that slowly. 

If you would like a free step-by step cheatsheet for how to create Micro Practices for yourself, click here and I'll send it to you!

With that slowness, you've got all of this opportunity to bring in awareness to what's happening. 

What it is that's challenging about this part in the music, what it is that your body or your mind hasn't quite gotten itself around yet, and you've got the time to actually execute that action in a way that creates flow. 

When you create slow, mindful flow in your music practice, that's when it transforms from something that's frustrating and confusing into something that's just relaxing and enjoyable, and you're now finally making progress. You're making way more progress than you would if you bit off more than you could chew if you went too fast and you really weren't defining what it was that you were practicing. 

AND you have the opportunity to observe the feelings and thoughts you have about yourself in the process - is there doubt, fear, self-judgement, unfair expectations? These could all be contributing to the resistance you feel to the process of learning.

So I encourage you, think about that song or piece that you're learning right at the moment and try and identify just one action or one moment. It could be just a few seconds worth of music that you can identify and play in a loop, play slowly, create tiny practices, and get into a nice mindful flow with that one little piece of music. 

I really hope that helps you start to move the needle on that music that you're learning, and I'd love to hear from you. Please drop a comment below, and if you'd like more videos about music practice, and a holistic approach to learning music, then subscribe to my YouTube channel. 

Practice the beauty of sound, love the sounds you make!