If you suffer from occasional or even chronic low quality practice sessions, you are definitely going to want to check out this lesson. In it I’m going to show you four important behaviors that once developed and integrated into your study routine will improve every practice session that you do, every single day by at least 1 percent...

 

 

 

 

These behaviors are simple changes you can make to your mind-set and they won’t take you more than 30 seconds to implement! 

 

Once learned, they will help you to get rid of those lousy practice sessions forever. Understanding the selection of these behaviors will require a brief discussion of the reasons for your bad practice sessions in the first place.

 

WATCH THE VIDEO:

 

 

In this lesson we are going to talk to you about building the fastest way for improving your skills on guitar. Sadly, most guitar players have slow to almost non-existent progress related to how they are expanding their skills on guitar on a daily basis and it shouldn’t be like that. 

 

You should be moving ahead each day and getting at least 1 percent better every day. But, instead, lack-luster progress is rampant among guitar players and it’s almost always a symptom of something else that’s not being done productively.

 

If you look at your current practice approach, the first thing that you probably want to ask yourself is, do I even have an approach to begin with? 

 

Most guitar players do not have any kind of an approach whatsoever. And, if that sounds like you, then fix it by creating a practice approach that focuses on four KEY behavior areas that you can start from... they are;

 

1). Discipline 

 

2). Good Attitude 

 

3). Quality Material to Study 

 

4). An Actual "Real" Concrete Plan

 

 

 

 

DISCIPLINE:
Discipline is the first part of this plan because without discipline you can’t go beyond the third and fourth stages of improvement. So, how can you improve discipline? Well, one of the first things to do is create a clean and tidy work area. Free of any distractions. 

 

Turn off the music, or turn off TV and clean up around where you are so that your workspace feels comfortable and uncluttered. The next thing is to never wait for things to “feel right” to practice, a disciplined player just gets into it and starts practicing. Once you begin you’ll be into it and the work will start to take care of itself.

 

Another thing to add into the discipline mix is taking breaks. Never push yourself to work past the point of exhaustion. You need to be getting up and walking around to clear your mind. And, doing this also improves your mood, your decision making skills and your concentration. 

 

Breaks work a lot like a mental reward because they help to keep your mind fresh. Finally, the last thing to understand about discipline is that studying the playing of a musical instrument is full of great successes, and total flat out failures. So, an easy going attitude is a huge part of keeping a disciplined mind.

 

Coming up next, I’m going to cover the benefits of; having a Good Attitude, the use of Quality Material to Study and the advantage of using a Concrete Plan for Daily Improvement. 

 

But first, I want to tell you about a special promotional offer for a collection of some of the most valuable handouts I have here at my studio, it’s my new; Handouts Collection eBook.

 

 

ATTITUDE:
When it comes to success in anything attitude plays one of the biggest roles in achieving that success. But, often times what happens is a person will shut down success very quickly because of only a few bad experiences that have become re-enforced. 

 

This can happen in many different ways, like they might be a little too negative, or they’ll hold too much of a pessimistic view on what it is that they are doing. 

 

To clean up your attitude, start by realizing that you’re going to encounter obstacles throughout your practice day and there is no such thing as a "perfect" practice session. There are practice sessions that go well and there are others that do not go well.

 

The important thing is, when you come up against challenges during a practice session, find the counter-benefit from the challenge, no matter how angry or how frustrated you get, always try to find humor in what you’re doing and try to look for the, “lesson in the failure.” 

 

Back away from any of the negativity that might surround what’s going on with the undesirable result and make sure that you never exaggerate situations into something worse than they really are. This is really important because exaggeration "amplifies" the bad experience and that amplification can allow the experience to come back and taint a future event. 

 

Keep what’s happening centered within the present moment. Everything that happens during a learning experience does have the potential to affect your line of thinking, and you need to keep that train of thought clear, healthy and focused on the positive!

 

 

 

 

QUALITY OF MATERIAL:
The next area of importance is the quality of what it is that you’re practicing. It’s easy enough to head back day after day to run through material that you’ve had on-hand for years. That’s a not hard to do, (and granted it is fun to do, but it does not push us ahead).

 

The problem with running through older material is that particular type of work doesn’t expand our horizons. In fact, it tends to have the exact opposite effect by keeping us in a sort of stagnation loop.Running through the same stuff day after day. A great way to stop this is by cleaning up your workspace area.

 

Clean Up Your Work-Space:
Keep it very tidy where you sit down to practice guitar, a big mess will clutter your mind as well as your workspace. In the clean space organize what you want to complete each practice day.
 

Cluttered spaces can have the result of keeping your clarity down and that won't allow you to go past the point of venturing into new or unique training. Higher clarity forces you to move into new material that presents a challenge.

 

Cluttered spaces also have the tendency of resulting in misplaced items. You don't want lost items because it creates frustrating. Instead, you'll want everything readily accessible including your gear, course books and your music sheets.

 

A clean and tidy environment naturally promotes clarity and that means you'll feel more ready to take on those really challenging assignments! 

 

This is perfect if you feel like you're being somehow kept away from new and different material than what you’re used to only because you have a mess to contend with before you can study your courses or sheet music.

 

 

 

 

In a cluttered environment the problem you’ll have is that you’re searching for stuff and not exactly reaching into uncharted territory with ease. Searching for your stuff leads to frustration and that will always make it harder to grow as a musician. 

 

You'll just keep feeling stuck in the same routines, feeling frustrated that you can't find everything you're looking for. Practice will feel like a chore.

 

I know from my own personal experience, I always had the best results come out of the times where I was following a course and working on easily accessible material that was new, or by working on material that was unfamiliar, but well presented and well organized.

 

Well presented and well organized new and different material will make a student feel like it is fun to do the research and to put more time at practice and learning to understand the songs, techniques or the exercises so that I could play them the best that I could. 

 

So remember, quality material is going to be the material that you’ve never worked on before. The material that’s well organized and new and different! Your success with high quality challenging material comes from being in a clean and tidy work area.

 

 

 

 

YOUR CONCRETE PLAN:
Our last discussion is going to be on the importance of having a concrete plan for how you’re going to spend your time. 

 

Being successful at this will inevitably involve the daily use of keeping a highly organized practice schedule. If you’ve never kept track of the topics that you’re studying (and the time that you’re spending on them), then implementing the use of a practice schedule is going to make a big difference.

 

Practice schedules go a long way in helping us sort out what we want to work on, how much time we decide to spend on each topic and if they are done correctly, a practice schedule will also help us start to keep track of how successful we’re getting with each topic. 

 

Practice schedules are essentially a road map to our time frames, subjects and metronome settings during each practice session. 

 

If you keep a practice schedule going day after day and you constantly reference it to organize your topics in a well-structured way what’s going to happen is you’ll find that the daily use of your time will become more focused.

 

The schedule will go a long way to help your ability to reach higher levels of skill and the enhanced skill will start to accelerate day by day. The bare minimum that we want to see is an improvement of at least 1 percent every day. 

 

Over 30 days that’s a 30 percent improvement... And, that’s a VERY effective use of your time!