The Power of Consistency
We all want to make progress, but often we go about it the wrong way, trying a lesson here, wathcing a YouTube video there, and trying bits and pieces of this and that… and as a result, not making any real progress.
Making real progress requires working at something for several days, weeks or even months; depending on the scope of what you are trying to learn.
Let’s look at three different examples of this, for beginners, more advanced players and guitar teachers:
Beginner Guitarists
When you’re new to learning guitar, it’s especially important to stick to what you are learning. A lot of beginner guitar players end up learning all sorts of bits and pieces but cannot play a song from start to finish.
For the beginner, learning their first song can take weeks. I remember the first song my guitar teacher wanted me to learn, All Day and All of the Night by The Kinks - it took me nearly two months to get the hang of that. Beginner guitar players taking the Rock Guitar Mastery program often find the first song in the program takes a week or two to get the hang of (incidentally I love reading about their progress in the student forum!).
Completing the program can seem daunting, it will take most beginners several months to work through all the songs in the program, but by the end of it they will have a thorough and comprehensive grounding in rock guitar, and they’ll have the skills and knowledge to be able to learn others songs, from start to finish… which is a great level of skill to reach.
The key: Sticking to it. Keep working on it when it’s hard. Realise that part of learning is just sticking at the thing and that hammering away eventually yields results.
Intermediate to Advanced Guitarists
As you get more advanced at playing guitar, you may find that you become interested in more advanced skills and challenges. You may find that new skills can take a couple of months to get to grips with. Complex pieces of music may now take several months or even over a year to learn.
Four years ago I started composing a four-movement sonata for electric guitar and strings. I dabbled in it and learned bits of it, then applied my own advice. Since January this year, nearly every day (aside from my day off each week) I’ve worked on this piece for three hours. Sometimes more, sometimes less… but the consistency has been there.
I’m not sure if I’ll reach my goal of recording it by Christmas, but it’s close.
There have been days when I felt like it would never get finished, days when I had no motivation… Sometimes I’d be working on the same bar for three weeks…
But with consistency, I’m getting there. I’m currently on the exposition of the fourth movement, and that’s nearly done. Maybe it’ll take me until next year, I don’t know… I do know that if I keep going I’ll get there eventually.
For Guitar Teachers
The idea of consistency has two applications to guitar teachers:
- Working on building your student numbers
- As a tool to help your students
Building Your Student Numbers
Building a business and finding new students is just like learning a new skill on guitar. It takes time, you have to figure out what works and why, and you have to be consistent with your effort.
If you keep at it, keep learning and keep taking the right actions, you’ll find that you get more students and consistently build your teaching studio.
A lot of guitar teachers make an inconsistent effort with finding new students… but most guitar teachers find the problem find that their problem isn’t making the effort, but knowing what to do.
Finding students requires understanding copywriting, student motivations and what methods of advertising work for getting students. I know this is true, becuase when I was working on finding more students for my teaching, I was making a lot of effort for very little results. When I figured out methods and approaches that worked, my phone quickly became busy.
The crazy thing is, this stuff isn’t difficult, but if you don’t know, you don’t know. So I took everything I learned about what does and doesn’t work with finding students and advertising as a guitar teacher and wrote it down in How to Teach Guitar.
Helping Your Students
Knowing that consistency is a key to improving, you can make this an implicit and explicit part of your lessons. Implicitly by helping the student work through the material you set week by week. A song might be broken down over several weeks. A skill like barre-chords might take a couple of months for the student to really get to grips with.
Part of your job as a teacher is to help the student be consistent, setting them clear practice routines and achievable goals to help them along in their guitar journey.
Explicitly, you may want to tell the student that making progress on guitar is simply a case of trying to be just 1% better each week, and that their metric for success is not “Can I play like Steve Vai?”, but “Am I 1% better at one thing than I was this time last week?”.
You can tell them:
By setting the goal of being 1% better, which is quite achievable, you know that if you’re consistent with practice, you can achieve almost anything with your playing - which is an awesome realisation. At that point, consistency becomes an almost super power to getting long-term results from your guitar playing.
Closing Thoughts
Consistency is a powerful tool to make more progress, and requires action in two areas:
- Consistently getting practice time done
- Consistently working on the same material and not jumping around every practice session
If you can apply these ideas to your playing, you’ll find you make a lot more progress.