The Motivation Game | 4 Strategies For Fueling The Fire (ft. Rosie Bennet)
In this week’s post, Rosie Bennet shares four of the strategies she uses to keep her classical guitar motivation strong. Try looking back at these the next time you hit the inevitable slump in your life with the guitar. Also, if you missed Rosie’s last post on Comfort Zones, make sure you check it out here!
Any relationship takes work, but it is generally acknowledged that one where you must give more than you get is not worth pursuing.
It’s no surprise then that our relationships with our instruments can be so strained; we have taken a hobby and turned it into a lifestyle, spending hours every day in training on an unending and grueling self improvement track that often gives very little gratification.
Motivation is a difficult entity, mostly because we confuse it with determination and then associate it with success, with health or with strength of character. But as with most processes that conduct how we learn, motivation is all about a trade in of a mindset.
So how can we flick that switch and start playing the motivation game?
1. Don’t read too much into the criticism you get
Criticism is important, it is how we learn tradition, analysis, different musical styles, and as we become more aware, it gives us a slice of other people’s interpretations.
But putting yourself up against other people’s preferences and agendas can be tiring, and it doesn’t let you find the things that you really desire from your playing.
Spend time with your instrument deciding what you like, understand that you have full autonomy over your technical and musical decisions. An audience is just as likely to enjoy what you do whether you concentrate on your ideas or someone else’s.
2. Take time off of social media
This sounds like a pretty basic point and is something we hear all the time, but get off social media!
Aside from the fact that social media is a pretty intense highlights reel of all the people we connect with in our profession, we should all be more aware that in any place where it is possible to advertise, we are being subtly fed content that make us feel we are not good enough as we are.
Learn to find a balance, social media is an important part of promotion, but once in a while download and print that score instead of reading it off the computer!
3. Get engaged with other art outlets
Visit a gallery, go to a painting class, find another hobby to replace the fact that your OG nerdy habit has now become your life.
Indulge in the similarities between art forms, learn about something for the first time without fear of making mistakes, get inspired, and understand that everything is influencing you and your playing in a positive way.
4. Trust that your relationship with your instrument is founded
I’ve heard people say ‘don’t play for a day, lose it for a week, don’t play for a week, lose it for a month.’
What a strange way to think of a skill you have been building your whole life.
All the work that you have done up until this point, every single second of practice, performance and even thought has enabled you to play as you do in your current state.
It is true that after some time of not playing at all, you may well lose some of the power in specific muscles of the hand, but after a day, or even a week, that loss is hardly substantial enough to make any noticeable difference in your playing at all.
We need to learn to trust in our ability to recreate our ideal playing, just as much as we need to learn to trust that we have been playing music for such a long time for a reason.
Perhaps it can be useful to remember that if you did not care about playing music, you would not be worrying about your levels of motivation. That desire to love it and work at it more shows that you already have a deep love for and commitment to your instrument.
As with anything in life, we need to appreciate that our lifestyle choices affect everything we do. In order to create the positive work experience that we believe we crave, ultimately we must alter the thought processes that hold us back.
We can only start where we stand, so perhaps it’s a good idea is to step out of the practice room once in a while, after all, there’s plenty of inspiration out there.
And Vitamin D — that’s probably a good idea too….
About Rosie Bennet
Born in London in 1996, Rosie started playing guitar at age seven. She received her early musical education at The Yehudi Menuhin School of Music and went on to study with Zoran Dukic (The Hague, NL), Johan Fostier (Tilburg, NL), Rene Izquierdo (Milwaukee, USA) and Raphaella Smits (Leuven, BE). She has performed in festivals all over Europe, including Open Guitar Festival in Křivoklát, Czech Republic, Glasgow’s Big Guitar Weekend, Scotland, Porziano Music Festival, Italy and the West Dean guitar Festival, UK. Highlights of her concert career include performances at Wigmore Hall, London, The North Wall, Oxford and concerts given on El Camino De Santiago.
Learn more about Rosie by visiting her website at rosiebennet.com
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