Part One: How to Set Goals
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
Steven R. Covey
I’ve been there before: I know I have practised over the year, but I don’t really feel like I’ve made any progress. This is a common problem for professional and amateur musicians alike – we don’t have enough time to practise so we grab a few minutes here and there, but it is all a bit unfocused..
However, there are tactics you can use to overcome this hurdle and get yourself back on the fast track to becoming the best musician you can be.
This series will cover different elements of how to practise.
Without clear goals we tend to practise aimlessly without really achieving anything. Having a clear idea of where you want to go will function like a road-map, helping reach your goals quickly and effectively. The five tips below will help you design your map.
1. Focus on the destination
The first and most important step is setting clear goals for the long-term, mid-term, short-term and next few days. Write your goals down to clarify your thinking.
- Long term goals: think about where you ultimately want to be as a musician. Do you want to be able to play through every Beatles song in your bedroom, work as a session guitarist or write songs for your own band? Long term goals don’t need to be overly detailed and can just be a vision of where you would like to go. Remember you may adjust these as you progress on your musical journey, so you don’t need to be too rigid.
- Mid-Term goals: This covers the next one or two years. Here you can write down clearer goals such as “write 20 songs to perform with my own band” or “learn all Beatles songs from the Revolver album”. I don’t like setting ‘Five-Year Goals’ as I find five years is a little too long for me to get fully engaged and motivated.
- Short-Term goals: This covers the next few months or weeks, and could be goals such as “learn one Beatles song from Revolver album” or “write and record one song”.
- Immediate goals: This would cover today or this week and could be things such as “learn verse chords to Taxman by the Beatles” or “write two riffs and record them onto my phone so I remember them”.
Once I have written down my goals, I find it useful to ask myself if the mid-term goals (1 to 2 years) can actually be achieved in a shorter time-frame of 1 or 2 months. Usually they can’t, but it is a good way to evaluate my goal setting.
2. Motivational Juice: (don’t make goals too academic or dry)
When setting your goals, don’t make them too academic or dry. Ideally your goals should be filled with emotional purpose and an easy way to do this is to use your goals to serve others.
If you want to write songs, an academic goal would be something like “I want to write 20 songs in a variety of keys, for a range of different instruments, using different song structures and lyrical content”. Or you could say it in a more exciting way: “I want to write songs so that people feel the fucking roller-coaster of emotions I’ve felt during my life.”
3. Schedule it in: (this will take away decision fatigue)
I sometimes think I’m ‘too busy’ to do the creative things I want to do. My solution is to write a weekly list of what I want to do, with a rough time of when I can fit it in. My creative time is usually after work in the evenings, so having a list really takes way the problem of trying to decide what I should be doing (this is called ‘decision fatigue’ where my brain is literally tired of making too many decisions).
I write my schedule every Friday evening for the week ahead. This lets me plan around things like cinema trips or evenings out.
The items I add to my schedule are based on ‘themes’ rather than exact details, so it might say “Saturday 10:00am to 10:30am – practise Queen song on guitar”. I used to write really detailed and exact goals on my schedule, but found that I would feel deflated if I failed to meet the exact goals listed. Find what works for you and keeps you moving forward.
4. Measure progress: (create a positive feedback loop)
We can check we are moving towards our goals by measuring our progress. Because we see our own progress in small increments, we often forget how much we have achieved, so measuring your progress should be a chance to critique yourself and praise yourself. When we see how much progress we’ve made, it encourages us to practise more, creating a positive feedback loop where our skills spiral upwards. Smart phones make it easy to record ourselves via video, audio or just typing notes.
5. Take massive action: (this could just be “consistency”)
Many motivational speakers talk about taking ‘massive action’ towards our goals, but I think this is sometimes misunderstood. Although Steve Vai practised his guitar for 12 hours a day as a student, this is not realistic for the majority of us who work or have families.
The idea of massive action could just mean working every day on our goals, even if it’s just for an hour. Let me say that again: every day. This might include your birthday, Christmas, the day you have an awful cold and the day you just don’t feel like doing it. But an hour every day might be the massive action that is available to you, given your other commitments.
When you measure your progress a year later, you will definitely feel, think and act like a different person. That’s how massive action affects you.
Next time I will discuss how we identify the weak spots in our playing and how to turn them into our strengths.
Once you have an effective practise routine in place, you want to make sure that you are learning in the most effective way. My ebook ‘Guitar Gymnasium’ shows how to accelerate your learning with simple learning hacks.
Impact Guitar 