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I love this quote.

It describes so precisely why music has been such an important part of my life. I’m not a very emotionally expressive person when it comes to saying or showing how I feel, but I have feelings swirling around inside all the same. Where do these feelings go?

For me, music has always been the answer. It’s the outlet for all the feelings that I can’t express properly in any other way. Singing and playing music have always been my go-to’s for self-healing and I’m not sure what my mental state would be in if I didn’t do these on a regular basis.

This pandemic and its effects on society have played havoc with our lives and I feel it keenly on a daily basis. It’s given me a lot of emotional and financial heartache and there have been days when I’ve either wanted to curl up into a ball or throw large breakable objects at the walls.

Needless to say, my piano is getting a real workout during this time.

Depending on what I’m feeling on a given day, this is what I’m playing to get me through:

• If I’m angry and just need to forget about life for a while, there’s really nothing better than playing scales. Maybe a little bit of Bach and Burgmuller for good measure. Anything that has a very set rhythm, requires a heck of finger movement and articulation, so my brain is 100% engaged and I can’t randomly start thinking about what to make for dinner for a lonely meal for one.
• If I’m missing people I love, I play sad, sad love songs. Mostly from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Maybe I venture into the 90s. But never beyond that decade. They just don’t get sad enough once you hit the 00’s. Current favourites are “Where Do I Begin”, “A Time for Us” and “Desperado”.
• If I’m feeling upbeat and looking forward in a positive way, it’s Disney and musical theatre for the win (with very loud singing accompaniment).

I’m so thankful to have learnt the piano growing up so that I can play myself out of any funk I get into. It’s basically free therapy, and we could all use some of that right now.

Four weeks into isolation lock down, I’ve finally found time to get around to those “important, but not urgent” tasks on my to-do list!

One of these was to share about the end of year Celebration Concert that I hosted at my studio last December. Feels like a lifetime ago now…

Setting the Theme

For most of my students, this was the very first performance they had ever done in front of an audience.

That’s pretty nerve-wrecking, and while a bit of nerves are great, I didn’t want any of them to get too worked up about it. That’s why I decided to call it a “concert party” as opposed to a “recital” to help set the right tone. A party creates more positive associations and it was the holiday season after all. Nibbles and bubbles (chocolate milk and juice for the kids!) would be served afterwards to really give it more of a party feel.

I chose the theme “Celebrate!” to highlight that this was a concert to celebrate everything that my students had achieved for the year and to get into the festive spirit!

Student Nerves

The great thing about young kids is that they’re not overly inhibited by fear of judgment. The idea of performing in front of 20 people (most of whom they hadn’t met before) didn’t seem to daunt them. The older or more shy ones were nervous, but credit to them all, not one student turned around to say they weren’t going to participate.

I loved that every single one of my students embraced the opportunity to perform, even if the idea of it was scary to them.

The best thing to do with nerves is to channel them into action, and never had my students practiced so hard than in the six weeks before the concert. Even the ones who didn’t initially appear to be nervous started to feel it as the idea of performing became more real with each passing week. Everyone put in extra effort and I could see improvements across the board. This was a huge relief on my own nerves to be honest, as there were times when I wasn’t sure if everyone would have their pieces ready in time.

Concert Day!

From the outset, it was clear that performance day jitters had hit. The kids were unusually quiet when they arrived and even the usually chatty ones were a lot more reserved. A performance is a performance, no matter if there are balloons and a Christmas tree and smiles all around. I was nervous too, running around like a headless chicken trying to get last minute things in place and worrying about pretty much everything.

In my mind, the definition of success would have simply been for every student to get up and perform. How their performance went was secondary to the act of getting up in front of an audience and playing their pieces from beginning to end.

But not only did every single student get up and perform, they all performed really, really well.

One of the biggest lessons I’d drilled into my students before the concert was to keep going even if they made a mistake. Every piano teacher has those students who always want to start from the beginning when they make a mistake, or worse yet, the ones that stop altogether and don’t start up again at all.

That is the biggest no-no in performance.

The piece must go on, no matter how big the bungle.

The mantra of “keep going” was something I said to them at every lesson, at the risk of sounding like a broken record.

It must have worked though because on the day, no one had a meltdown, no one needed their parent to go up to the piano with them, and no one stopped halfway to start from the beginning. The kids all were fantastic and the gigantic grins on their faces at the end of the concert said it all. They had hit an important milestone in their piano journey and it felt great!

Can We Do It Again?

In each student’s lesson the week after the concert, I gave them their set of compliment cards so they could read how their performances were received (you can read more about them in this post). Most kids were only really interested in figuring out which cards were written by their mum or dad – no one else’s words mattered! There were some very thoughtful and encouraging comments from the parents and I was glad they had embraced the compliment card idea.

In chatting with my students, I was really surprised when a lot of them asked if they could perform again. Not next year, but next week! They had had such a positive experience that they wanted to do it all over again straight away. I’m hoping they will remember these feelings and look forward to it when we do this again in a year’s time!

Special Outcomes

There were two particularly special outcomes from the concert that I hadn’t foreseen but which made the whole experience even more worthwhile.

Two of my students had been really anxious about performing and both had struggled with learning the piano in their own ways. One in particular had started engaging in a lot of negative self-talk and they both seemed to think that they just weren’t good at piano.

Since the concert however, their entire demeanour and approach to the piano has changed. Perhaps the performance gave them the confidence boost they needed?

I’m hoping it showed them the power of perseverance and that they can achieve their goal if they keep working at it. The initial struggle of learning falls away eventually and playing the piano becomes so much more fun once you can do it with a level of practiced skill.

For all of my students, I’m glad the concert gave them the opportunity to strive and to feel good about their achievements. It was a lot of hard work but so rewarding to see all the happy and proud smiling faces of parents and students alike.

Imagine you know two people who both do yoga. One tells you they have been practicing for a year and a half, while the other tells you they have practiced for 30 days. Which person do you think would be more advanced in their mastery of yoga?

Most of us would say that the person who has done it for a year a half would surely be more advanced.

Yet you might be surprised to find out that the 30 day yoga practitioner has actually developed better technique and progressed further.

How could this be possible?

Let me explain.

My Yoga Journey

I first took up yoga in January 2017 when I signed up for membership at a nearby studio. I went “regularly” about once a week, each time for a one hour yoga class. There were definitely weeks that I missed every now and then but I tried to go when I could. I kept this up for a year and a half until July 2018 when my membership expired and I decided not to renew it. We were in the middle of a house move amongst other things but at the heart of it, I just didn’t feel all that motivated to keep going.

The classes were pretty much the same all the time and I got bored with doing the same things over and over with no visible progress.

So I took a big long break from yoga.

One whole year went by.

Then one day I realised, hey, in this new place we had moved into, not only is the space big enough for my piano studio, it’s also big enough to do yoga in without banging into furniture. During the year that had passed, I had wanted to get back on the mat every now and then but I wasn’t keen to take up another membership for the same experience as before. With the realisation that I could practice at home, I decided to try and re-discover yoga in a new way. I bought a brand new, beautiful (expensive) mat which gave me that final push to get back on (there’s nothing like a bit of financial investment sometimes to get things going).

I set a goal for myself: to incorporate yoga into my daily routine for 30 days. One. whole. month. I was allowed one day a week off only on my gym workout days. I had no expectations of how things would turn out and I was happy to just see what could happen. Concrete goals are a big motivator for me so I knew at least that I would try my darnedest to stick to it.

And stick to it I did!

As with most things, it was hardest at the beginning when I had to deliberately find time in the diary to squeeze yoga in as it hadn’t become a habit yet. Then as the second week went by, I started to really look forward to my daily yoga sessions. A day didn’t feel complete until I had done my yoga practice, whether it was in the morning, lunchtime or evening. By the time the final week rolled around, yoga had truly become part of my daily routine. It had become as second nature as brushing my teeth and I was happy to see that I could do a lot of the poses with greater ease and confidence.

What a difference 30 days make

At the outset of 2017 when I was a complete newbie to yoga, I did make some obvious progress as I went from knowing nothing to knowing something, e.g. how to hold basic poses, how to do fundamental flows etc. But I plateaued in improving my form probably around the six month mark. What I could do in December 2017 wasn’t wildly different to what was possible for me in July 2017.

However, with this recent 30 day yoga challenge, I could really see and feel the difference at the end of the month compared with where I was only 3o days prior. I was able to reach further and go deeper in many poses, and if I really wanted to I could do a whole session on my own without any verbal or visual guidance. For the yogis out there who are reading this, I was also able to actually touch my knee to nose before the step-through to one leg forward one leg back, and to hold the bukasana (crow pose) for a few seconds. Neither of these was ever possible for me before!

But really, how could 30 days beat a year and a half?

Quite simply, it comes down to regularity.

Doing a bit of yoga every single day over a short period of time made a bigger difference than doing it for an hour each week over a prolonged period.

With a once a week practice, my body never really got the chance to get used to new movements and to have them become muscle memory. Rather, my body was spending a part of each week’s class simply re-learning the old as opposed to building something new.

With a daily practice, there’s not enough time in between sessions to forget what I had done the day before. My body could reproduce the same actions as yesterday much quicker as there was no re-learning to be done. It was simply a matter of getting more and more used to the actions. This allowed space for adding more complicated movements and going into deeper stretches.

Numbers also tell a story

The thing about doing something only once a week is that it’s easy to lose a lot of weeks without you even noticing.

Looking back at my history of class attendance between January 2017 and July 2018, it turns out that I didn’t go as regularly as I thought I did. My total attendance tallied up to 36 classes which, at an hour a piece, only amounted to 36 hours of total practice. 36 hours over one and a half years?! Putting that into perspective, 36 hours is less than one standard working week! You could say that I had really only done yoga for a week in total. It’s little wonder that I made zero progress after the initial learning phase.

Compare this to the recent 30 days where each yoga session averaged 25 minutes:

30 days * 25 minutes = 750 minutes

750 minutes ÷ 60 minutes = 12.5 hours.

My total time on the mat ended up being 12.5 hours. At this same rate of practice, it would only take another two months of daily yoga practice to reach my prior year and a half total of 36 hours.

How this relates to piano

I sometimes hear parents speak about their children having learned the piano for X number of months or X number of years, and then using that time frame as an assessment of where they think their child should be in terms of playing ability. In some instances, it’s used as a direct comparison against other children of a similar age. “They have only been learning for six months and can do that. Why can’t my child do the same thing after a year?”

Taking my yoga story as an analogy, I think it goes to show that a year of lessons doesn’t always mean a year of practice.

How far a child progresses over a period of time isn’t only dependent on how many lessons they’ve had. It’s determined to a larger extent by how much time they spend working on quality piano practicing.

45 minutes a week over one year only amounts to 39 hours of lesson time (and that’s being generous as it assumes a 52-week year with no missed lessons which never happens).

45 minutes * 52 weeks = 2,340 minutes

2,340 minutes ÷ 60 minutes = 39 hours

If you consider a child who, in addition to their 45 minute weekly lesson, practices at home for just 15 minutes a day on the 6 days in between, that’s already an additional 90 minutes they spend on the piano every single week. That’s a whole lot of extra muscle memory and technique being developed. To compare their ability with another child who does no practice at all wouldn’t really be a fair comparison.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a little bit of practice every day makes a big difference to progress. It may seem daunting to do something every single day, but you don’t have to start big. Start with just a little bit. Maybe try playing one song 3 times every day for a week. Pretty soon, you might find yourself practicing 5 songs every day without even thinking about it.

Go on, take on a daily practice challenge and see where it can lead you!

Have you incorporated something into your daily habit? What kind of results did you see? Share with us in the comments below!