How To Succeed At Playing Guitar WITHOUT Practicing

Oftentimes I get asked my students, lauren, what's the number one thing I can do to ensure that I'm going to get better at the guitar or be successful? And they're really surprised when I tell them it has nothing to do with the guitar at all.

Lauren, how can I get better at the guitar if it has nothing to do with the guitar? Well, you still have to practice. Okay. Hands down, the guitar is not easy. We do have to practice. But the number one thing that's going to keep you from reaching your guitar playing goals is in here. It's actually your mind. Your mind is the number one thing that you have to train when you're doing anything new. And I'm going to go over three of the most common mental mistakes that students make when they're learning and what you can do to correct this to ensure that you don't give up on your dream of playing the guitar too soon. One of the biggest things I see with students, particularly my adult students, is that they come in with these really high expectations. And I love big thinking and I love goals. But understanding that you're not going to go from absolute beginner to being Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page overnight, it's going to take time. It's going to take years. It might even take a decade. And if you're someone sitting here going, well, Lauren, I'm in my 60s, 70s, or 80s, you know, I don't get a lot of time left here. Don't worry. Just do what you can with what you got. All right? I don't know if I'm going to be here tomorrow. All right? I'm 39 right now. I'm going to be 40 next year. None of us know how much time we have left, but guitar is not something that's going to happen overnight. So I want you to reset your expectations to understand that one, you're a beginner and you're learning, and maybe you've been playing for a couple years and you're still at that beginner level. Well, guess what? You're still learning. As long as you stick with the process and never give up, you are going to continue to improve year after year, month after month. I tell students, I say, listen, the goal is for you to just get 1% better every single week. And at the end of the year, that might not add up to a lot, but you're going to be way better than you were the year before. Celebrate those baby steps. I know the big steps, the big things are what we want to do, but you have to remember this is a long journey, and you have to celebrate every single step along the way. Every little victory, no matter how little it is. It could be playing your D chord cleanly or finally getting the upstrom down, or actually, maybe just getting your timing down. Is a huge win for a lot of students, and I think they overlook that in the beginning. Another big mistake I see my students doing is negative talk or false beliefs. You know, I've had this happen so many times. You know, someone will be playing the guitar and, like, oh, well, this really sucks right now. Or this really doesn't sound so good. Or Olivia Newton dachshund. Sorry about that. So you might catch yourselves saying some of these things. Oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not where I want to be. This is too hard. I'm never going to be able to do this. I suck right now. Well, guess what? You're learning. You're supposed to suck right now, okay? Even I was horrible at the guitar. You are learning, okay? But you need to change that. Talk inside your head. It's not because you're too old. It's not because you're not talented enough. I'm the only person in my family that is musically inclined, all right? I had to put a lot of hard work and effort into. Into learning to play guitar. So I have no musical gene in my body, okay? No one else in my family does it, all right? You're not too old. I have. Students are in their 80s and 90s. Actually, I just had a gentleman from Bath, England, who emailed me the other day, and he said, you know, I use your songs and stuff with my band. The average age of the band is 78, okay? You are never too old to learn to play music, so get that out of your head, all right? Get the talent myth out of your head. It's not that you're not talented enough. It's just you haven't put in enough of the work. So when you're sitting down and you're playing that D chord and it's sounding like this or your C chord, and it's sounding crappy, all right? Understand? Just say, you know what? Maybe my C chord isn't sounding so great today, but in two weeks, it's going to sound better, and I'm going to keep working on this, and I'm learning. And you know what? This actually feels better than it did last month. Maybe it's not perfect, all right? Maybe it's not perfect right now, but recognize that something is better than it was the month before. And how do you do that? All right, which brings me to mistake number three. For a lot of students, they give up too soon because they don't know if they're making any progress. Okay. And that's a mental thing that can be very demoralizing to be working on something for months, or for some of you, you've been at this even years. And to say, I don't even know if I'm any better than I was a year ago. That's why in my guitar courses, I get people on the metronome as soon as possible. Keep a journal. You should be writing down all the wins you're having along the day. What you're feeling, get those feelings out on paper. You need to recognize those feelings and start scoring yourself. You know, I do chord change exercises with my students. We'll pick a couple chords, C to G, and we put it to a metronome, and we go back to four. Back and forth, back and forth. And I say, Great, week number one. We're at 26 chord changes. That's not very fast at all. But I say, okay, we're gonna work on this. And then next week when you come back, I want to see that number go up. And then they come back next week, and it's 36. Okay. And again, 36 is nothing to write home about. But you can visually see on paper that you went from 26 to 36. That's progress. I know it's not 100. And that's where we want to get. A lot of students feel like they're going in circles, especially on YouTube, because there's so many. There's so much information on YouTube, and I love teaching on YouTube, but I love people getting people off of YouTube and into one of my courses onto a blueprint. Because when you have a blueprint of knowing this is step one, this is step two, this is step three, one. It takes away a lot of that overwhelm. It takes away that feeling of, like, being in the rat race, like, you're going all over the place. Oh, I'm over here. Now I'm over there. I'm going to try this. I want to do that. And you're all over the place, and you're not really focusing on anything, which makes you feel like you're not learning anything. That's what I do. In the seven level system, we work on level one, then we build from there. Level two, level three. All right. It's a blueprint. It is step by step, and it takes away a Lot of the thinking and we track, we do a lot of tracking in the system because I know how important it is for you to see those numbers going up. All right. It's one of the first things I get you on is starting to track your progress. How fast are you going? Because when you see that number going up, like I said, it's a scorecard. And when the score goes up, it makes you feel great about yourself and it actually motivates you to, to keep going. So if you want to see how helpful it can be to just have a little bit of structure in your learning, then I highly recommend you go grab my free guitar crash course. It's absolutely free. It's not going to cost you anything. Just have to give me an email, all right, and you'll get a PDF workbook that comes with it. But I'm going to show you how to use a metronome. I'm going to show you how to set goals so that you can start making progress, you can start getting motivated about your guitar playing. So if you're interested in that, go to the link in the description below, click on that sign up and I guarantee you with just that little crash course, I promise you, you're going to make more progress with your guitar playing than you have on your own. For years. I went the self learned route for a very long time. I was self taught myself for probably about a decade and I didn't have much to write home about after that decade. And I finally sat down and was like, if I want to get good at this thing, I need to get some help. You can only go so far by yourself. You do eventually, at some point need to get help. And if you're at that stage where you're like, okay, I need a little bit more guidance, I need a little bit extra hand holding, I need some structure. Go check out my free guitar course. Even if you're not an absolute beginner, go check it out. I guarantee I'm going to tell you something, you're going to learn something that you didn't know and you're going to find helpful. So go to the link in the description below, Go click on that and I hope to see you in a lesson real soon.