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Feeling discouraged
My progress this benchmark has been lackluster. While the hammer ons and pull offs were okay (I could do the first two challenges of the week), I struggled through the scale (again), and the chords (again), and the chord transitions were once again awful. I did not make any progress at all, and my notes from this time were pretty much identical to my notes from last time.
Has anyone else experienced lack of improvement (or even backsliding) between benchmarks? How do you handle it? I admit it’s making me want to put the guitar away and not play because it’s so frustrating to see negative improvement despite putting in an hour a day four days a week.
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13 Replies
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Hi @Rocktopus , IMHO what you’re experiencing right now (frustration) is normal in the course of learning to play guitar. I have been there too. What you need to keep in mind is that NO ONE is going to go from zero to rock star in the amount of time that you’ve been playing guitar, period! Just keep your preverbal nose to the grindstone and things will come together for you. Also, you’ve got to keep it fun for yourself – if you’re not having fun, put the guitar down for a while and come back to it later. An old TAC mentor of mine told me the keys to learning guitar are patients, persistence, practice, more practice and…………………. (wait for it)…………………….more practice!
Good luck on your journey and DON’T GIVE UP – ever.
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Thank you for the encouragement. Never give up, never surrender, right?
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Once you surrender don’t forget you have joined the winning team! Here we play, come what may. It’s not profound but the idea is sound. Simple and yet not easy until the habit forms and then you begin to see progress uninhibited by ego mi amigo….amiga didn’t sound as good. Expectations and “shoulds” are jettisoned and replaced with small win after small win in a sea of fun. Creativity abounds. But none of this happens until frustration is moved from an inhibitor to a motivator. Good direction combinded with methodic intervals aimed at progress is the secret sauce to accomplish this and throw in a chat board to explore, query and solve and I say…Team TAC for the win.
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Perfect— it’s how you look at things. Move frustration from being an inhibitor to a motivator. Who wants to hear about someone who has climbed a small mountain? The difficulty is where the excitement is.
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@the-old-coach : had to respond here, no room left in the layout. : ) ..The brick wall is real….now I look for it…I dance in front of it in joyful reverie…..this is the place where I used to find myself working a skill and it seemed like I was watching paint dry…..with encouragement from those who had faced the wall before me and learned how conquer it, watch paint dry? I did it and to be fair I whinned alot. But even though I wanted to stop, i did not stop and then… it happened: a brick fell…..and then they all fell and off I went. I was suffering in the repetition but it was that very thing that I was resisting that ultimately proved the solution. Now I revel in repetition….I realized that most music is repetitive. I used to need a map for success, now I need a map to the next wall. (it is the same map, shhhhhh.)
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Jeff— This is the coolest post you have made here! Simply hilarious……. and simply…. true. The most improvement comes from what starts-out as the hardest task.
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Rocktopus says– “I did not make any progress at all”….
Wait a minute….Oh, but you DID! You gotta work your brain and hands a bit to improve! You gotta really push your noggin for it to absorb it all. Your brain does its best work storing this stuff up—– when you are asleep….. It WILL catch up.
Think about it…….. Your callouses didn’t come from easy guitar-workouts. They ONLY come when you have “pushed” your fingertips thru some pretty hard workouts. They get tougher and better only because of the work.
That’s exactly the way you want it to be…….. challenging…….. difficult at times……. pushed right to the edge of your ability. THAT’S when improvement happens!
You likely made a TON of progress (you’ll see!).
TOC
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Rocktopus! Love the name 🙂
Everyone has moments of discouragement. There have been times where I haven’t touched my guitar for weeks for various reasons! Frustration, time, feeling sorry for myself… we are humans and all of this happens and is normal ❤️
For me, the most important thing in moments like these is a shift in focus a little bit – to find something that brings me JOY. Like I need a joy infusion lol. When it all comes down to it, it’s that feeling that keeps us doing things. That’s what keeps our head and our heart in it.
And yes, hard work and discipline can and will be a part of learning any new meaningful thing. But it’s okay to take a break from that part of it if it’s not also giving us the joy of progress.
Doesn’t mean you have to put the guitar down though. One tool that I have used is to look up some songs with chords I know well (the good ‘ol 3 chord tunes are a good start!), and then search YouTube for live versions or some good covers and then just play along and have some fun with ZERO pressure of progress or anything like that… literally just for fun. And it can be as on point or as “horrible” with missed notes, losing places, etc and it doesn’t matter. There’s something about the video thing that helps to smooth out our own mistakes and it carries the song even when we ‘mess up’.
You can strum, experiment with some picking… follow what feels fun 🙂 Don’t forget that the guitar and music making is there to serve us and not the other way around ❤️
At least that’s what I believe 🙂
Have fun!!! 🙂
Maggie
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Maggie– great post! I also think the real fun/ the most fun in guitar comes when you just “get lost in it”…… turn your brain off and just play and have fun.
Added benefit— your brain is watching and taking all of that in, too…..
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This reply was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by the-old-coach.
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This reply was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by
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I love your solution of the joy infusion — I found myself messing around with chords and found a few that sound interesting together. I had a lot of fun strumming that, messing around, and not doing the lessons, haha. So there’s a small win. 🙂
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@Rocktopus : you now have in your hands one of the keys to fast progress, don’t let go….this is a magnificent small win. Celebrate the sound that wood box vibrates out. Even one string one note is a celebration. If you ever run out of the joyful play part, come back and we can all find it together. It seems to be ridiculously contagious.
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Hi @Rocktopus,
I’m a 2 plus year TAC veteran and member of multiple other sites. What I’ve learned over the past nearly 3 years is that breakthroughs come in multiple sizes. Most of the time they’re tiny w’ittle, w’ittle baby-steps. These you can find regularly if play close attention – you do that thing slightly better than you did yesterday. I always called them nuggets and in the beginning that’s all I had because I was terrible back then, I could do the Thursday/Friday stuff at all. But after a while I began enjoying those days more and more. You can’t let whether you knocked the daily lesson out of the park dictate whether you’re having fun learning guitar or not. You gotta look elsewhere.
We all want to instantly get better but the reality is, most of us improve very slowly. Try to get 1% better each week. Did you know that if you could get 1% better every week, your growth compounds to about 1.01^52 ≈ 1.67 after a year — so you’d be about 67% better than where you started.
I have found this to be absolutely true, by playing every day (or at least 98.5% of days) I have easily improved more than 50% annually.
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Hi everyone,
I wanted to thank those who replied for taking the time to share your perspectives about what worked for you on your guitar journeys, and the encouragement to never quit. I appreciate it. 🤘
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