Listen to the Audio Version of this Guitar Article below.
I want to talk about a very important guitar practice mindset change that will help you drastically improve your playing. Not making this change often keeps guitar players at the same level for years…or forever.
Have you ever said this to yourself…
“I’ll move on to something new when I’ve mastered what I’m practicing now.”
So you don’t learn new chords, or new songs, or start playing lead guitar in a different position on the neck…etc. Because you are “not ready yet”.
What I’ve found over the last 30 year of teaching guitar privately is that too many guitar players want to stay in one place way too long. Waiting until they are “ready” to move on.
I call it… “the Guitar Progress Holding Pattern”.
It’s one reason I find so many “beginning” guitar players who have actually been playing guitar for 15 or more years.
Now actual guitar practice is a factor too 🙂 But even with minimal consistent practice on the guitar you can make progress.
The problem with the “I’m going to wait…” syndrome is this. Actually mastering a particular thing on the guitar often does not happen until you start to learn other pieces of the puzzle.
So muscles you develop in learning a new chord will help you play an old chord more easily. So waiting to learn new chords has actually slowed down your progress on the old chords.
Playing guitar is like a huge mosaic. A huge puzzle. But it’s much harder to put a puzzle together when you don’t know what the picture is.
If you were putting a puzzle together and desided to only focus on the a small block in the corner. Not doing anything else until you had that corner finished. You’d be working on the puzzle for a very long time.
Working on other parts of that puzzle at the same time helps you move toward your goal much faster.
And once you have bits and pieces of the whole puzzle in place, it’s so much easier to finish that corner. Because you now understand how that corner fits into the whole picture.
Will it feel uncomfortable to move into uncharted territory before you “think” you are ready. You bet it will. Growth at anything lives on the edge of the comfort zone.
The other extreme is guitar players who jump from one thing to the other without taking time to work and improve on them. But my experience has shown me that waiting too long to move on is more often what happens.
So get out of the guitar progress holding pattern. Don’t land, but set a new course for adventure on your guitar journey. Learn something new today.
