Setting Playing Goals for the New Year for Students and Parents
With the start of the New Year, now is the perfect time to decide what playing goals you would like to achieve for yourself! Some ideas for this may immediately come to mind, or conversely, you may feel overwhelmed by trying to narrow things down and choose which goals to pursue. Either way, I’d love to offer some tips for picking helpful and attainable goals!
Choose something specific and doable. What we mean by this is that we don’t want to be too general with our goals. For instance, simply saying, “I want to be better at violin,” is too broad and unfocused. Instead, we want to pick a goal that is clear and manageable, such as improving intonation, keeping the bow straight, or learning to play faster. This way you have an exact goal that you can work toward, and it will feel more approachable. To help even further with picking specific goals, we can boil down the parts of playing into three categories: Left-hand technique (think things like intonation, note timing, or shifting), right-hand technique (such as improving your bow grip, learning new articulations, or using different parts of the bow), and musical aspects (like dynamics, note reading, rhythm, and performing).
Break the goal down into smaller, easier steps. If we try to take on too big of an idea all at once, we’re more likely to feel overwhelmed and want to give up the goal. For instance, say you pick intonation as a goal. Rather than trying to immediately play a whole entire song perfectly in tune, we want to break the process down into bite-sized steps. This could look like first working on getting your A string notes more in tune, or working on getting a single scale precisely in tune. This is how we get from one level to the next, by taking small steps one at a time rather than trying to jump a huge distance.
Be consistent. The saying, “Practice makes perfect,” exists for good reason. It is only through steady and consistent practice that we build our skills and become better players. Imagine if you set aside just five minutes each practice session to work on your specific goal. If you did this five days a week over four weeks, that would be over an hour and a half of practice on that goal. Now imagine you did this over three months. Those five minutes during five days of the week would add up to five hours total of practice time on the goal. Imagine how much better you would be after that much time perfecting your skills. That amount of time would bring you lots of progress! Finally, we want to pick a smaller chunk of time to commit to practicing our goals. This way we make it much easier for us to stick to regularly.
I hope these tips help give you a clearer idea of how to set goals for yourself! Remember, we want to set as clear and precise a goal as possible, then break the goal into actionable and attainable steps, and finally be steady and consistent. With these three tips, there’s no limit to what you can learn and achieve on the violin!