I know that I'm not alone in struggling from time to time with motivation. It can be a tricky subject. Some days I pick up my flute and don’t want to set it back down. Other days I dread the thought of going into my office to practice. I find a way to procrastinate by working on other things.
With a busy work schedule, unavoidable time commitments, and the pressure of living abroad and integrating into a new culture, it seems like it will always be difficult to squeeze the perfect amount of practice time into my day.
But until the world turns onto the perfect day where I can spend a few hours devoted to the flute before calmly doing yoga and teaching from my home (no traveling!) I’ll have to stay creative and come up with new ways to stay motivated.
First let's chat a bit about motivation. There are two main types:
Internal Motivation: Ideally we would all be intrinsically motivated to wake up early every day, exercise, and get in a good, hearty warm-up on our flutes before dashing out the door to our first “real-world” responsibility. The pressure would come from within and it would always be personally satisfying.
External Motivation: In a realistic world motivation comes extrinsically - we have a recital coming up to prepare for, we want to audition for a place in an orchestra or for graduate school. The pressure to prepare and practice is coming from the outside and we need to find a way to adapt in order to feel successful.
How can we manage the different types of motivation and use them to our advantage? One tip is to use Social Media!
I recently wrote a post about managing your practice time effectively (see it here on my Facebook page) and the second rule of thumb was to avoid social media while you practice. Ignore that, for now.
Social Media in the Practice Room!?
Yes, sometimes to keep motivated it’s a good idea to bring social media in the practice room.
Use Facebook groups like “Etude of the Week” to motivate you to work up an etude each week. This is a great way to work through more music every week, bring in a bit of performance pressure into your practice room (which is great for those of us who are outside of school and don’t have as many performance opportunities as before) and get some good, constructive feedback on your video! Then repeat the next week, as you work your way through an etude book with the others in the group.
Hop onto Instagram with the #100DaysofPractice hashtag. Record a snippet of each of your practice sessions and post it on your Instagram page. You can post as little or as much as you’d like and it can be of any part of your practice session. Use the time spent listening to your practice session wisely and try to really focus on what you were doing – make note of things that went well or poorly, or moments that didn’t go as you had thought. Most importantly, focus on the positive as well as the negative things! Sometimes it’s hard not to dwell on negative thoughts, but try to remember that you enjoy playing the flute and that the process is more important than the end goal.
You can even use Twitter to tweet out different things you are working on. What did you work on today in the practice room? Were you struggling with long tones, double tonguing, or scale work? Or maybe the second movement of the Bach Partita in A Minor was causing you troubles. Tweet out a statement about your practice session with the hashtag #FluteAdventures.
Create your own, or join an existing, supportive social media flute community. Whether you’re home for summer vacation and don’t have the easy access to your teacher or flute studio, you’ve just graduated from school and don’t know where to share your musical thoughts, or you are an amateur musician who wants to share your music with the world, you can share your musical journey with others.
And remember – you are on your own musical journey. Don’t get caught in the infinity loop of comparisons. Let yourself shine and enjoy sharing your music with others, without letting their music intimidate you into silence.
Have fun!
~Krystle Giddey