Sometimes it can be very difficult to find motivation to pick up your instrument and practice. But it is necessary to find the motivation and push through the feeling in order to reach your goals. Especially in this difficult time with Covid-19, many are not able to have lessons, play concerts, or even have a decent practice space. Therefore, it is easy to lose motivation. Here I give my advice to what you can do when you want to find more motivation.
Have a goal
When you don’t have concerts or lessons coming up and you lose motivation, a great thing you can do is to determine a goal for yourself. It is good to have a long-term goal of where you want to be in 5 or 10 years, but you also need short-term goals. These goals can be a goal for half a year, one month, one week, or even just one practice session. It is good to have a goal and within that goal have smaller goals. An example of this could be if you want to learn circular breathing, then the long-term goal is to be able to do circular breathing well in a musical context. But this can feel like an overwhelming goal, so you need smaller goals in order to reach your final result. Short-term goals could be, to be able to do circular breathing without instrument, and then with the oboe reed and increasingly challenging yourself. This way you will have many smaller victories that can help you to keep motivation towards your final goal.
Remind yourself why you play
When we study and prepare for competitions, sometimes it is easy to lose sight of why we started playing in the first place. Most people started playing because they loved the sound of the instrument, wanted to play together with other people, or for other reasons. But when studying music, it can become hard to find the joy in playing but this is one of the most important things about playing music, and if you can remind yourself of why you love to play, you can find the motivation to keep improving.
Make a practice plan
Sometimes we lose motivation because we have too many different things going on or too many different pieces we need to prepare. If this is the case, a great way to find motivation and feel more in control is to make a practice plan. If you write down all the pieces you need to practice and make a detailed practice plan for each session, you will find out that you have more time than you think or that it is not as overwhelming as you initially thought.
Have fun with it
When we prepare for a concert or competition, we are often very critical to ourselves since we want to do our very best. This is great, but it can make every practice session mentally hard. Therefore, it can be a good idea to sometimes just have a bit of fun with playing. You can play a piece you really like, improvise, or something completely different. The important part is to feel happy about picking up your instrument and that it is fun to play, rather than it is difficult and you feel bad afterwards. Whatever it is that makes you have fun with your instrument, I recommend you to take a little time out of your practice to just have fun. Even if you don’t have a lot of time before a competition or concert, I am certain that you will play a lot better if you have the feeling of having fun while playing.
Evaluate yourself
It is important to evaluate yourself all the time and think about what you can do better, but it is also very important to evaluate what you do well. If you only think about all the things you need to improve, it is easy to feel like you don’t play well and lose motivation. But if you also think about what you are actually really good at, then you will have a lot of small victories and you will feel that you play very well. Once you have the feeling of being a good musician, it is easier for you to think about the things you need to improve without crushing your confidence.
These are some recommendations to what you can do to regain motivation. All of the things might not work for you, but if you are having trouble keeping up the motivation, I advise you to try out some or all of these tips, and I hope it can be a help for you. If you have any comments, critique or questions, you are very welcome to write me.
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