The positive effects of struggling

In my guitar lessons I teach students of a variety of age and experience levels. Over the years I have noticed a particular issue with a ‘certain type’ of younger student that I think is worth talking about. This is specifically an issue with children who are generally quite bright, have slightly advanced motor and/or cognitive abilities for their age and tend to be good at any new skill they turn their hand to. Their progression tends to follow a similar structure which looks like this

·       A great first lesson where they are able to do everything that is asked of them, despite maybe never having held a guitar before.

·       A 1-2 month long period of accelerated learning where they breeze through new material and practice regularly at home.

·       A lesson where a technique appears that is too technically difficult for them to achieve within the lesson time.

·       A sharp drop off in home practice that exacerbates the difficulty by stymying their technical progress.

·       At this point lessons become a mixture of moving on to other material to maintain interest and practice, whilst occasionally coming back to the difficult technique in order to not give up. Sometimes other techniques come up in other lessons that similarly give them trouble.

·       The parents take the child’s reduced practice time as evidence that they are no longer interested in the instrument and cease their lessons.

With these students what is often happening could be considered an aversion to struggling. Generally they find the entry level skills required to do most things fairly easy. People tell them they’re good at those things, which feels nice, and so they continue to do them. On the face of it that’s an excellent thing. The opposite happens all too often, where someone at a young age is told they’re not very good at singing, drawing or maths, and takes that as a signal not to do that thing anymore. Unsurprisingly they grow into adults who can’t sing, draw or do maths because of this, despite all of those being things they could have improved over time.

In both cases the children have internalised the idea that you are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something naturally. For the children who tend to be good at most things struggling with the guitar can be a particularly difficult challenge. With other instruments, such as piano, drums and singing, it is possible to play with poor technique but still get a result that sounds like music. This is because striking a drum, pressing a key or singing a word off-key with any technique at all still produces a sound of some sort, even if it’s an imperfect one. This allows you to finish the piece and go back and improve it later.

With instruments like the guitar, clarinet or violin the technique to play them is far less forgiving. In some circumstance it can be possible to do 9 out of 10 things right and still have the instrument produce no sound at all!

To a child who is used to being good at everything this presents a challenge, as this may be the first time they have ever come across something that is going to require an extended period of focus and improvement in order to have a breakthrough. They may not have done something imperfectly before, and it can create a sense of cognitive dissonance that stops them wanting to pick up the instrument.

At this point this is about more than just their progress on the guitar, but about how they deal with the inevitable future challenges they’re going to face in all areas of their life.

Having had a fair bit of experience with this particular issue I’ve found that the best way to deal with it is to manage expectations early on. We talk a lot in lessons about what the actual purpose of learning is and what the process looks like in your brain (there are some interesting chapters in Danel Levitin’s ‘This is Your Brain on Music’ that are helpful here). We also talk about the idea of ‘permission to fail’ (as discussed in ‘The Inner Game of Music’ by Barry Green) and how that can help to enjoy the process of becoming better at something.

When the lessons are recontextualised to be about learning how to learn, finding enjoyment in the process of learning and how that process involves seeking out mistakes and making them again and again, the vast majority of students begin to find the fun in it once more. The idea that making mistakes is a valuable part of learning means they cease to be something to be avoided, and become an almost enjoyable part of the process in their own right. The guitar becomes a vehicle for a wider lesson that can be applied beyond music and taken into school and other areas of life beyond.

It’s also worth mentioning that this doesn’t happen for everybody. For some students this blockage is harder to get past, and the thing that ultimately may lead them to overcome it is to try a new skill, a different instrument or a craft, and to come up against those same issues again and again in different scenarios. Ultimately the lessons we learn best are the ones that feel more like discoveries, and so finding out the value of struggling for themselves may still help to get them to where they need to be.

A final thing to consider if you’re finding that your child frequently gives up when things get difficult, whether that be guitar or at more general tasks, is how often they see you deal with the same challenges. It’s easy to tell a kid what to do, but any parent knows that most kids automatically do the opposite of what they are told. Instead, consider taking up a new difficult hobby yourself and let them see you modelling the behaviour you want to see in them. Try to find enjoyment in new challenges, laugh with them at the mistakes you make before getting back up and trying again. Then watch how quickly they start to do the same.

Plus you might learn a little something yourself along the way.