Senior Instructor at Halifax Guitar Lessons
Our attitude. It affects everything we do in life.
That means your attitude will also affect how you learn to play the guitar. It can literally determine if you will be successful or if you will get frustrated and quit learning how to play.
Pretty bold statements I know but I have experienced it myself and I have seen it played out in many guitar students.
Finding out where your attitude is at and where it needs to be will help you decide what you really want and how to get it when it comes to learning how to play the guitar.
Here are 3 types of attitudes that I see in guitar students and how it can affect your ability to learn to play the guitar.
1. You Doubt That You Can Learn To Play The Guitar
This is the most popular attitude by far.
Many people absolutely want to learn how to play the guitar. They can see how much fun it is and how much fun they could have doing it.
But we’ve been taught that skilled musicians, athletes and other stars in our society are “gifted” and were “born” with talent.
Since we have not learned to play the guitar yet and we struggled if attempted it seems to be enough proof for most of us to believe we are not born with talent for this.
So, most people who start to learn how to play the guitar begin with a huge cloud of doubt.
This makes it difficult to learn because instead of celebrating your successes you will tend to focus on your mistakes or how difficult it is for you and propagate the belief. Or worse, you may never even try to learn to play the guitar.
It does not have to be that way.
2. You Flip Flop Between Thinking You Can And Can’t Learn To Play The Guitar
This is a step above doubting in some ways but a step below in some ways.
If you can move beyond doubt then you have a chance to be successful because you will at the very least be willing to give learning to play the guitar a try.
Then when you first start learning to play the guitar there are moments when you get something right and it works. You can then start to see that some things are possible.
However, this does not usually last long. The next day the same thing you got down the day before is not working quite as well and you start to doubt again. Or a new thing seems impossible.
This is typical for most people once they move beyond the total doubt phase. You flip flop between thinking you can and can’t learn to play the guitar.
Unfortunately, if you base your ability to learn on these day-to-day happenings then when you hit a long string of bad days your confidence erodes quickly and usually disappears. Most people then quit and stop learning.
That’s not what you want.
3. You Are Confident You Can And Will Learn To Play The Guitar
This is the winning attitude of course. Getting here can be difficult for most people. I know it was for me.
That’s because learning how to play the guitar is not easy and if you try to do it on your own or with untrained guitar teachers you will have mixed results and usually of the frustrating kind.
That makes it very hard to really believe you can do it and have that confidence. You have to constantly hope that maybe there is a better or easier way to learn to play the guitar.
I assure you though, if you really want to learn how to play and if you keep trying, you can overcome all of the obstacles that present themselves in front of you.
That’s what I had to do for many years until I finally found the key to it all and then knew for sure I could do this!
The Key That Will Help You Maintain A Confident Attitude While Learning To Play The Guitar
There is one thing you can do to increase the chances that you will be successful at learning to play the guitar.
The key is to maintain your confidence level up. Pretty obvious. However, as you may know, that is very difficult to do when you are guessing. What you need to do is what I did and find the right guitar teacher.
The right teacher will know how to help you overcome all of your obstacles and lead you step by step until you achieve what you want on the guitar.
This teacher needs to be highly trained on how to teach and more specifically how to teach the guitar. They must have experience and proof they have helped many other people like you and that they can help you too.
I will admit that these teachers are rare so you have to be diligent and do your research and ask a lot of questions. Once you find them you will have found the key to learning how to play the guitar!