Let’s make piano plans for 2024!

The New Year is a great time to set new goals for ourselves, and I thought today it could be good for us to come together to share our goals and support each other in achieving them. As a piano teacher, I notice how often success in achieving goals is linked to the quality of the goal itself, so today I’d like to share three pieces of advice to help you create the most sustainable and motivating goals possible! Then, I’ll share some of my own goals for this year, which are taken directly from these pieces of advice that I'm sharing with you. Let's get into it!

Choose to start your plans from a place of joy and delight

Too often, I see people create piano goals that are more based around demonstrating their success or worthiness as students rather than a desire to learn how to love the piano more. This is really unfortunate because goals built to demonstrate a musician’s value turns the piano itself into an instrument of judgment. The piano will always be a sign of their potential inadequacy, and this judgment is very difficult to get up from under if this is the place you’ve started from.

I think the idea that your piano plans must always be a source of self-improvement might stem from the link between music education and formal education. Formal education is very much built around measuring mastery of a topic and evaluating a learner against their peers. Formal teaching methods have transferred to piano instruction, and sadly, so have some of its priorities.

But the idea that your piano is a tool for measurement and evaluation could not be further from the truth. Your piano does not judge you. Music is a gift for your joyful, creative expression, and as such, your piano is itself a tool for that creative expression! If you would like to step into your creative identity this year, you need to make a decision that all your goals are going to prioritize your enjoyment of piano.

Ego vs. heart-based goals

Now that we have agreed to start from a place of joy and delight, my second piece of advice for you is to try to notice the difference between ego-based goals and heart-based goals.

Ego-based goals are the kinds of goals that make us feel that other people would be really impressed if they knew we were working towards this goal. Heart-based goals are the kinds of goals that make us happy and satisfied to accomplish, even if no one else agrees with us that they are good goals, or even knew what we were doing.

I won’t pretend that you can completely banish your ego, but I am going to encourage you to try to find some balance with it this year. Here’s why this is so important to your piano learning:

Every time you choose an ego-based goal, your self-worth becomes attached to how well you play. I can tell you, unfortunately from my own painful experience, that that is a miserable way to sit down at your piano. But I can also tell you from experience that if you choose heart-based goals, you will be constantly growing towards your own truer self-expression. That kind of motivation is incredibly self-sustaining, and it makes practicing a joy.

My wish for you is that you will be able to find the courage to continually choose heart-based goals for yourself this year!

Balance big and small projects

New Year’s is often a time for big ambitions, but there’s beauty in small ambitions, too! My third piece of advice is that you consider finding a balance between big goals and small goals this year. Big goals are the kinds of projects that deliberately grow your skills in a really noticeable way. Small goals feel like lower-hanging fruit; they’re projects that simply review skills you already have or expand on them in a small way.

It’s really hard for my students to find a balance between big goals and small goals! Usually they’re so eager to learn piano that they only want to take on big projects and only practice songs that are going to expand their skills in ways that their friends and family would notice.

I totally get that because it's so exciting to see your skills grow. But the benefit of including smaller projects in your plans for this year is that you gain a greater sense of accomplishment over the course of that year and you gain a greater variety of experience.

Let’s take the goal of learning a new song as an example. There’s a huge benefit to learning a song from start to finish, so in general this a great goal to set. But if you're only choosing really big goals for yourself, as in really big songs, you'll only get to experience that benefit maybe three or four times a year.

On the other hand, if you were to take on only one really big song and intersperse it with smaller/easier songs, you could experience the satisfaction of completing music maybe 20, even 30 times a year! Can you imagine how amazing it would feel to know you’d learned that many songs this year??

My goals for 2024

Now that I’ve shared my three pieces of advice, I’d like to share with you how I apply them to my own goals.

I should start by saying that I too felt the pressure to choose an ego-based goal when I was planning out my goals! As a piano teacher, I felt some pressure to choose a piano-based goal that was going to be very impressive for my students and my new social media friends. But fortunately, I have enough experience choosing (and getting burned by!) ego-based goals that I started to recognize the heaviness that I felt in my heart when I started to think about that.

So I pulled myself out of that idea, and I started to really reflect on what would really make me feel really proud of myself and excited to do, even if no one else thought that it was cool.

For me, my heart-based goals really came down to teaching. I don't really have any piano-based goals for myself this year, but I do have a lot of teaching-based goals for myself this year. Achieving these teaching goals would make me feel very proud of myself, even if no one else agreed with me that they were awesome.

I can split my teaching-based goals into one big goal and one small goal.

My big goal is to learn how to expand the kind of content that I can create. I’ve really enjoyed learning how to create videos and how to talk about piano and music theory on YouTube for the last couple of years. Up to this point, my videos have been anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes long. I would like to expand on this and try my hand at planning and delivering longer-form content like a one-hour webinar.

This is a “big” project for me because I have never planned a one-hour webinar before, and I would basically be starting this from scratch. I don't even know what I want to host a webinar on at this point! I will be undertaking this project from start to finish, and that’s why it’s a big goal!

Edit: With the support of my amazing YouTube community, this goal became a reality! On Valentine’s Day this year, I hosted my very first interactive webinar, Introduction to Playing By Ear. Learn more about it here!

My small goal is related to my music composition. This goal was partially inspired by how much engagement I've had here on this channel on my videos related to songwriting. I'd forgotten how much I like talking about music composition and how much I enjoyed writing music myself. I have a practice of collecting snippets and fragments of music that I think sound nice in a small composition book that I keep at my piano. But it's been a really long time since I pulled any of these fragments together into a complete song. So my smaller goal for this year is going to be to see if any of my existing fragments of music fit well enough with each other that I could string them into a longer song.

This is an example of a “small” goal because I'm working with what I already have. I'm not starting from scratch. I'm just going to be building on something I already have. I’m not putting any pressure on myself to write an entire song from start to finish — I’m just working with what I have and seeing if any two fragments fit together like puzzle pieces.

What do you think?

I hope outlining my advice and my plan was helpful to you. If any part of this has been inspiring to you, I would love to hear about your own goals for this year. You’re invited to leave a comment on this video, and maybe we can find some community as we support each other in our piano plans for 2024. :)

Here's to your goals big and small for 2024! I hope you have a wonderful, joyful, and successful year ahead :)