Today I'd like to share about a bad habit that I used to have, one that I see in my students from time to time. This habit involves taking an idea that seems fun and overthinking it to the point of becoming intimidated by the possible futures it might bring. Can you relate to this?

Today I’d like to address a concern that comes up when someone is about to spend a lot of money, and that is, how do I avoid choosing an instrument that is quickly going to become obsolete? It’s a valid concern. A keyboard is a big investment and in our day in age when innovation happens pretty quickly and a lot of technology is seen as essentially disposable, it’s natural to worry that you’re about to throw your money away on something that won’t be usable in a few years.

So let’s talk about this. How do we choose a keyboard that has some longevity?

Piano lessons are a really interesting educational setting to me.

On the one hand, with the vast history of music to explore, students objectively have the greatest choice of options in terms of what they could learn, compared to other educational topics.

And yet, out of all the educational settings I have taught in (a lot!), piano learners feel the most limited in what they are allowed to learn because of their expectations of what piano lessons are supposed to look like.

My piano students often know they want to give up on a song weeks before they build up the courage to tell me! Often the reason they hesitate to admit how they’re feeling about a song is because they don’t want to appear undisciplined. There’s a longstanding tradition of suffering through piano lessons in order to “get better”. No pain, no gain — right?

Well, no.

I think there are certain kinds of pain that are actually really detrimental to growing musicianship, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

Today I’d like to talk about a common struggle that I’ve noticed in piano lessons, in the hopes that it helps others on their piano journey. I’ve noticed that the students who have the hardest time in piano lessons are the ones who wait for me to tell them if they’ve played their song correctly, rather than actively listening to themselves and trying to catch their own mistakes. Why does this happen? And what can we do about it?

If you want to grow in your independence as a piano player, one of the best skills you can learn is the ability to isolate and identify the things that are bothering you.

For many people, this means resisting mental and emotional habits they’ve surrendered to for years.

If you’re at the stage in your piano journey where you're still trying to become comfortable in reading new notes, it’s okay to look for shortcuts in your music as a way of helping you understand your song.

A shortcut could be anything from noticing a note on line 2 is the same one that you labelled on line 1, or noticing that a phrase, hand position, or chord progression repeats itself.

If you’re a parent who would like to support their child in learning piano, help them find opportunities to teach other people what they’re learning in their piano lessons.

Have you ever heard the saying, “If you really want to know a subject, teach it?” In my experience, that saying is very true — I constantly learn new aspects about music the longer I teach it — and it applies to kids as much as it applies to adults.

My last video on performance mindset got some amazing feedback, probably more than anything else I've posted online. Multiple people told me their perfectionism and fear of performance ruined their ability to play music, even for fun.

I felt I wanted to response to some of these commenters, to give them an extra step in their path to reconnecting with their musical ability. So I sat down and recorded a few videos sharing some of the lessons I’d learned that helped me overcome my perfectionism, in case it could help them. Here’s one of those lessons in case it can help you, too.