What To Do When You Lose Focus On Guitar Practice Too Easily?
How often do you practice guitar for a few minutes and immediately find yourself losing focus and thinking about something else?
Does it happen every day? Multiple times every day?
Is it happening right now as you read this newsletter?
Do you even remember what you just read? (I don’t. Let me reread it before I write the rest…)
You may wonder to yourself if you are just broken, cursed to never be able to hold focus on your practicing for more than a few minutes at a time.
Is it all for naught? Is all that practice time wasted, and you will not ever reach your goals?
Well, no, it isn’t. You just haven’t set up your practice time yet to keep this from happening.
While there are more than a few ways to keep yourself from losing focus (and an entire industry set on selling you the latest “productivity” secrets), I have found one method that is so simple but so effective and will immediately have an effect on the quality of your practice time, and how long you can focus.
And rather than sell it to you, I’ll gladly give it for free (*)
And it’s kinda funny too, which helps.
In the video below, you will see an in-depth explanation of this method, which you can use immediately. Check it out and start practicing!
(*) After all, the more you realize that you do have enough time to practice and that you can improve substantially with just a few focused minutes, the more likely it is that you will also check out my guitar courses… hey, I’m tryin’ to make a livin’ here.
Case in point: if you’re looking for something to test your newfound super-focus on, take a look at my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course to expand your knowledge of chord and harmony, and supercharge your knowledge of the fretboard and the fun you can have with your guitar.
Video Transcription
Hello, internet; So nice to see you! Some time ago, a student asked me how to use their concentration power for practicing. What does it mean? Well, again, we are limited in our concentration power, we are limited in the amount of concentration we can put into a practice session, it may have happened to you that you start practicing and you’re super concentrated. And then after a while, your mind wanders off and you start noodling on your guitar and you’re not really practicing anymore, you’re just noodling. And there’s nothing bad about noodling, but it’s not practicing. And you get much better if you practice instead of noodling.
So, we were doing in a past video, I was talking about these and saying that you have two solutions, the first one is to make the most of what you have. And that was the previous video, which I will link on the top right. And the second solution was to learn how you can increase your concentration power, and how to become a concentration monster, so you can stay perfectly concentrated for a long amount of time, like a laser.
How do you do that? How do you reach Zen-level concentration for practicing guitar? How do you up your inner game of music so that you can do whatever you want with this instrument? Well, here’s how, a student of mine asked me how to increase their concentration power when they practice. And this is my answer.
‘So, I want to talk about focus, and specifically, how do I improve my ability to focus in general?’
‘Very good. So, you previously asked the question about what to do with your current level of concentration power. I’m not saying that word. Okay. Now we’re talking about instead how to increase that capacity.
Okay. There is more than one trick you can use. What you see, when people have a low concentration power, or when they try to concentrate for too long anyway, there are several tricks that you can use to increase your concentration power. What do you notice when people are either having a low concentration power, or they’re trying to concentrate for an inordinately long amount of time is that at a certain point, their mind wanders around, and they do something else, I’m saying something completely obvious, but it’s important to know that this happens.
So, after a certain point, you’re concentrating, and then you lose track. Then if you try again, after a certain point, you’re concentrating and then you lose track. Okay, that’s normal. That’s actually a defense mechanism. In your mind, you don’t want to concentrate on a single thing. For too long, you always want to be aware of your surroundings. So, your mind at a certain point is like, okay, there was enough on this little detail. Let’s check if there are tigers around, okay? Because your mind is still thinking about that. Okay.
But we can overcome that. Okay, so here’s the trick. You’re gonna get a timer, and we’re gonna get one, great, but you’re gonna get a special kind of timer. You sometimes can find these in software on phones and other things, but I like to have a physical one, you’re gonna get a gym timer. The gym timers have something special that they keep repeating the same interval of time. So, they can ding every five minutes, or they can ding every 10 minutes, or they can ding every minute. You start by setting it on one minute.
Okay, turn on the timer, and start practicing. Whenever the timer goes ding, you remind yourself that you need to practice and you concentrate again. Okay? It’s like a check. Did you wander yet? Are you still here? Did you get distracted? Yep, no, come back, come back. Okay. So, like forcefully, essentially. And then it goes, then you forcefully take your attention back to the instrument and what you’re doing. ‘
‘So, it’s a way to reset your focus?’
‘Exactly, exactly. Because the only thing you need is a reminder. But if your mind is losing concentration, you cannot rely on your mind to be the reminder. So, you have this kind of external force, telling you to concentrate again. Okay? You do this for a while, then you try it with a minute and a half and two minutes, then more okay. But I find that I never go beyond a minute. I mean, I noticed that I’m way more efficient if I keep it on the minute. Okay. Because it’s like it starts to fade away and you kind of slow down you don’t even realize you’re doing it and the thing dings like no, wait, wait. I should be back here. it’s a strange feeling. It works, really well. Okay, kind of a mental hack. It’s simple. And really, there’s nothing much else to say.’
‘What if I am using that and I still fade out?’
‘Are you using that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Every minute?’
‘Not every time I practice but I’m getting better at using it.’
‘Okay. Shorten time. Make it 30 seconds.’
‘Five seconds.’
‘You want to set it every five seconds? I mean, not seriously, right? No, okay. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not an expert, maybe somebody with ADHD gets distracted literally every five seconds, it could be a problem. Try 30 seconds, try 20 seconds. Okay. The other thing is, you don’t want to do these for hours and hours and hours.
I talked previously about doing micro-practices. Okay, so you do your five or 10 minutes of micro practice. And in this time period, you have these, the timer, dinging every 30 seconds, say, okay, the idea is not again, it’s not to push too much, because it’s counterproductive.
You want to do this, but at the end of the session, you don’t want to feel like you exhausted completely your attention, and capability, okay? Because if you exhaust it completely, then it’s much harder next time to do it again. Because you know, it’s gonna feel bad. Okay. It’s kind of like when you work out. If you train to complete exhaustion, it’s hard and to come back and train the next time.
Some people say that there are benefits to training to complete exhaustion because you deplete completely something in your muscles and they grow better later. And it’s totally true. No problem. But motivationally speaking, okay. It feels horrible. Next time you go to the gym, you’re like, no, I don’t want to do this. Again, just find all the excuses possible to not go back to the gym to not do specific exercises to not train to exhaustion again. So, you don’t want to put yourself in that situation.
Okay, you can train your concentration power by not training it to exhaustion, but just trying to push a little bit for 5-10 minutes. Okay. It gets better with training. It does take a little bit of time; I would not expect to see big results in a week or two. But maybe in amount, you should start to feel a difference. Okay, good. And that’s one thing because if you need only one for this one.
Thank you, Nik.’
‘Thank you.’