Bad Feeling Options

[Gertrude]

Some days I feel like I want to quit playing and that my life will be a lot less complicated without the hard work in trying to make the time for practice.

How did others get around this?

[Yoshifumu]

I hit a pretty hard dip last year, a year after I started playing. Not having a teacher I had pretty much no idea what to do and came pretty close to giving up. Instead I booked myself into an ABRSM grade 2 exam to motivate myself and give me an aim (the main problem was that I had reached all the long-term goals that I had set myself and didn't know what to do from then on).

That worked pretty well and since then I set myself the goal of grade 5, followed by 8, and then eventually I would hope for a dipABRSM.

I'm almost at 5 now and I'm still going pretty strong. I've had a few dips this year but I find having a piano always around helps, so that I can just every now and then sit down and play a little something, even if I haven't practiced regularly for a week or two.

Basically: having a long term goal and not pressurising myself into playing keeps me going relatively constantly.


Although I understand it's probably difficult to do this with a teacher.