Making Music...

I am a terrible guitar player.

I started playing when I was 8. My parents bought me a cheap little acoustic with the strings so far off the neck, it required a herculean effort just to play a note. My first guitar teacher was an older gentleman who taught me to play notes: an e, a g, an f out of a song book. In a couple of half hour lessons, I slogged my way through the Top 40 smash hit “Hava Nagila” at a pace that would make a sloth nap. Needless to say, I was done with the guitar by 8 ½. When my Parents asked me why I didn’t want to play anymore, I just told them it wasn’t fun and to be honest, I wasn’t playing music.

I have the privilege of getting to talk to coaches about coaching and one of the things we bring up often is having a growth mindset , being a lifelong learner and coming out of our comfort zones. All of these are in such demand of coaches going forward today that I figured I needed to do something to work on these skills for my benefit as a coach and a teacher of coaches and players.

Fast forward the cassette player (ask your parents) three years ago and I picked up a guitar for the first time in 7 presidents and noticed right away that things had changed. I could go on line now and find a chart for chords, and songs with guitar tabs making it easier to try and replicate the songs I listened to on my iPod. If I struggled with a certain riff or change, I could maybe go on You Tube and a nice guitar teacher would SHOW me, on video, how to play that certain lick.

In a great article entitled, “The Secrets of Self-Taught, High Performing Musicians,” Tim Buszard talks about how so many of our best guitarists were self taught: names like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Prince, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Buszard says, “Research over the past few decades has demonstrated the advantages of learning a skill implicitly: that is, to learn a skill without a conscious awareness of the underlying processes of what is being learnt.” He adds that one of the advantages of acquiring a skill implicitly is it’s more durable under pressure, like performing before a live audience.

“Pressure often causes people to think about the step-by-step processes of what they are doing and this often leads to slips in performance. But if the skill was learnt without any knowledge of the step by step processes, the performer’s automatic mechanisms take over.” Buszard notes.

There is a reason volleyball players are drawn to the sand and it’s the reasons given above. Most of the time, there are no coaches in sand and the players have to figure things out on their own. With only one other partner, they aren’t sketched into a certain spot on the court, a specific position. They get to do it all. And oh yea, it’s really fun…hard but fun.

When we over coach kids out of their passion for the game, we are committing a heinous act. There are so few things that a person may be passionate about in their lives and to pound that passion out of them is a criminal act as a coach or a Parent.

We forget sometimes the characteristics that make something passionate in our lives: something we strive to get better at, something we can share with others and yea, something fun!

I am still a bad guitar player, but in my tiny speck of the universe, at least now I am able to play music.