5 factors to keep in mind to exercise less and learn more.
Last Thursday I gave the first webinar.
I planted a tree, had a child and haven’t written a book yet, but I did give a webinar.
I am a beginner in online education.
I can talk about non-stop musical transformation processes or spend hours in front of a piano working with my students. I find it energizing.
But the technology involved in an online venture yesterday left me exhausted.
Everything was tested before the webinar: the sound, the link, the video settings, the lights, and the slideshow program.
Everything worked.
But… 30 minutes before the meeting started, I opened the notebook to connect and it wouldn’t wake up from sleep mode…..
And my sympathetic nervous system began to go into fight or flight mode.
Did it have to be today, just before the webinar starts, that the sleep mode of the computer, for the first time, does not work?
Anyway… after rebooting it, it worked. On-off is the only strategy I know of for troubleshooting computer problems.
Sound was the next problem we were lucky enough to solve… halfway.
With the friendly audience I had, I had no reason to give in and quit in the middle of the game…I made a peace treaty with the enemy and moved on.
Even though at times the slides were not going through 🙈 my colleagues stayed until the end.
And so, with this first webinar, and after 10 months of solitary work with no resonance other than my own criticism and praise, my project began to become visible.
I also felt that happiness in my nervous system.
A study by Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School, reveals that excitement (of accomplishing my goals) and fear (of technology, in this case) trigger similar sensations in the body: racing pulse, agitation, tension.
As Alice recommends in her scientific study, I tried to turn my techno-anxiety into excitement at finally being able to connect with colleagues through the webinar.
It works!
I ended the day over revved up, with an adrenaline cocktail of happiness and digital trauma.
The next morning I had 3 objectives.
The first one, was a date with technology 🥴: I wanted to learn how to use a program to transcribe course videos, for colleagues who prefer to read.
On my list was also writing this article and tidying up the apartment before my fairy godmother arrives to help me with the cleaning.
And while I woke up happy on Friday, my mind had a hard time focusing.
It was saturated.
My thoughts, wandering in disarray, literally in limbo.
My eyeballs seemed to be lying on a sofa… the visual impressions of the play of shadows of the morning sun in the dining room came to my retina by themselves, because my eyes were not able to go anywhere.
In other times, he would have told me: Gaby, it’s Friday, you’re not going to waste a day of work, tomorrow is Saturday and you can rest.
I would have then sat down to learn how to transcribe videos with my mind crammed and accomplish things, which normally take 20 minutes, in two hours.
But not this time.
I said to myself instead: Gaby, after learning and experiencing so many new things, letting your eyes and thoughts wander during a walk along the banks of the Rhine is a better option to take your mind off the last few days of high doses of “computer” challenges.
And I decided to tell you about it, because it is relevant.
Do you have students who, despite exercising, are stagnating?
We all experience blockages in different life situations. Because of technical or virtual life 😅.
And it’s all about learning how to navigate them.
A blockage can be, in our teaching task, a stagnation of technical, artistic, personal, corporal or mental development.
The reasons may be different and today I will tell you about one of them: concentration during exercise.
Find out more about these 5 factors that influence concentration and that will help you or your students to make daily study motivating.
👉🏼Objetivos very difficult
If the goals set are too difficult or too many at once, frustration will quickly become great and the mind will seek reassurance in other thoughts. Increase the challenges a little at a time. We teachers, in individual class, tend to over-teach and over-fill the short-term memory, which is not only short but does not have as much capacity as the long-term memory.
👉🏼Objetivos very easy
If the objectives are too easy, we generally fall into automatism and your learner will lose motivation. Most likely with it, attention will be dispersed. Between the very difficult objectives and the very easy ones is the zone in which your student’s possibilities are aligned with the difficulties you propose and the process of musical transformation flows. Discovering that zone in each class is the secret of flow in learning.
👉🏼Vitalidad
If you are tired, or an adrenaline cocktail is fizzing inside you, it will be more difficult to maintain focus. Mental overwhelm makes practices cumbersome and inefficient. Planning practices at times of the day when we have the most energy makes them motivating and efficient. On the contrary, demanding too much when you are tired is unproductive. Learning is, after all, an activity that we can do after having fulfilled our basic biological needs and with a very particular need: to feel safe and secure. If we feel threatened, by some conflict, for example (because today tigers are generally not on the loose), our sympathetic nervous system goes on alert and our mind prepares to fight or run away.
During your practices, plan short breaks every 20 minutes, look out the window, in the distance, for a couple of minutes. Make also longer breaks and include in them walks or sports.
👉🏼Vaguedad in the approach of objectives
Playing certain measures of a piece well is a very vague goal. If there is no description of a concrete goal, a plan to get there, and knowledge to evaluate the results, there will be no point to direct your thoughts and actions to. You will start playing Bach’s Partita, for example, and as mistakes arise, you will correct them. This is an intuitive way, which leads to a certain insecurity when it comes to recovering the performances achieved with repetitions.
Do not repeat without asking yourself why. Taking only one objective, formulating it clearly and elaborating an action plan (mental or written) allows you to take safe steps and to better evaluate your progress.
👉🏼Prioritize and resign
Prioritizing goes hand in hand with quitting. Giving up specifically training skills in pursuit of learning a specific skill focuses you on your goals. If you don’t quit, you will fall into trying to solve everything at once, which is generally very frustrating. Giving up to improve several skills at the same time is a skill that also requires training 🙃. In later stages the goal will be to integrate, for example, two specific vocal functions.
The two-hour walk, the spring scents, the trees that have been thick with foliage for four weeks, transformed my thoughts into calm and silent waters. Broth for new ideas.
✨ Mental clarity brings well-being and makes practices shorter and more efficient.
