How to Improve as an Artist: Ditch Common Advice and Do What Works

There is a LOT of information out there in the world for artists to pick up and live by. From the best ways to engage and grow your social media following to the best ways to rehearse, someone is constantly adding their two cents to the mountain of ideas on how to be the best artist.

Some of the common practices that people put out are genuinely good advice like being consistent with your private rehearsal time. I don’t know how many youtube videos I have watched while learning the piano that end with practice everyday and then you will start seeing results.

I am OVER it.

It’s not that I don’t want to be consistent, I just don’t want to burn myself out. So today I have decided to focus on doing what is best for me as an artist over what is common practice for artists in general.

What does this mean practically? Let’s take piano for example.

Before I adopted the mindset of doing what works I made it my goal to practice piano for an hour or more everyday. If I missed a day I felt terrible. If I got frustrated in practice I would beat myself up internally because I thought that this pace would guarantee my success. I was also frustrated with how long it was taking to pick up this skill. I had a bad habit of equating intelligence with speedy skill acquisition and that is just not true.

Now, I make a very specific piano practice schedule. It’s less than an hour. It doesn’t happen every day, because I’ve discovered mental breaks help me learn better. I have given myself permission to not only take my time to learn this new skill but to showcase my progress on social media. This keeps me accountable and my whole mindset towards how I learn and how fast I learn has drastically changed for the better.

That shift to a positive mindset about how you learn helps you to have a healthy learning experience. And I all want for myself and for you are healthy experiences, especially in your artist journey! You not only have to accept the way you learn but LOVE the way you learn.

Your brain is wired in a unique way and discovering your learning style will be to your benefit as you grow in your artistry.

So today I am encouraging you to lean into your unique nature of learning. A few common ones are:

Auditory

Kinesthetic

Visual

Reading/Writing

And if you search on google there are a whole lot more. You might discover you have a combination of these styles.

Think of it like baking a dessert. Your base will always be milk, butter, flour, sugar and eggs. But you can choose what type of flour you use, you might even try an egg substitute like apple sauce. Just like your taste buds, the brain likes a steady combination of novelty and consistency, especially when you are learning something new.

For the piano that means that one day I’m listening to a podcast about music theory (auditory). For my next practice day I might watch a piano video about a skill I’m struggling to master like chord inversions (visual). The next time I sit at the piano and play through my scales and chord inversions I am combining visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning methods. And if I attempt to play a piece of sheet music I am combining all four learning methods for a delicious musical dessert.

But here is the thing about baking, things don’t always turn out the way you want them to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that same experience at the piano. I’ll sit there and know what to do but my hands won’t cooperate with me. Or I’m trying to sight read and I’m realizing I’m remembering where the notes are on the piano more than I am reading them from the page because I’ve played the piece so much. This is why we practice. You try and you fail and you take a deep breath, get up and try again. It’s all a part of the learning experience, sour notes and all.

How do you learn? If you don’t know the only way to figure it out is to try! At the end of the day you have to do what works for you, it’s your journey, it’s your art, enjoy every moment.

Until next time,

Orianna Joy