Mental Movies

What this episode covers

Neil discusses the importance of mental rehearsal and how you can use it to help your students, or yourself, to improve the way you play or teach. Listen to this episode to find out how you can use mental rehearsal to improve the way you teach your students and how you can use it to enable them to improve their skills too. KEY TAKEAWAYS Mental rehearsal is a vital component of what I do, and try to get my students to do, day to day. Everyone should be using this and encouraging to do this because practising in the mind allows you to practise perfectly without any mistakes, unlike if you were to practise in real life. Mental rehearsal presents very low resistance to the idea of practising and can be done anywhere at any time. How do you teach your students to mentally rehearse? Get them to visualise themselves playing perfectly with excellent technique and control. Get them to see themselves looking happy and enjoying playing. Ask them how they can see themselves moving when they play. Tweak this vision until it’s perfect, the nature, quality and movement. Make the image really colourful, bright and bold. Use the piece of the music that they’re working on at the moment. Have the student zoom in and out of the image to see what they’re doing with each hand when mentally rehearsing. When the mental rehearsal is over, the lessons and learnings from the mental movie can be taken away for when they practise in real life. Don’t believe what the artists are doing in any instrumental music video is how to play the song, most of the time the music is pre recorded then lip sank. This could even be therapeutic and relaxing. The more you do it, the more vivid you will be able to remember make the mental movie real. You can apply mental rehearsal to teaching too, it doesn’t’ just have to be for students. BEST MOMENTS ‘When you practise mentally, it can be perfect every time.’ ‘Shape the movie to what they want.’ ‘Go from Third person to First person.’ ‘They should do it as often as they can whenever they like’ ‘Play back the music that they’re learning.’ ‘Best time for mental rehearsal is just before bed.’ We, and our students, can become better versions of ourselves in our minds.’ ABOUT THE HOST Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years of experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS! CONTACT METHOD Neil Cowmeadow [email protected]

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