gretchen rubin | Christine Goodner: The Suzuki Triangle Blog, Author, Speaker, Podcaster

How Musicians Can Use Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies to Accomplish Their Goals

This post is part of a series on the blog about helping teens succeed in music. You can read last week’s article about 20 Ways to Encourage Your Teen in Music HERE.

I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin’s work, especially her newest book all about the Four Tendencies. If you’re not familiar with this idea, this is the author’s framework to explain the four ways people respond to expectations placed on them, either by themselves or others.

Once I realized what my own tendency was, according to Gretchen Rubin’s definitions, it made a huge difference in how I was able to work with myself to meet my own goals and to understand my reaction to the expectations others placed on me.

For musicians, there are all sorts of expectations we encounter from teachers, parents, conductors, and from ourselves.

Understanding how we naturally respond, and how we can work with themselves to reach goals, and requirements we must meet, is a huge advantage. It helps us in music and every other area of our lives too.

The link to take Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendency Quiz is HERE

Based on Gretchen Rubin’s great book on the subject I want to share each tendency and some ideas for musicians to work with their tendency to meet their musical goals.

Will Rewards for Practice Keep it From Becoming a Habit?

Rewards and Practice

Rewards can be powerful motivation! There are a lot of opinions about whether rewards really help or hurt motivation and that has gotten me thinking lately about how I use rewards with my students.

As a music teacher I’d like my students to be motivated by making great music. While I think that’s a reasonable goal for older students, very young students may need some additional outside motivation to keep them going (at least that’s what I’ve found).

I’ve gone through many phases as a teacher – some where I give out a lot of stickers and little prizes to students & some where I give ideas to parents and let them implement what they think will work with their children at home. Other times I haven’t really done much at all.

Lately I’ve been doing a few practice challenges in my studio and have been re-thinking how much rewards are helping vs hurting students. I read an interesting perspective on this from Gretchen Rubin who studies how people make and keep habits & her research has helped me clarify how I want to go about reward giving going forward. . .

Easy Ideas for Making Practice Convenient

Suzuki Practice & Convenience

When my daughters were young and it was time to practice, for some un-explainable reason the hardest part was getting the instrument out of the case. It really took about 2 minutes but some days it would seem like such a daunting task! We learned that keeping the instrument out of the case (and also out of reach so it stayed safe) made it more convenient to get started right away.

There are many little things like this that we can do to make it easier to get practice and listening done.

It’s human nature to do what is convenient and avoid what is inconvenient and it’s a great idea to look at our practice routines and to see if there is any way to make them more convenient so we’re more likely to follow through.

“People often ask me, “What surprised you most about habits?” One thing that continually astonished me is the degree to which we’re influenced by sheer convenience. The amount of effort, time, or decision making required by an action has a huge influence on habit formation. To a truly remarkable extent, we’re more likely to do something if it’s convenient, and less likely if it’s not.”

~ Gretchen Rubin Better than Before

This is 2nd in a series about Gretchen Rubin’s book Better than Before, a fantastic book about making and break habits. It gives great insights, on habit formation, that can be used when studying & teaching music as well as forming any other type of habit.

A new school year & Gretchen Rubin’s Strategy of the Clean Slate

. Gretchen Rubin's Strategy of the Clean Slate

One of my favorite podcasters, and experts on making new habits, is Gretchen Rubin (http://www.GretchenRubin.com). Her book Better than Before explains how to make new habits and how to understand how you approach the process. It is full of useful tips – I highly recommend it.

As I have been planning my fall studio schedule and answering some questions from new parents about whether or not lessons will start the first week of school, I realized that one of the points in Gretchen Rubin’s book was my main argument for starting right away. The strategy of the clean slate . . .