Name: __________________

Grade and section: ________

Instrument: ______________

Developing a Practice Routine

Let’s be honest here. You probably don’t love practicing all the time. I’m hoping you enjoy it
at least some of the time, but a lot of the time it’s probably not your favorite thing to do.
That’s okay. In fact, that’s probably even a good thing. Practicing correctly is hard work. It
takes a lot of mental energy and effort. It’s repetitive and lonely. It stretches us to the limits
of what we can do, and that makes us uncomfortable. So yeah, you aren’t going to love
practicing all the time, especially if we are practicing the way we should be practicing. But
that creates a problem, because most of us aren’t very good at doing things we don’t enjoy.
If we don’t love doing it, we have a hard time making ourselves do it. So how do we get
past that and practice anyway?

The secret here is that we need to find something that we love and connect it with practicing.
If we can do that, then practicing itself will become more enjoyable because we know that
we’re going to get to do something we love when we practice. If you don’t quite understand
yet, just follow along. It’ll make sense soon.

1. What kinds of things do you really enjoy doing? If possible, try to think of at least a
couple of music- related activities.

2. Look at your lists of activities that you enjoy. Is there one that you could do right
before you practice or right after you practice to use Look at your as a reward for
practicing? Something that would get you excited or feeling happy? What is it? (You
can look at the examples below if you are struggling to think of something.)
a. Play something fun
b. Listen to a favorite song
c. Play along with a track (Instrument karaoke!)
d. Look up YouTube videos of your favorite artists

Try doing that thing you enjoy either right before you practice or right at the end of your practice
session. Make some goals for the week.

1. How many times will you practice this week and for how long?
 2. What enjoyable thing will you do either before or after your practice?

3. What skills/goals will you focus on through the week ?

4. What will you do to overcome challenges in your playing? Be specific.

One final caveat: This trick takes a while to make a difference. Your brain needs time to make
the connection between the fun thing and practicing, so for the first couple of weeks, it may
not make a huge difference for you. Also, it works best if you do the fun thing EVERY TIME
you practice, not just now and then. The more you do those two things together, the more your
brain connects them. Once it makes that connection, then your brain with start thinking of
practicing as the fun thing and you’ll start getting excited about practicing itself.

This can happen just with practicing on its own without an extra fun thing. At first, practicing is
hard and not fun, but the more you do it, the more you see yourself improving and getting
better. Let me tell you from experience, there is nothing as fun as doing something challenging
and feeling like you’re good at it, so when you get to that point, practicing becomes fun by
itself. During the not-fun part, though, we have to help it along a little.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Don’t give up on this just yet. If you aren’t seeing the results yet, keep
it up and see how you feel in a few weeks.

5. For now – GO PRACTICE and tell me how it goes: