The Practice Sandwich will keep you from quitting music lessons
The Practice Sandwich will keep you from quitting music lessons
How’s that for a clickbait title? ;) But seriously, today I’m going to talk about how the way you practice will make or break your motivation to continue music lessons.
First of all, let me explain what the Practice Sandwich is. You can probably guess from the name that it’s similar to the Compliment Sandwich (also known by another name which I won’t use here), a widely used strategy for delivering negative feedback. There’s something not-delightful that has to be addressed, so you sandwich it in between more palatable things to make it less unpleasant.
What needs to be sandwiched when you’re practicing music? Anything that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It could be working out a tricky piece or section of a piece, learning something new that takes a lot of mental focus, or tedious tasks like metronome practice, theory worksheets, or memorizing. It’s the thing that you dread doing, the thing that drains your energy and makes you feel frustrated, angry, or bored. You know what it is for you.
If you try to start practice sessions with the thing you dread, you’ll start to avoid practicing. If you end with it and leave the practice room feeling frustrated, incompetent, or exhausted, that feeling will stay with you. You’ll remember practicing as having been unpleasant, making you reluctant to start again the next time.
The bread of your Practice Sandwich is satisfying music making. We musicians all know that practicing involves some unpleasant tasks and emotions at times. Those of us who have been working on music for a long time understand that the joy and satisfaction we get from making music is what allows us to handle those unpleasant parts. We counter any feelings of frustration that crop up with our faith, justified by long experience, that those wonderful, positive feelings we crave are made possible by working through the challenges.
Beginners don’t have that experience-forged faith in the benefits of practicing. This is where the Practice Sandwich comes in. Start your practice session with something you’re good at. How about doing easy technical exercises or playing or singing music you can already do well? This gives you the confidence to tackle anything challenging you need to work on. After you’ve gotten the tough stuff handled, end with more satisfying, enjoyable music. By intentionally starting and ending practice with rewarding experiences, sandwiching the challenging and tedious stuff in between, you’ll make daily practice go down easier and prevent yourself from dwelling on any negative feelings you might have had.
As popular as it is, apparently the Compliment Sandwich isn’t effective in the workplace, according to this article. While I appreciated the author’s take on the subject, as well as the research study cited in the article, I don’t think the shortcomings of the Compliment Sandwich are relevant to the Practice Sandwich. For example, one of the drawbacks mentioned is that the Compliment Sandwich can minimize criticism to the point of failing to communicate it effectively. Minimizing is part of the point of the Practice Sandwich. We WANT to limit the experience and the memory of negative emotions in practice as much as possible.
If the Compliment Sandwich isn’t working in the business world, I’d suggest that’s because it’s so often used ineffectively. Consider the article’s opening example:
“I really like how well you worked with others on this project, but it would’ve been better if you delved a lot deeper into this specific topic in your report. You’ve been doing such a fantastic job lately.”
What absolutely hackish feedback! As sandwiches go, this is a Kraft Single between two shoe soles. Fire that manager.
You have to understand how and why the Compliment Sandwich works in order to use it well. We don’t generally come at people, especially our employees, with an unvarnished call-out on their shortcomings. Contextless criticism is impolite at best. At worst, it makes the person receiving it feel like they are being told they’re a complete failure and they suck. Plain old criticism doesn’t make people want to improve. The purpose of a well-crafted Compliment Sandwich is to give emotional context that makes the criticism easier to hear, understand, and act upon.
Let me rework that example into a better effort at communication:
“Overall, this project went fairly well, and your great work in collaborating with your colleagues was a big reason for that. The report you submitted fell a bit short of expectations, though. Management would have preferred that you delve a lot deeper into the topic. Next time we do a similar project, I would like you to provide about 30% more content, consult more resources, and provide more specific details. I’m sure you can do that, because you’ve been consistently productive and positive here at Company Name, and I want you to know we appreciate your efforts.”
Now THAT’S a tasty Compliment Sandwich. (I’m not interested in taking a corporate management position, but thank you for your interest.)
The opening “good news” sets the tone: Overall, things are okay. Your manager is affirming that they think well of you and have noticed your good work. This is your reference point. You’re beginning from a secure position.
Then the bad news: There’s improvement needed in a certain area. The facts are stated directly, without any hostility. The idea here is to accurately convey the severity of the situation, neither overstating nor understating it. The criticism is, of course, accompanied by mention of specific guidelines for improvement, because no one should be giving naked criticisms like in the original example. Constructive criticisms only, people.
We finish with “good news” again, in the form of an affirmation of your past success and an expression of confidence in your future achievement. The opening compliment primes you to hear criticism without feeling attacked. The closing compliment encourages you to take the recommended action with confidence.
The Compliment Sandwich doesn’t work if it’s perfunctory. It doesn’t work if the supposed compliment is a trite little “great job!” And it doesn’t work if you gloss over the content of the negative feedback in a rush to placate the hearer with another compliment and get the whole thing over with. The compliments and the criticism need to be genuine and specific, focused on action and controllable factors.
The Practice Sandwich has to be equally sincere. You have to get real satisfaction and reassurance from your practice “compliments” if they’re going to help you take your practice “criticism” in stride.
The bread on your Practice Sandwich can be whatever you feel good about playing or singing. It can be the same every time, or it can change day to day or week to week. Many people start practice sessions with scales and technical exercises. Because they’re memorized and repetitive, it doesn’t take too much mental energy to do them, and they help warm up your fingers/voice and your brain. If you don’t like scales, you can’t go wrong starting practice with breathing exercises. Focusing on the breath helps clear the mind and attune the senses. These exercises may be more technically useful for singers and wind players, but all musicians use their bodies and benefit from feeling relaxed and physically aware.
Criticism must point out an opportunity for improvement in order to be constructive. Likewise, the meat of your Practice Sandwich, your challenging tasks, should involve using intentional methods for improvement. You shouldn’t be banging your head against an impossible piece or repeatedly trying and failing with no particular progression. Your teacher has probably given you a lot of advice about methodical practice. If not, ask for some.
Why will practicing this way keep you from quitting? Because it keeps frustrations manageable so you can keep making progress. Low achievement and frustration are among The biggest reasons for quitting lessons. When your progress slows down and you get frustrated, it’s almost invariably because of how you’re practicing.
Here’s how it happens:
There’s a beginner honeymoon period when it’s easy to make progress in lessons. New information is pretty straightforward, and the pieces of music you’re working with are uncomplicated enough that you can learn them fairly easily without much practice. You may even be able to learn all your material during your lessons and get away with not practicing much on your own.
That period ends. The techniques and concepts get more complex, the pieces get longer and more challenging, and you won’t be able to keep up by just coming to lessons and muddling through. You won’t be able to learn or retain what you’ve learned without regular practice. If you don’t have a solid practice routine with effective practice strategies, your progress will stagnate.
But even if you’ve been practicing regularly from the start, when your music gets more challenging, practicing becomes more challenging, too. If you start to think of practicing as an unpleasant experience, you’ll avoid doing it. The less you practice, the slower you’ll progress and the more frustrated you’ll feel. Less achievement means less positive emotion to counter the frustration. Everything snowballs until you’re overwhelmed with the negativity of it and you want to quit.
That’s the normal reaction, by the way. We shouldn’t be making ourselves do things that cost us more than they give us. If you’re experiencing lots of frustration and little to no progress or satisfaction, it’s not working out. Something has to change.
In order to stay engaged with taking lessons and learning music, you have to manage and contain that potential for frustration that comes with being challenged. That’s why you need to implement the Practice Sandwich ASAP, preferably from the beginning of your music study. You want to have this method in place before you need to rely on it to get you through any big challenges.
The best thing about the Practice Sandwich is that it’s so easy to use it. It’s really very simple advice: Start and end every practice with something you enjoy doing that brings you satisfaction. You’ll look forward to practice time, your challenges won’t feel so daunting, and you’ll walk away feeling positive about your music and about yourself as a musician.
Read more from Labyrinth Music Blog:
The Musician’s Two Modes, and how you can leverage them to get better at performing
Do singers need to read music?
8 practice hacks for effective, low-stress music learning
How soon will I see results from my music lessons?
The importance of doing a bad job
