Teaching guitar lessons

Picture: Taken at a duo gig at Food Lover's Market, early in 2010.

This week has had very good energy. In so many ways, life feels different, in a positive, exciting way. I’ve managed to tie up some loose ends, and am closer than ever to achieving some of my goals. Of course, having the October concert as a project to occupy my mind and time is really energizing. This week it’s rained once or twice, so I stayed indoors more than usual and achieved things on the home base that I don’t normally, when I’m out and about. Baby steps, but they all contribute towards making the bigger picture of my life feel like it’s taking shape, heading in the right direction.

Something I’ve accepted about myself is that I thrive on being busy. I actually like working, as long as it’s fulfilling, I feel I’m making a difference, and – this seems to be the key ingredient – I have a lot of autonomy. Teaching guitar lessons satisfies all of those criteria. I love managing my own schedule and planning my days in a way that allows me to meet my family’s needs, as well. I like sourcing the students, which I do through my networks, those of my friends, as well as advertising to the public at large. I love preparing my lessons, drawing up the worksheets, finding appropriate songs and I even like the administrative side of things, keeping my files organised (Virgo!) and updating the records of my students’ progress. Because I like to keep things simple, I’ve tweaked my financial record keeping system until it’s made sense to me, and I now give my students monthly statements that look quite professional.

But most of all, I absolutely LOVE teaching people to play the guitar! Having found something that I love doing, which can earn me money, is a huge thing in my life, and something which has filled my heart with hope. In my case, I’m lucky to have not one, but TWO things I love doing, which can generate an income: live performances and teaching guitar lessons. This year I’ve learnt how hard it is to get gigs, especially at restaurants, during winter. Restaurant owners trim their overheads during the colder months, for survival. One of the restaurants I sang at a few months ago has since closed down – business was just too bad. I need to work out a way to ensure I maximize my gig prospects in the warmer months and keep the guitar lessons going throughout the year, because they would be my main source of income during winter.

Having established that I enjoy teaching people to play the guitar so much, and that my students all seem to be enjoying their lessons, I now have to set my sights on the way forward. I have fourteen active students, three of which I teach privately, with the rest in groups. I now need to increase my number of students. Adding 20 more students is my current goal. With a certain combination of private and group lessons, that should earn me enough to get through the month with, shall we say, dignity. It would mean that, finally, I wouldn’t have to borrow from anyone to meet the demands of life.

I prefer to work with absolute beginners, because I like to teach them before they’ve got into bad habits, especially with posture and hand position. I’ve worked out a system that’s logical and easy to follow, and as long as the student practices, he or she WILL learn every week and WILL be playing a song within the first three to four lessons. I do teach some people who can already play, but I always do a free assessment session with them, to establish if we’d be a good match. I have to find out if they want to learn the style of playing that I teach, and if I’m the right person for them – it might be necessary for me to refer them to someone else. I always tell my students, I can teach them everything I know, and after that they need to progress to another teacher, for more advanced lessons. Because I’ve been playing for 33 years, I think there’s quite a bit I can teach people!

Something that I make a point of, in my lessons, is that I hardly ever play my guitar. Most times, my guitar comes out only when we’re tuning, at the beginning of the lesson, then stays in its case for the rest of the lesson. The student handles his or her guitar for the entire lesson, utilizing the full lesson time to work on acquiring the skill. I’ve had lessons, myself, where I’ve just sat and observed while my teacher demonstrated. While this is sometimes necessary, I keep it to an absolute minimum, because I know how disempowering it feels and I believe that you have to learn physical skills by DOING. Sometimes, for different reasons, students don’t find time to practise between lessons. While this is not ideal, it happens, and it used to happen to me, too. If you have a job, you run a home and take care of a family, it’s easy for a week to go by without your having found time to practise your guitar playing. Even more reason for you to play your guitar for the full lesson time.

I emphasise to students that they should never cancel a lesson because they haven’t practised – it’s like going off your diet after a bad day/week. Playing the guitar is a skill that develops over time, and requires commitment. This includes accepting that you’ll have weeks where you won’t have practiced as much as you’d planned to. It’s the same principle that applies to so many other things in life, and sometimes we need a physical example to learn this life lesson: when you experience any form of adversity or failure, the song says: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.”

When I was asked, as a little girl, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I apparently had only two answers, ever: a mother, and a teacher. All these years later, I can say that life has indeed given me my heart’s desire – two of my greatest passions are being a mother, and teaching. Now I need to complete the story, by being the best mother I can be, and developing the professional passion into a successful enterprise, one that also addresses another goal of mine – to make a difference in the lives of previously-disadvantaged people, in post-apartheid South Africa.

I have my work cut out for me. It feels like it’s taken me almost a year to re-discover what I’ve known all along I should be dedicating my life to.

But now I know.

Phew!