3 Practice Mistakes That Kill Your Progress

Not all practice is created equal. Said differently, practice can contribute to your progress, or it can just be putting in the time.

Our daily practice is our path to progress. It's how we develop mastery of our instrument and increase our understanding of music in general. Dr. Shinichi Suzuki's famous quote,"Practice only on the days you eat," illustrates so vividly the importance of making practice a daily routine.

But anything we do every day can become so routine that we slip into bad habits, or at the very least, stop thinking creatively and productively about what we are actually trying to achieve in our practice.

Here are three of the most common mistakes I see music students making in and around their practice. Are you making any of these right now? It's worth spending a few minutes reading through the list to save yourself any amount of wasted practice time!

1. Irregular practice. Do you practice only when you feel like it? Being in the right frame of mind to practice is helpful, but daily practice is the key to success. Make your practice a habit. Even if you don’t feel like practicing when you start, after a few minutes, you will likely enjoy what you’re doing and you’ll forget you weren’t in the mood.
   
   
2. A lack of daily practice goals. When you get ready to practice, do you have specific tasks and goals in mind? Or do you just start plowing through the music you need to learn? The difference is that when you know exactly what you want to accomplish in that practice session, you can be fairly certain that you will achieve it.
   
   
3. Using repetition as a substitute for attention. When we tell ourselves, "I need to play this passage 25 times (or 10 times or 100 times)," we are effectively giving ourselves permission to mentally go on vacation. We go on "auto-pilot" when instead we should be fully involved in our practice. This isn't to say that repetition is not needed, only that it is useless when we check out mentally.