NEIL COWMEADOW - THE EXPERT GUITAR TEACHER IN TELFORD. GUITAR TEACHER AND AUTHOR. GUITAR LESSONS THAT WORK! DEDICATED TO TEACHING SINCE 1999 - ACCELERATED LEARNING TECHNIQUES: LEARN FASTER, PLAY BETTER, AND UNDERSTAND...

The Thursday Thesis  - 28/7/2016

Why “Mainstream” Really Means “Average”

Adopting the same approach as everyone else seems like a safe strategy – after all, if so many people are doing it, they can’t all be wrong, can they?

There’s safety in numbers, isn’t there?

I have a problem with doing what everyone else does. When I ask people if they are succeeding at what they want to do, and if are they happy doing what they do, they have to stop and think.

Imagine that – you have to stop and think about whether your life is going the way you want, and run a quick mental checklist to be able to say if you’re happy or not.

The sad truth is that most people don’t have a plan for their lives that looks further than the next paycheque or the next holiday from work.

If you have no plan, how can you know if you are succeeding or not?

The majority of people coast along, going with the flow of everything that is happening around them, doing what everyone else is doing, fitting-in and being one of the crowd. You can see them any day, in any town.

In the middle of The Mainstream, people follow what’s in front of them. The people in front of them are following the people in front of them...

So it goes: on and on.

In The Mainstream, the followers are following the followers, who are – in turn – following other followers.

Where are the Leaders?

The Leaders are nowhere to be seen in The Mainstream - but why not?

It turns out that the Leaders are exploring the tributaries and rapids, the cascades and eddies overlooked by those in The Mainstream who are busy following the followers in front of them.
Leaders are at the edges, away from The Mainstream. They are digging wells, building towers, chasing dreams.

Leaders know that – even if they excel in The Mainstream – they can only achieve more or less what anyone else in The Mainstream can achieve: mediocrity.

But excellence in mediocrity holds no appeal to Leaders. Those who Lead are willing to make a new way, to carve out a new course, to swim against the flow of The Mediocre Mainstream, to believe in their own dreams – rather than to follow a follower of someone else’s dreams.

Sadly, excelling at following someone else’s dream is what The Mainstream does.

But The Future belongs to the Mavericks: to the oddballs and eccentrics who believe in themselves and their own dreams: those weirdoes and fruitcakes who believe in themselves, and who dare to break the rules that discourage “normal” people.

It is often said that "progress depends upon the unreasonable man".

Whilst “Normal” people drown in the undertow of The Mainstream, the unreasonable man or woman is off chasing their own dreams.

The moment You swim for the banks of The Mainstream, Your life changes: everything changes. The view from the far bank is different to that from The Mainstream. Escape The Mainstream, and where you go next is up to you.

It is your choice to stay drowning in the anonymity of The Mainstream’s comfortable multitude, but the best you can expect to be is average.

The edges are where the good stuff happens, but it’s where almost nobody is looking.

Are you ready to strike out for the edge, yet?

After nearly twenty years of being in The Mainstream of mediocre guitar players (frustrated, disheartened, clumsy, slow, confused, etc. Etc. Etc.) I got frustrated enough – and angry enough – to strike out and swim for a different shore.

And as soon as I’d committed to thinking differently about what I really wanted - to play smoothly, quickly, and to have a system that let me understand what I was doing – things began to change. So, day for the last 17 years I’ve been guiding players and beginners away from the deadly current and treacherous tides of The Mainstream.

As I teach, I learn new lessons, and every new lesson influences and improves the way I teach.
What I learnt, and what I teach, isn’t Mainstream – it’s my way, based on what I would have wanted to know, right on Day One.

And when you take action and begin to think differently about what you want, things will begin to change for you, too.

So let me ask you this question:
                               If a pudding like me can do it, what are you waiting for?

The Thursday Thesis  - 21/7/2016
The Thursday Thesis  is based on my experience as a Life-Coach, musical instrument retailer, guitar teacher, player, and guitar technician.

“It Just Comes Naturally...”

You know the way some people make it look easy?
 They seem to glide effortlessly from one chord to the next, smoothly flowing from one melodic line into a resolving chord, seeming to only tickle the strings, caress the notes out of the guitar.
How do they do it?
What do they do that is different to what we do?
They’re two great questions, and there’s one answer to both of them.
It isn’t talent or innate ability that makes the difference: the difference is that their defaults are different to ours.
A default is an assumed condition; it is what normally happens if nothing else affects behaviour: in other words, habits.

Defaults and habits are ingrained behaviours that release your mind from the fag of thinking about every little action you make – a sort of instruction that says “always do this thing, unless something else happens”.
Habits run in the background of our minds, like the operating system of the computer or phone you’re reading this on: once you get it to work consistently, you stop noticing it is there, and can just get on and do the other stuff – texting, emailing, watching cat videos on YouTube etc.
Without the operating system, you’d have to manage each application separately, perform repetitive tasks, and work harder.
The smart operating system takes care of many jobs for you, automating and streamlining as it goes: that’s what habits do for us.
So, what habits are you running in your neck-top computer?
Which habits are virally infecting your playing?
Which habits would you like to change?
What would you like to default to?
It turns out that building better habits is one of the common traits found in the biographies of many great achievers: Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, and Stephen King, to name just three highly productive people who credit their habits as the reasons for their success.

Actively creating better playing defaults and habits is simple:

1. Ask why you’re currently doing what you’re doing,
2. Notice if it is working or not,
3. Keep what works, change what isn’t working for you.

If you’re usually struggling to play something, what would happen if you decided to reset your default to Easy, Light and Effortless?
You might ask yourself:

1. What am I already doing that is good?
2. How can I make it better?
3. What can I change, to make playing this one note/chord easier and better?

Simply assuming ease will change your life, because you are framing the guitar playing experience in new ways.
Priming your mind in this way works just like entering a new word into Google’s search box – you’ll get what you search for, what you expect to be there - simply because you are telling your mind to look for it.

Set your playing default – your search term - to “easy”, today: it could change your life.
You won’t be perfect, first time. There will be a natural resistance to change your old habits/defaults, but even that resistance and the inevitable lapses are indicators that you are making progress.
Over time the glitches and lapses will be weeded out and die away, replaced by what you really wanted all along.

I did it myself; after 19 years of butchering the guitar, I reset my defaults, and it changed my life.
If I can do it, so can you.

So what are you waiting for?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Thursday Thesis  is based on my experience as a musical instrument retailer, guitar teacher, player, and guitar technician.

A Blunted Pencil...
Everyone should keep a notebook of their lessons – especially teachers like me – I’ve done it for years. But I don’t write about the lessons I teach - I write about the lessons I have learned whilst teaching, studying, reading, researching and thinking deeply about what I do. And I also like to keep a note of my questions - just writing them down seems to set my unconscious mind working toward a solution.
I’ve just started the fifth A4 volume of my notebook – it’s a hard-backed, black, Leuchturm1917 with 233 numbered pages of creamy-smooth paper that loves the Deep Magenta and Mediterranean Blue inks from my fountain pens.
It’s very revealing to have over 900 pages of notes and ideas that you can refer back to, update, challenge and refresh, because we forget so much in ordinary life.
Actually, it turns out that our brains are brilliant at deleting things, compressing data and information down into manageable chunks. The problem is that it’s a semi-random process, so insights get lost, cool stuff is squeezed out, and trivia is retained.
That’s great for a pub quiz, but not so great for developing better ways of doing what you love.
The Chinese proverb says “The bluntest pencil is superior to the sharpest memory”.
That’s so good, I think you should write it down...
Use a blunt pencil if you have to.
I did.
Just writing an idea or question down gives it form, permanence, and lets you re-examine it later from a new perspective. Because, when you flip open your notebook, you are not the same person who wrote the entry. You’ll have learned new things, forgotten stuff, and your perspective will have shifted. What seemed peculiar, odd, or difficult a month ago can snap into hard focus today: what was impenetrable back then can be easy-peasey today.
What will you learn today, that your OCD tidy-minded brain will brush into the dustpan of forgetting?
Grab your pencil...

The Thursday ThoughtCast  is based on my experience as a musical instrument retailer, guitar teacher, player, and guitar technician.

“I Thought that Guitars “Just Were” ...”
A few weeks ago I began working with a student –  he's been playing for nearly twenty years and is semi-pro with a local band.
As usual he has most of the problems I find in all self-taught players who come to me for help: they’ve got as far as they can with what they’ve managed to learn, but their technique and approach has reached its limits.
That’s the point where they seek help – when there’s no chance for progression using their current knowledge.
The interesting thing, for me, was his idea that guitars “Just were...” and that players should adapt themselves to it.
It was fascinating - because I once had that idea, too.
I explained that instruments recognisable as guitars have been around for 800 years or so; that they were made by illiterate, mediaeval peasants as playthings.
They are just toys.
Yep – the guitar is a toy, made for short-arse, illiterate, mediaeval peasants to play – just for fun.  So, relaxation would be a huge part of the design philosophy of the instrument – toys aren’t made to be painful or unpleasant to play with, are they?
The Hand came first – bear that in mind when you’re tempted to think that the guitar is the problem – and ask yourself whether you are using your own hands properly, efficiently, and effectively.
Chances are that you’re doing one or more (maybe all) of the Weird Things Guitarists Do, which doom them to frustration, failure and fist-fighting their guitars.
What’s holding you back?

I have a cover design for the book: what do you think?

The Wisdom of The Clash
The Thursday ThoughtCast  - 23/6/2016

The Thursday ThoughtCast  is based on my experience as a musical instrument retailer, guitar teacher, player, and guitar technician.

“It’s Better to Look Good and Play Shit, than to Look Shit and Play Good...”
So said Mick Jones of The Clash in an interview in the long-gone International Musician & Recording World, back in 1987, when he was leading Big Audio Dynamite (riding high at the time with the sample-heavy E=mc2 ).
That line really rang a bell in the back of my mind, and it stayed with me.
Back then it was a bold swing at the music business and the rise of video promos: today it feels like a prophecy.
Media Darling pop and rock stars live or die by their images and the illusions they create in your mind. But over the years of teaching people how to play, I’ve realised that most of what you hear is pretty basic, mostly formulaic, and dead-easy to play.
Looking a certain way is another thing entirely.
But if playing the music is the easy part, what’s holding you back?