How To Help Your Guitar Students Make Faster Progress
Want your guitar students to make more progress? Learn how to recognize your students’ personality and tailor your guitar lessons to fit their mindset.
Mastering this skill makes you a very effective guitar teacher and helps you train your guitar students to become great musicians.
Most guitar students are weak (or average) minded. These students have a lot of doubts about their musical potential, become bored easily and get frustrated when faced with challenges.
Strong-minded students are the minority. These students can handle the most boring aspects of guitar practice, don’t mind working on their musical weaknesses and stay motivated over the long term.
This video explains the difference between different types of guitar students’ personalities and how to approach each one:
The stronger someone’s mindset is, the easier they are to teach and the faster they progress. They are most likely to do what you tell them to do (assuming they trust you) until they get a result.
Teaching weak-minded students requires a specialized approach that builds their confidence, minimizes frustration and keeps them focused on their goals.
Question: “Tom Hess, so should I ‘screen’ all my potential students for their mindset before I take them on? Should I only teach (or accept) strong-minded students?”
Answer: No. If you take that path, you won’t have a lot of students in your schedule.
What you need to do is:
- Recognize the personality type of the student in front of you.
- Adjust your teaching style accordingly.
Hint: it’s far easier to simply assume that the student in front of you is weak-minded and start out by teaching them accordingly.
You can easily pivot once you realize you’re actually dealing with a strong(er)-minded student than it is to backpedal after overwhelming a weaker-minded guitar student with more than he or she can handle.
How do you ‘pivot’ exactly?
When you see that a student in front of you is doing exactly what you told them and is making good progress, you can:
- Give them a less-than-instantly gratifying issue to work on in their playing (for example: changing how they hold the guitar pick to a more efficient position).
- Teach them a topic that relates to their musical goals that isn’t as fun as just ‘playing’ guitar (for example: training their ear).
You’ll get better at reading people’s personality type with experience (but getting guitar teacher training will help you master this guitar teaching skill a lot faster).
This guitar teaching article shows a proven process for training and coaching your guitar students to become great players.
Learn how to become a very successful guitar teacher.
