How To Keep Guitar Students Longer – Proven Guitar Teaching Advice
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If you teach guitar...
... and you’d like to keep guitar students longer than you do now...
... this guitar teaching article will show you how.
To begin...
I’ll lay out some of the more surprising (but very common) reasons guitar students quit...
(Hint: none of them have to do with “running out of money” or becoming “too busy”.)
Next...
I’ll show you simple things you can do to overcome those reasons and make your guitar students way more likely to stay with you for years.
These are some of the secrets that guitar teachers I train in the Elite Guitar Teachers Inner Circle are using to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year...
... teaching guitar part-time.
EMAIL TO GET ACCESS
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
To begin...
Here is why guitar students often stop taking guitar lessons with you (and most other guitar teachers):
Now, let’s go deeper into each of the reasons guitar students quit and how to turn them around to keep guitar students longer.
Reason #1 Why Guitar Students Quit: Overwhelm From “Too Much To Practice”
When guitar students feel like they have more to practice than they can handle - they often quit to ‘catch up’ and ‘practice what they’ve learned’.
Most guitar teachers create this overwhelm by accident.
They keep piling on new exercises, songs and other materials every week - thinking this adds value. But what it actually creates is a pile of confusion that drives many to quit.
On top of this, this approach creates a major time and energy drain for you, the guitar teacher.
When you’re constantly coming up with new content for every student each week, it turns your whole teaching business into a treadmill.
That leaves you with no time to work on your business, attract new guitar students and think of new ways to offer more value to your current guitar students (so you can grow your guitar teaching income).
Cranking out new content for your guitar students every week turns teaching guitar into an endless hamster wheel of busywork... where you work full-time, for part-time money.
Attract More New Guitar StudentsDiscover how to attract new guitar students by using this assessment.
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The solution? Teach less. Train more.
What’s the difference between teaching and training?
Teaching is when you show your guitar student how something works.
Training is when you guide them through doing it - step by step - until they get it right.
You’re not just telling them what to do. You’re watching them do it. You’re correcting mistakes.
You’re coaching them on how to think the right way while they play.
Most guitar teachers stop at the teaching part. That’s why their students forget everything the moment they get home.
But when you train your students during their lesson, they remember how to practice.
They leave knowing exactly what to do and how to do it.
And most importantly - they feel confident that they can do it on their own.
This helps your guitar students to stop feeling overwhelmed... it makes them feel in control of their guitar progress and that is what helps you (the guitar teacher) keep guitar students longer.
Here is an example of what guitar training looks like:
Reason #2 Why Guitar Students Quit: Boredom
Everyone plays guitar to have fun. And guitar students take lessons to make guitar more fun.
If lessons feel like work or school - they’ll quit.
When do guitar students become bored?
One (big!) reason this happens when they can’t see how what they’re learning connects to the music they want to play.
For example:
Beginner guitar students come in excited to play music as soon as possible.
But if you (the guitar teacher) spend the whole lesson talking about theory, posture, gear, the metronome or force them to play chromatic finger exercises – their excitement fades.
That is when beginners can start doubting if learning guitar (and take guitar lessons with you) was really a good idea.
These thoughts wreck your ability to keep guitar students longer.
Pro guitar teaching tip: get your beginner guitar students playing as soon as possible. That will excite them, make them believe in themselves and make them want to continue taking lessons with you much longer.
Intermediate guitar students get bored too, but for different reasons.
For example: when you teach intermediate guitar students something they think they already know... they can start to lose interest.
Intermediate guitar students have more self-confidence than beginners and they can handle being challenged... as long as they can see how the challenge helps them reach their goals.
The best way to challenge intermediate guitar students?
Show them how to apply the things they already know and tie their guitar (and musical skills together). For example:
- train them to improvise guitar solos using the scale patterns they know
- show them how to write a song using the chords they know.
- fill the gaps in their fretboard knowledge
- get them to practice connecting guitar techniques together.
When you teach guitar like this, your intermediate guitar students feel like musicians - not just students. That’s what keeps them inspired to continue and makes it easier for you to keep your guitar students longer.
It also makes teaching easier for you (the guitar teacher), as you’re not scrambling to come up with new guitar teaching content every week.
Reason #3 Why Guitar Students Quit: Loss Of Belief In Their Musical Potential
If guitar students don’t believe they have what it takes to get good at guitar - they won’t stay with you for long.
This loss of belief in musical potential is most likely to occur with beginner guitar students.
Why?
Because most beginner guitar students already come in with doubts about their potential.
They’re not sure if they’re too old, too “untalented”, have the wrong size or shape hands or have an “ear” for music.
They assume (often wrongly) that learning guitar will be harder for them that it is for everyone else who “has something they don’t”.
And if you want to keep guitar students longer, it’s part of your job as a guitar teacher to:
1. Realize that your beginner guitar students’ confidence is hanging by a thread.
2. Do everything you can to bolster your students’ belief in themselves and make them realize they were not hallucinating when they imagined they could learn guitar.
If you don’t do that, your beginner guitar students will soon quit.
Pro tip: if your guitar students tell you they want to stop guitar lessons “for a while” and “go home to practice more on their own”...
... that is most likely their way of politely saying they’ve stopped believing they have what it takes to learn guitar.
The best way to make beginner guitar students believe in their musical potential?
Help them experience quick wins while teaching guitar to them.
As in: show them things they can make music with right away... so they leave each guitar lesson, feeling good about their musical potential.
The better you are at this, the easier it becomes to keep guitar students longer.
Reason #4 Why Guitar Students Quit: Chasing Shiny Objects
Many intermediate (and higher) level guitar students get distracted by random videos of online guitar teachers.
This can happen when your guitar students start assuming they can find everything you’re teaching them online for free... without realizing how much of the info online is wrong, incomplete and not presented in the right order for them to learn.
What is the solution that can help you keep guitar students longer?
Tell your guitar students that collecting new random content online is one of the causes of ‘playing bits & pieces’ and never feeling like a musician.
Then show them how what they really need is:
1. A strategy tailored just for their goals. This saves them a ton of time and shields them from a lot of frustration by learning the right things, in the right order and in the right way.
2. Training on how to apply the things they’re learning, so they feel like musicians instead of just guitar students.
3. Training on how to tie their skills together and sound pro, even if they’re just playing for fun.
The more you communicate this to your guitar students when you’re teaching guitar to them, the easier it becomes to keep guitar students longer.
Reason #5 Why Guitar Students Quit: Feeling Like They’re Letting You Down
If a guitar student has an interruption in their life that puts their guitar playing on the backburner, they may quit out of shame for letting you down or being “your worst student”.
Only guess what?
Guitar students will rarely tell you they’re quitting because they feel shame.
Most times, they’ll come up with some excuse they’ll think you have no comeback for. Like: they’ve ran out of money... or they’re “taking a break’ or “going in another direction” or “they’ll come back once they have more time to practice”.
If you want to keep guitar students longer, you need to see signs of their mindset changing ‘before’ they voice their decision to stop lessons. This gives you your best chance at keeping guitar students longer before they quit for this reason.
Now that you know why guitar students quit (and what to do to keep guitar students longer), I want to help you attract more guitar students into your guitar teaching business. I show you how in my eCourse: This Will Get You A Lot More Guitar Students. Download it today and discover the guitar teaching secrets most guitar teachers will never know.
Learn to make at least 6-figures teaching guitar by getting guitar teacher training.
