This Gal's Monthly Guitar Progress report: A note on positivity

Quite some time ago, I wrote about my first guitar practice and how well it went and how much I loved it. Not long after that post I realized the guitar I had was unplayable. I eventually got a new one at a very deep discount. So, for the past year I've been practicing off and on. More off than on, if I'm being totally honest with ya'll. I don't think I ever went more than two days in a row of practicing. About two months ago, I decided that I wanted to get serious about learning.

My old guitar that was unplayable because the bridge was coming off!

In my efforts of being more consistent with my practicing, I started a guitar journal. Immediately after practicing, I do a quick free write about how I feel about that particular session.

Honestly, the month of August has been pretty disappointing on the guitar practice front. I just haven't been practicing, and I have no real excuse. It highly contrasts the month of July when I was highly motivated and inspired. Honestly, I think I just became discouraged because I'm not great, I'm not even good at playing. I'm not even to the point that you'd call playing. (It's ridiculous, I know. Just keep reading.)

In hopes of finding that motivation I started rereading some of my old journal entries. I found one that basically just put my ridiculousness into perspective. Hopefully, it will keep me grounded to finish off August strong and keep plugging away through September. Below is the journal entry that helped me.

Disclaimer: I took this directly from my guitar journal. I just wrote out my feelings with very little thought to cohesiveness and structure. So, it'll be repetitive, rambley, unrefined and a grammatical mess. So, you've been warned. 

My guitar journal

July 8, 2015

I didn't feel like I made as much progress today as I did yesterday but they say that's to be expected. I'm guessing my hand just got tired quicker. Which will only get better with time and practice. I'm trying to practice a solid 20 minutes everyday.

Things I worked on: I just worked on changing from D to G and vice versa with a little bit of A to E and vice versa. I'm sure there's a better way to practice this. But this is what's working for me now. I'm going to try to do a little practice schedule. But I'm really not sure what to look for. Everything I find is still super advanced for me at this point.

Things to remember: I'm kind of bummed out about not getting the G chord to ring out clearly. But I just have to remember I've done it before. I mostly just think it's that my hand is getting tired more quickly because I've practiced multiple days in a row. It doesn't seem like that would make sense but it's got to be like exercising/working out. You work out for the first time in a long while one day and it's hard but you can get it done. Then the next day, when you're doing that same work out it's harder to finish because your body and muscles are sore. 

I'm assuming it's the same basic principle with guitar. And this is probably the point where a lot of people give up. Or why I personally give up practicing for weeks, sometimes months on end. This is why I think it's oh-so-important for me to practice tomorrow.

I'm thinking about a reward system for myself somehow. Like, maybe after every 30 days of daily practice I get myself something. A new tuner, 20 or 30 dollars toward a new guitar. I don't know. I'll figure something out. 

A mess, I know, but I'm glad I wrote it. It doesn't explicitly say that I've been being ridiculous in the past, but I think that's what I was getting at.

I've had these idiotic ideas that I'm going to see how to do a certain thing and just magically be able to do it. Like, watch a video on how to play the G chord and then go and play it perfectly the first time I try it. That's ridiculous. Sitting back and thinking critically about this is helping me check my preconceived notions at the door and has allowed me to just figure out what I need to figure out.

The thing I have to remember is that if I can consistently keep this mindset, I WILL see progress. If I were being honest with myself, I'd say that I HAVE seen progress. It's just really easy to forget after 20 minutes of feeling like nothing is going right. So, I'm here today to declare that I won't let myself get discouraged so easily. I'm going to channel the July version of myself and just power through.

My new guitar, Guitarri.

Apart from my journal, I'm going to start posting monthly progress reports here on This Gal Knows. I hope it'll be one more thing to keep me motivated to practice and improve. Until then you can always track my progress on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. I think I might even do daily updates, sort of like proof of practice, on either Tumblr or Twitter. Maybe even both.

What do you guys think? Anyone use a journal to track your progress when learning guitar (or anything else new to you)? Did you find that it's helped? Let me know in the comment section.

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