Guitar Lessons and NLP Business Success

NLP Accelerated Learning Principles Applied to Guitar Playing and Business

Music is a complex environment and applying Accelerated Learning NLP Techniques can teach you a lot about NLP, music and business. This article examines the nature of applying NLP to these issues and specifically to learning to play the guitar.

 Learning to Play Guitar 

Learning to play music is a testing environment for NLP Applications. Firstly there are a whole load of presuppositions about music that you might have taken on board and that don’t help. For example many people believe music is a complex subject, you have to have talent and music theory has a mystique about it that even music graduates are confused about.

Using NLP belief changing ideas you could let go of unhelpful beliefs, install empowering one as well as create drive and motivation to achieve results.

An accusation often levelled at NLP Trainers is that they replace skills and knowledge with emotions and enthusiasm. If we left our accelerated learning lesson here then I think the accusation would be well founded. Just because you believe you can learn to play the guitar quickly and easily and are motivated to learn does not mean you can play the instrument.

Understanding of Music

The next step would be to understand how sound and music notation relate to the instrument and then where to put your fingers. The understanding of all of this then needs to be ingrained so your muscles automatically move your fingers to the right places when you want them to.

Once you have this understanding and you are developing the muscle memory you will need to work on interpretation, improvisation and creating new patterns from what you have learnt.

Playing a guitar requires you to put your fingers in the right places in the right time with no pause for thought. If you are improvising or sight reading new music you have to react to your external environment whether hearing what the rest of the band are doing or reading off the page and then make appropriate response via the guitar. That response can be selected from a whole range of possibilities and without conscious thought you will be selecting the response best suited to the communication you want to convey through your music. Learning to do all this is a great test for NLP Applications and Accelerated Learning.

Duncan Lorien 

One person that has developed these programmes greatly is Duncan Lorien. In three days he taught me more about music that I had learnt in over twenty years of guitar playing. Although Duncan is not NLP trained he has unknowingly applied fundamental NLP Principles to learning to play a musical instrument and has created a course that would give you a dramatic result. After less than three days you will be playing a keyboard with both hands whilst sight reading new music and have a depth of knowledge about music that many musicians just dream about.

The approach is done on several different levels. For example traditional disempowering beliefs about music are challenged and demonstrations of more useful beliefs are layer in.

Perfect Practice

All the steps to be able to play a musical instrument are taken apart, analysed and exercises created that are designed to get you to practice them efficiently. On this note there is the old adage practice makes perfect and this is an erroneous belief. Only PERFECT PRACTICE makes perfect. A lot of guitarists suffer from not practicing efficiently or worse still ingraining bad habits through the way they practice.

I remember my younger days practicing speed drills on my guitar where I would be trying to get faster and faster. Looking back on those days I can now see how unhelpful that really was. The exercises, so I thought were to develop speed and fluency. But when you think about it if you slowed down until you were always accurate then as your confidence grows your speed and fluency will pick up naturally. By practicing speed first you can never become accurate. I have over the years had to spend a lot of effort taking away the damage I did myself through ingraining these bad practices…and at the time I thought I was improving.

By looking at the exercise, understanding the true purpose of it and developing it to do this efficiently you can not only learn to play the guitar very quickly but also learn how to learn, or even how to train others.

NLP Techniques for Business

Tom, a graduate of my practitioner course went on Duncan’s Understanding of Music Seminar and applied the principles to training others in page layout. He took a course that was a week long and cut it down to less than a day. A great Business NLP Application that Tom learnt through learning to play a musical instrument.

I love NLP Learning Applications like playing a musical instrument, poker or any real time environment because they have a complex set of variables that can really test your NLP Techniques.

Posted: 05|13|08 at 4:24 pm. Filed under: Accelerated Learning, Music and NLP. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Comment | Trackback

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