3 Ways to Think About Measuring Progress

Today Christine is sharing a few ideas about measuring our progress at the end of the year. Especially when it comes to progress on an instrument with young musicians, here are three ways we can think about looking back and seeing how far we’ve come this year. 

You can read this article below, or listen to it on audio through the link below.

To Listen to the full episode you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.

You can also listen directly from the link below:

3 Ways to Think About Measuring Progress

This article is coming out in December of 2022 and I am a person that loves to reflect on the year behind me and make plans for the year ahead. 

Just this week I see many posting their spotify wrapped stats – showing what they listened to most this last year. 

An app I use for tracking and reviewing books I have read called Goodreads has a format to vote for your favorite book of the year, and see a recap of all the books you’ve read this year including longest and shortest and other such details. 

This is a great exercise for many areas of life. And since we talk here about practicing music, especially with young musicians I think it’s a great time of year to think about how we think about our progress over the last year. 

There are so many things we could say about this topic, but I want to share three ways to think about Measuring progress this past year. 

• Do your own version of practice time wrapped 

• Watch a recital video from a year ago 

• Pull out your lesson notes from last December 

When we are a part of practice from day to day it’s easy to feel like nothing is changing. Sometimes we need to check back at different moments in time to remember what we were actually doing back then. 

I have had families tell me this really helped because they weren’t sure there had been improvement that year and then when they watched a video from a year back they could see such growth in so many areas. 

The Gap and The Gain

So here’s the first way I would invite you to think about progress and it involves the Gap and the Gain. This is a concept that I first heard from business coach Dan Sullivan – he and Dr. Benjamin Hardy have a recent book out about it. Dan Sullivan talks about the fact that we have a choice to look at the gap between where we are and where we want to be or to focus on the gain and how far we have come. 

I think it’s easy to see the gap for musicians 

We listen to great recordings and performances and have a high standard for how we want to sound (and it can be easy to see where we aren’t there yet). 

But how discouraging is it if we only focus on that?? 

Of course, we want to strive to improve but as Dan Sullivan says, high achievers are the people who focus their energy on the gain instead. 

How far have we come? 

What has gotten better? 

Here’s where we used to be, and here’s where we are now – that’s progress.

We may always wish progress was faster or that we sounded more like our musical idols but if we stay focused there that is not a great way to feel motivated to keep improving. 

How can you focus on the gains this year? 

Where were you a year ago and what has improved? 

Focusing there helps give us the energy to keep improving and to get closer to our big goals anyway.

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Invisible Things

That brings us to our 2nd big idea about measuring progress – measure what Andy J. Pizza calls invisible things. 

Andy J Pizza is a favorite artist of mine, he’s a visual artist, speaker, podcaster, and children’s book illustrator and I’ll include how to find him on social media in the show notes. You can find him on Instagram @AndyJPizza

He has a great series of art that he calls invisible things. On it, he includes things like hope, time, a wish, mystery, chaos, empathy. All things that are very real but less tangible or easy to see. 

I’m an early childhood music teacher along with violin and viola and this age is so much easier to see teeny, tiny bits of progress and find them thrilling. When a toddler taps right with a beat or moves to music and you can see they are connecting with the feel of the music or just loving everything about it it’s so exciting.

There’s nothing better. I think somehow in the instrumental studio we lose that feeling of joy even with small children if we don’t celebrate the small, invisible things that students are learning and developing. 

Invisible things for music students might be 

Focus 

Fine motor control

Sense of pulse or beat 

Connections in the brain 

A love of music 

Sometimes we start to focus on “how many pieces did you learn?” “What book are you in?” and such things. They are one way to measure progress, but each piece learned is made up of hours and often weeks or months to learn. 

Meanwhile, a thousand visible and invisible things improve along the way to help us get there. 

What if we measured those things? 

What if we found it just as exciting when our child can focus a bit long? 

Puts more heart and emotion into their playing? 

Can through a piece with a confusing form or pattern and doesn’t get lost? 

Or learn to work through their own frustration in practice more easily? 

Actually, this is the kind of progress I get most excited about as a teacher. 

We can and will learn lots of music. But what are we learning about ourselves and working with ourselves along the way? Who are we becoming as humans through the process of practice? 

This is the kind of progress and growth that changes us as people and that we learn in the music room and then take with us and have with us for life.

Finally, I want to share a list of prompts about progress from my workbook Positive Practice. After a practice session, or every so often, there is a list of questions I like music students or the adults that are their practice partners to go through. 

In the workbook, we talk about “What improved today? Since we’re talking about capping off the year, what improved over the last year?

We can ask ourselves: Did One of the Following Improve?

• Did something get easier? (Following Suzuki Teacher Trainer Edmund Sprunger’s definition)

• Did a technical skill improve?

• Did we get a clearer, more beautiful sound?

• Did we play with more artistry or expression?

• Did our ability to focus increase?

You may come up with other improvements you want to add. You could add your own list of invisible things. 

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What I’ve found is if we’ve been practicing regularly something will have improved. That’s where we get to focus, that is our gain. 

If we wish we had improved more or accomplished more that’s absolutely fine. Many people feel that way at the end of a year, let’s just not sit in that gap. 

It can help us think about what we want to focus on for the next year though. Do we need to be more consistent with practice? Do we want to focus on technique? Or musicality? 

If your child is old enough you might talk together for a musical goal, or goals for 2022? 

But first I think it’s important to see how far we’ve come. 

To focus on the gain, the invisible things that we can’t touch and feel but which have improved none-the-less, and to think about ways to measure progress beyond a piece of music. 

Yes to high standard and achievement goals – I’m all for that. 

Also why are we learning music? When I ask families to think about what they want their child to have from taking lessons 10-15 years from now it’s often things like perseverance, learning to work hard, loving music and things like this. It’s who we become along the way. 

What better way to lean into that side of things than to really look at how we’ve improved and celebrate that. 

Tiny progress is still progress. Invisible things making progress is still progress. 

Sometimes we have to look at little harder to see those things, but they can be the most important to look for. 

So whether progress feels like that to you, or feels huge and obvious – let’s all take a look at our musical year and appreciate how far we’ve come. 

I’d love to hear what you come up with as a musician, or family of a musician, as you reflecting on measuring progress at your house.

Until next time! 

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Links from Today’s Episode on Measuring Progress:

The Gap and The Gain

Invisible Things by Andy J. Pizza

Positive Practice by Christine E Goodner

Find me on Instagram: www.Instagram.com/suzukitriangle/