Hey guys. Welcome back to this episode. You don't have a guitar problem. You have an attention problem.
Welcome to JazzGuitarLessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way.
My name is Marc and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe!
So quick! Personal update I've been reading this book called The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace, and thank you Sean. So a new friend who is also a seasoned meditator recommended this book. It's actually super power attention is and even after reading only a few chapters, I'm realizing that most of what we do is about presence more so than productivity. Even if we have hacks, we have to do lists and we want to do more with less time and and or outperform others or, you know, in case of music like make progress faster. it's it's a challenge and that's our superpower. So let me explain. you could do this right now. Pause the podcast or, you know, pause the video and attempt to focus on a single object like a glass of water or a flower or yourself in the mirror. Right? I did, I saw a telephone pole yesterday. I'm on the sidewalk, I just stopped, I looked at the telephone pole and like, I challenge myself. 30s 60s and I tried several times. Just personal anecdote. I could probably do five 10s maybe not even because my mind would be drifting I. So the point is, generally in our day and age, we're not really wired for stillness anymore. And it's okay. I mean, it's it it's not a problem. But here's where I want to come at it for for just our podcast. If we're practicing scales, typically we don't have a technical problem because the technical problem can be fixed. Here's the beauty of guitar and why I love, There's many things I love in life to do or to learn or to be or to be around people. And if I'm trying to fix, quote unquote, something with my guitar playing, the main advantage I have is instant feedback, right? If I'm playing at a chord or scale a note, I know how it sounds like, what do I use? Well, I use my ears to pick up if I played it correctly and this is a feedback loop. I hear it, I play better and I play it again, etc. so it's called practice, right? No surprise. But here's the thing. If I'm playing the G major scale, I don't necessarily have a technical problem with the scale because that I can fix through the feedback loop. I have an attention problem, meaning that my mind or my thoughts can be somewhere else and the immediate thing I am doing. Oh yes, very obvious. Marc, you're saying you're telling us? Yeah, I am telling me that. Try, try play a G major scale 30s in full presence. Can you stay aware of the tone, the feel, the, the feel of the strings on your your finger? So the pick or the right hand finger, which you pick with the motion of each of the finger, the intention to sound. Can you stay aware of that without drifting? And the short answer is probably no. And I'm not blaming you. I'm just I'm I'm like that as well. I realize that even though I can concentrate and play music and whatever, which quite frankly, I don't do as much anymore, but I could by the same time, I'm extremely distracted. I'm not like ADHD or I don't have like a diagnosis, but I think we're all a little bit like that. And I think deep focus and being completely enthralled and taken in and losing myself, quote unquote, in the music, is that musical superpower. I think it saved me in my 20s and 30s, because it's a state in which I was really in peace, because I couldn't think of anything else than the actual moment, you know, try improvising on giant steps or confirmation or whatever. You can't really be doing anything else much. Or if I do, like if I'm eyeing the bartender's like, oh, she's cute, and I'm not totally focused on my solo anymore and vice versa, right? So it's sort of a meditation or prayers on its immersion flow. It's being in that zone and again, that's the ultimate superpower. So this is not an exercise. It's more of like sort of opening up to something. You may look at. It's never about that exercise, that melody, that tune, that scale or that like it's how I approach it. So I don't need more tabs, more books, more lessons. I need more attention and presence. And I know we're in that day and age where there's more content like YouTube, social media, blogs. Now, I there's more than ever and it's exponentially, moving up. And that's why we thought it would be the problem. Right. So in the 70s or 80s were like, oh, it's it's the data that we don't have. We don't have the books, we don't have the knowledge. After we solve that thing, we'll have all the knowledge and we'll know everything. And it's going to be super easy to pick up skills. Boy, were we wrong about that. The internet came up. It's everything 21st and a little bit of everything all of the time. You know, that's Bo Burnham. That was a song. It's sort of a funny thing, but he's right. I mean, it's everything. So if I really attend to what I'm doing and I'm really present to what that thing is, it it the thing starts to transform me because I can fully absorb it. So that's it. That was myself for the podcast. So my invitation to use pick up the guitar, try focusing for 30s. Don't beat yourself on the head, don't be disappointed. Just observe what's showing up. It may be a thought about lunch, maybe my thought about my previous conversation with my, partner. My romantic partner. It may be about family member. It may be a bad old memory. It may be a great old memory. It may be grief. Like whatever comes up. And that's the thing is, like once I focus my attention, all of the stuff will just come up. But as my attention expands, my music will deepen and my joy of that present moment will increase, especially once the like the small stuff has bubbled up. You know, the parking ticket or, you know, the the guy that drove slow in front of me or, you know, all of that will bubble up. And then after that's gone, then we're in business. All right. So this is the kind of mindset talk we really talked about on jazz guitar lessons, all that in our programs and ebooks. If you're interested, you can go deeper into this learning if you like. The simpler, easier, better, faster. But yet again, less is more approach. You can check out the Pinnacle Method e-book. It's free. It's in the description along. If you catch it in time, there's a bonus video training that goes with it. So that's it. I'll see you soon on JazzGuitarLessons.net. Au bientot!
