Learning to play the piano is wonderful and there can be many, many hours of pleasure from playing the piano. This is especially true for people who have waited years or even decades to take piano lessons, who find piano lessons particularly enjoyable because they have had to wait for so long. But what happens when you lose your motivation to keep going to piano lessons and practicing the piano?
Sometimes, the enthusiasm just vanishes and sometimes it just goes almost overnight.Sometimes it can feel like you are practicing and practicing and getting absolutely nowhere. I equate this feeling to driving a car and getting literally stuck in the mud and you are trying to get the car unstuck by aggressively applying the accelerator, but all you end up achieving is spinning the wheels and getting stuck even deeper into the mud.
You may also experience the feeling of being really discouraged and disheartened and feel like giving up.
So what do you do during these times when you are on the verge of quitting?
First of all, don’t quit. I know that can be very easy to say and really hard to do. If you are going to quit piano lessons, then quit when you have reached a certain achievement such as being able to play your favorite piece of music or you have completed a few levels of an online piano course. Quitting should be done when it is a pre-planned decision, not when it’s on a moment’s notice because you are likely to regret that decision.
Learning to play the piano is a lot like acquiring other skills – it is often a cycle. You start off being very enthusiastic and excited and after a while the excitement dissipates and sooner or later you come across some piece or some new technique that you find hard. It can sometimes feel so hard that piano practice is no longer enjoyable but rather it feels like it is just going through the motions or it can even feel like drudgery. This phase can last from a few weeks to quite a few weeks. Sometimes it feels so hard that you might even start to question your ability to learn to play the piano and consider quitting. If you don’t quit you will find that this period of difficulty will actually pass and the joy of learning to play the piano will come back.
I can actually guarantee that the pleasure will come back because I have seen it hundreds of times with my own students. I have also had students quit because learning to play the piano became hard for a while, but they didn’t understand that this hard part of the cycle of learning always comes to an end if they persist. The best analogy I can use is the time period of 24 hours. There is wonderful light followed by darkness, which is then followed by light again and darkness again that goes on endlessly. The same can be said for learning to play the piano – sometimes it is easy and fun and other times it is challenging and difficult.
So if you are considering quitting because you are finding learning to play the piano hard, don’t quit but persist because the cycle will come around again and you will have renewed enthusiasm and enjoyment.