The Power of Five Minutes

How do you motivate yourself, or your students to get things done on busy days?

Are you a teacher who has students who come to lessons week after week without seeming to have practiced? Do you have trouble finding the time to practice? Or do you have things you want to accomplish that just don’t get done week after week? Do you find that you have so much to do you get overwhelmed and nothing appears to get accomplished?

What if you took just five minutes of each day to do one thing on a task? What if you sat at the piano, or picked up your instrument and took a deep breath and worked on getting more comfortable with one passage of music? Really allowing yourself to go deep. Getting more in touch with the sensations in your body and listening to your sound so you can let the flow happen with that one phrase? What if you did that everyday you felt you were too busy?

This is what I do on busy days. I pick a phrase and play and listen, and allow myself to get in contact with my entire self for five minutes. And that five minutes gives me a sense of a win, of success, and calms the negative talk in my head, freeing me to be able to focus on another task.

Over a period of days I discover that I’ve accumulated a number of wins that propels me into accomplishing more on the days that I have more time to practice.

This experience allows me to guide my students to a feeling of success. Because this is what I do, I can speak with a sense of authenticity. My students feel relieved and discover the excitement and energy that comes from a lot of little wins.

How do you motivate yourself, or your students to get things done on busy days? What works for you? I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to share in the comments below.