The value of a good mentor/instructor/coach/teacher

Image Credit: AhavatHaEmet

Despite the fact that I am self taught in the guitar, I am always in support of getting a good mentor.

There was basically only 2 reasons why I could effectively teach myself the Guitar. At the same time however, I encountered 3 problems.

Firstly, all the resources were readily available to me.

I have a guitar. I had score sheets. I had suggestions from online forums on how to start playing. And I had the will to play. So play and progress I did.

More importantly, I had prior knowledge in Music. I knew what a cadence was. I could quantify rhythms. I knew how each cadence would sound. Most importantly, the mind-body link to my fingers was already there. All I needed to do was to modify it from that of pressing piano keys to pressing guitar strings.

Any prior knowledge in a field is always an added advantage. Many skills have overlapping areas, and the guitar was no exception. The finger dexterity, musical ‘feel’ and interpretation of a Grade 6 piano student directly affected my approach to the guitar.

This made technical progress much easier. For example, telling somebody to relax their wrists while pressing the strings won’t get through to the average beginner. How is it possible to convey a feeling as an instruction? If you listed down everything going on in the brain by trying to relax, it could basically fill a book.

The fact is, no one can teach you these skills but yourself. But then the next question is: What use is an instructor then?

Very simply, any good instructor has experience. They have seen numerous students and in a certain way, can look into the student’s mind and guess how he feels. At the same time, the instructor has gone through the learning process himself. These 2 keys make it possible for the instructor to receive feedback from his/her student, make an educated guess of the problem the student is facing, and then draw upon past experience to help to bridge the gap in the student’s skills.

Even myself, despite being musically trained, had trouble getting the knack of the some of the subtleties of the guitar. How should picking feel? How should the stroke be executed?

The only way I could approach the problem was to simply try it out. And if it did not work, I dumped the method. Not only did this create uncertainty of my own progress, it caused the other two problems.

Wasted Time

If you have read the article “A Discusiion on picking – how to hold the pick“. You would know that I started off with a holding and picking technique with did not give me enough technical flexibility. The method which I chose to hold the pick was completely arbitrary.

It turned out that I was wrong. However, to correct that mistake, I had to spend at least 2 months unlearning the old picking style and then learning a new one.

This applies to virtually any skill, and can come both in the form of learning incorrect skills which have to be unlearned, or from learning things which are unnecessary. In terms of the guitar, one unncessary skill which I tried to pick up was fingerstyle. As a rock player, I did not need to focus on effective fingerstyle playing to be able to play rock music effectively.

A good mentor will thus always have a distilled form of information and skills relay which allows the student to grasp the basics in the fastest time possible.

After the basics have been grasped, the student can then obviously have an enhanced experience of musical exploration.

This brings me to the last problem.

Frustrations and Bad Habits

Let’s face it, all of us hate to be newbies at any skill.

Sure, it’s fun for awhile, but when no consistent progress is made, motivation can wane. At the same time, we may try to take shortcuts that lead to destructive habits.

My favourite example involves weight lifting.

Suppose we have a beginner trainee who decides to get into lifting weights. He starts out light, and then progresses nicely for 12 weeks.

After 12 weeks, his gains halt. Furious and dedicated like he is (aren’t we all?), he pushes harder, refusing to take a break. The result is using bad technique to lift the weights in order to try and lift heavier weights.

Then, due to this bad form, he gets into trouble and herniates a spinal disc, effectively sidelining him for 3 months.

In guitar terms, it was like my picking problem. It can easily be a case where through experimentation, you possibly learn bad habits which cause you harm, or hamper progress.

Having a good mentor invariably eliminates this problem. He or she ‘knows the ropes’, and prevents bad habits from forming. Sure, optimal progress may not be gauranteed, but constant progress will be.

That said, because the mentor has knowledge in the field, he or she will more easily internalise new knowledge and thus be able to apply that knowledge better than a beginner can.

For example, a programming teacher will be able to internalise and update his students on the current compiler software and collaboration tools available, something that has to be distilled from the vast smorgasbord of information from the World Wide Web. The student just starting programming may not know this, and may end up with a lousy software with a lousy interface that hampers his rate of progress.

A Good Mentor

From the above I guess that you can guess what qualities a good mentor should have.

To end this post, I will summarize this in 3 points.