How To Create A State Of Flow When Learning Something New

Congratulations! Whether it's violin, musical theater, hip-hop, or rock band, you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone and added a new activity to your daily routine. 

At the start of learning something new, everything is exciting! New class, new teacher, new experiences!

But now things might be getting hard. By the second month of class, we are reminded that work (and lots of it) is a necessary part of this new activity. And work can be, well… less fun. 

It can be tempting to decide that it’s time to call it quits when your child doesn’t want to practice or complains about practicing. If they don’t like practicing, they must not like this new class or activity, right? 

The truth is, it’s not that simple.

In order to truly try out a new art form, we must fully commit. And that means committing to every aspect. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: 

“Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.”

When we practice (even if we don’t want to), we become more confident and are able to learn faster and more fully. We enjoy class more, because we come prepared and are thus able to learn something new (fun!). We get in a state of flow. Practicing leads us to enjoying our new instrument or activity, not the other way around.

This is also why when learning something new, we spend so much time developing the foundational skills. At Music House, we want to set our students up for success by making sure they have mastered one skill before moving on to the next. 

So if you’re a violin parent wondering, “Why is my child still working on Twinkle?”, this is why! 

Skill begets skill. Everything we’re learning now will show up again later. When we spend the time solidifying foundational skills before we add to them, we build a structure that is strong and sound, and can handle more weight and harder material! Learning something that is too hard for us is frustrating and de-motivating. Setting up foundational skills, and reinforcing them with daily practice, will make it so that nothing will be too hard, because we are taking small, confident steps the whole way. 

We will of course experience more roadblocks along the way. There are ups and downs to learning anything new! However, fully committing to this new art form through daily practice and reinforcing foundational skills will help to even out the rollercoaster, and lead to an altogether better learning experience!