LFP 017 | How to Accomplish Your Flute Goals

Well Hello today. My name is Rebecca Fuller and this is Episode seventeen!

Learning to play the flute will put you in a good mood for the rest of the day. Because the flute is the most cool, the most fun, and the most beautiful of all the instruments in the whole world. We are  here to tell you, you can do it! And Rebecca will show you how, step by step all along the way. She’s a curly headed blonde with a talent for teaching. Introducing the Learn Flute Podcast

Take it away Rebecca!

It’s going to be a great day here at Learn Flute Online! Rebecca Fuller here to help you with something we can all use- which is tangible ways to envision success with our flute playing and how to get those visions to actually happen.

I’ll let you in on some secrets of mine – I’ve always been the type of person who likes to achieve, and I like to make these successes pretty intentional.

By intentional, I mean that I actually ‘map’ out what I feel I’d like to accomplish, and then I work backwards from this outcome to create the perfect plan or map.

Now I’m guessing you are also an achiever. The reason I say this is because you are here, listening right now. That’s enough to let me know that you are a self-starter who cares about making themselves better. I know you value education. I also know that you thrive on the beautiful things of this earth- including music.

So today as I give you some examples on how to create this type of success in your music studies, I want you to take notes. In fact, I’d like it if you could write this little recipe on a card and tape it to your bathroom mirror or kitchen fridge or somewhere you’ll see it often. The reason I’m telling you this is because the number one element to creating your desired outcome will be to keep this goal right in front of your face. Literally – right in front of your face where you can see it often. Otherwise if you just listen to this podcast episode, your days and weeks will turn into months and you’ll forget all about this.

It’s been said that people who write down their goals are forty two percent more likely to achieve them. And, if they tell a friend the probability goes up to seventy eight percent. Pretty good odds there that writing these types of things down will really get you somewhere.

Having purposeful intention in making your goals is really going to do something for you so let’s go onto number two in our recipe for success here: number one was to write it down, if you didn’t catch that subtle hint. haha okay let’s get into number two now.  Lewis Carrol said it best when he wrote this conversation into the cheshire cat’s dialogue as he talked with Alice of Alice in Wonderland:

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”

The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”

I actually think that is quite brilliant. Too many of us say we want to be great, but don’t really have any specific goals. Well, today is our lucky day because we’re going to get clear as a bell on what we want to accomplish.

Now, before you write anything down at all on this stage, I want to talk about making these goals very specific, and some that shouldn’t take years or a lifetime to accomplish.

So, to be specific here, instead of writing down a broad goal of “I want to be a really good flute player”, let’s think about it for a minute and realize what being a really good flute player really entails.

First off, I’m going to choose for example’s sake that good flute players have impeccable tone. So, a more specific goal would be to have a clear tone that is free from fuzz and whispers.

Basically we were writing down the goal of having more clear tone because it’s a more precise way of getting at the goal of becoming a really good flutist.

The next thing we have to do is get very clear on what we ourselves can do to to accomplish this goal. And this is called the ACTION to the goal.

It may be that we just haven’t spent enough time with our instrument lately to keep our face muscles in shape and that’s the reason we are fighting with clear tone. So, a specific ACTION in this example we can write down and take is to find ourselves a regular practice time and then stick with it.

It could be that we have been practicing and practicing and not finding anything measurable working. So, we may need to seek for some guidance and help – which is really a super smart thing to do. It’s pretty neat that we get to help each other here in this world. we should use that to our advantage.

You can rest assured that I love being of assistance in this space. I have created program after program for people like us where I show and teach these exact concepts that I’ve been able to master to a certain level.

I get very specific these flute skills quite a bit during the premium lessons on my Learn Flute Online dot com website in the members area. Many, many  lessons are dedicated to identifying certain sounds and how to combat those with little specific tweaks I help you with.  Also, (as a side note on the subject of clear tone) if you are on my email list, which is easy to sign up for by just hopping over to the website and filling out your name and email in the opt-in box, you’ll get notifications of when I start my excellent course titled “Ten Days to Terrific Tone”.

I usually start it at the very beginning of each year, and it has proven to be quite popular. I have loads of testimonials from people who have gone through that course and said it totally turned their tone around and helped so much.

Anyway, back to our Goal setting subject, you’ll notice that we’ve identified three areas to accomplishment with the first being that we will ‘write it down’ and keep it in a place we can see it often.

The next is that we found a specific skill under a more broad umbrella goal that we can focus on. And this goal is where we create a tangible action.

Once we have gotten this far, we can set a time-frame to this where we will measure our success. I actually heard a study that was done I think at U.C. Santa Barbara. Anyway, they studied people who were actively trying to accomplish large-scale goals, and they found that those who chunked their ambition into 90 days or less were incredibly much more successful.

This is something I believe since I tend to get overwhelmed when I make monstrous intentions, and then get bogged down in the day to day tasks and realize that I bit something off bigger than I could chew.

Identifying a tangible destination to be accomplished no more than ninety days out is one smart way to keep us from overwhelm.

So, by now if you’ve been taking notes you should see these steps on your card; number one; write it all down; number two; figure out a smaller, more specific goal rather than a huge impossible sounding one; and number three; find an action or set of actions that you CAN do either by yourself or with some help and guidance and put them on your daily task list not to many though, not to many. Number four is to measure success and reevaluate goals and intentions every ninety days or even much more often.

Whew, there was a mouthful of how to become a person who intentionally achieves. And, I hope you have some great ideas for yourself this year. I know you’ll be able to dig in and do what is necessary to accomplish your hopes and dreams.

Playing the flute well is very satisfactory, and the allure and style a good musician brings to this earth is really quite something to be commended.

I hope you’ve had time to check out the other podcasts in this series. I feel there is a lot of really great information for you to consume on this platform, and I hope you take advantage of it… because I’m doing it all for you.

Come on over to the Learn Flute Online dot com website and join in on the conversation today at the URL Learn Flute Online dot com forward slash zero one seven. That’s for episode seventeen. My plan is to put out quite a few shows because I feel that talent and teaching isn’t something to keep hidden. I can reach out to you, and then you in turn can pass it along to someone who enjoys this same type of thing.

See you next time.