Feature Highlight Part 2: Practice Planner

Setting weekly goals and intentions

🎯 In the Practice Planner section of the Muse and Mate journal, you will find that every week starts with a guided goal-setting exercise. We recommend the goal be specific and based on the feedback you get from your lessons. 

🧩 It’s also a good time to refocus and set some intentions for the week – there are some helpful ones in the Intentions section of the journal for you to choose from. For example, this week, Winter will remember to “Focus on one fragment at a time” to thoroughly polish a Bach piece she will be performing. 

🧠 Similarly, set a reminder to get through a week where challenges will come up, even as simple as “Remember to breathe”. 

Plan and reflect on your daily practice

Now we’re getting into the most important part of the journal, the daily planner, to accompany your daily practice.

🗓️ Start your practice with a plan – there can be so many things to work on, and it helps to be organized. For adult learners and amateur musicians, finding enough time and energy to practice daily is the number one challenge. If so, just ask yourself, “If I can only do one thing today, what could it be?” Having the focus helps us feel less overwhelmed. And a lot of us find that once we can sit down to practice, we can usually do more.

⌛️ Reflecting on your practice is equally valuable. Since you won’t have a teacher to give you feedback on your daily practice, this is a way to create a feedback loop for yourself. We gave you four key prompts to help you reflect on the progress you’ve made, the exercises that helped (so you can reuse them in the future), what’s still challenging, and what you think you can do to tackle the challenging part (this will go into your planning for the next practice). If these prompts don’t capture your reflection, write them down in the Notes area.

🔄 Over the course of a week, what continues to be challenging can go into the Agenda in your Lesson Notes so you can get some help from your teacher.