Dear friend,

You probably don’t know me, but just a few years ago I was in the same shoes as you. Excited to be a Suzuki violin teacher, inspired by the many amazing veteran teachers, but low on experience and high on uncertainty. I didn’t know how the Suzuki Method would look for me, a 20 year old in the 2020’s.

I’ve learned many hard lessons in the last 3 years as our studio has grown from 0 to 35 students. I’d like to share a few with you to save you some time and heartbreak. Of course your journey will be unique, but know that you aren’t alone.

1. 99% Kindness

Yes, the craft of teaching is really important. Yes, your playing is really important. Yes, your admin systems are really important.

But at the end of the day what people need the most is a teacher who is kind.

99% of what makes a teacher an excellent teacher is that your students want to spend time with you. They want to work with you. They want to build a relationship with you.

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1. You don’t work on the recital, the recital works on you.
   We practice performance, we don’t perform performance.
2. Recovering from a mistake is more impressive than playing perfectly.
3. Collect evidence that you are prepared. Show the receipts.
4. What you call anxious is actually adrenaline, and adrenaline is a helpful chemical that you haven’t made friends with yet.

There are three levers of learning.

Environment.
Repetition.
Mental models.

To pull the lever of environment is to shape your space. This is physical, digital, olfactory, aural, etc. Anything that consumes the senses is in your environment.

We are biologically hardwired to give the humans in our environment (versus animals or objects, etc.) more weight. We learn more from a face than a collection of words. So we learn most from the people around us.

We also, of course, learn more from the physical than the digital world. However most people are live almost entirely in the digital world so digital learning overwhelms physical by sheer volume. We can use that to our advantage (see the next blog post).

And finally, we are predisposed to absorb more from our environment the younger we are. Don’t let this push you to think that environment isn’t meaningful for adults or adult learners.

People underestimate how much you ARE your environment. All of the little things you don’t consider to be ‘you’ are still you, you just haven’t considered them.

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