The Weight of Expectation

Pressure can be one of the great drivers of our motivation.

Put enough pressure on the opposition in a game of cricket, football, or basketball, and you put yourself in the box seat to victory.

On the contrary, if your team begins to feel the pressure at a critical moment in the way, then victory slips away.

The pressure cooker is one of the great culinary inventions that makes cooking soups and stews at home, oh so easy.

Place too much pressure in the cooker, and your soup may overflow or burn.

I’ve certainly had my fair share of battles with pressure over the years, and I’ve also been guilty of placing too much pressure on my own students.

How much pressure is too much pressure? How much is too little?

Is there a fine line that needs to be tread carefully? What if you took all the pressure off yourself?

Going Straight Into The Deep End

When I started teaching back in 2013, I was doing it purely to earn a bit of cash, after being rejected from three retail shops.

My first three students were all under the age of 10, and all of them were just starting out on their guitar journeys. I still remember this vividly and boy do I want to slap my 15-year-old self – I gave each student a chord chart of 20 “essential” chords that they had to practise within the next 2 weeks. I told them they would be learning a new song every 2 weeks, so they better get to work!

Now I’ve always been intense with every task I put my mind to, in my (brittle) defense, this was the way that some of my teachers used to teach me. But in hindsight, what was I thinking? Not only was I putting incredibly unrealistic levels of pressure on these young kids, but I was putting dangerous levels of pressure on myself!

The Weight of Expectation

I grew up with the expectation that every musician had to practise several hours every day just to build a solid technique, and a new song must be learnt every week.

Well, unfortunately for my students in my early years as a teacher, I continued this legacy. Being a naïve and inexperienced teacher at the time, I would also take it upon myself to live up to some of the lofty expectations of parents as well. Each week I would “test” students on how well they’d play a song, each week we’d learn a new challenging piece, more difficult than the last, and in my spare time, I learnt some of the hardest songs for guitar, even I couldn’t fathom myself.

I did this for the first 4 years of my teaching career before everything came crashing down.

The moments that everything changed…

Three moments between September 2019 and June 2021 completely changed the way I approached teaching, and also how I went about my own career.

September 2019 was the first time I admitted I needed to change the way I did things. The catalyst – I was burnt out. Severely burnt out. Up until this point, I was teaching 35 students a week, driving around Sydney like a headless chook, and when I wasn’t teaching, spending hours in the morning writing complex material for my students. Deep down, I was trying to search for the next “Tommy Emmanuel” but I completely lost sight of what I was doing. This stressed me out so much to the point that my body shut down, and I had no choice but to take a break.

April 2020 was the first time I was told a student of mine had depression. Although, there were several factors that contributed to this, there was no doubt that the expectations I was putting on him were overwhelming in, and it explained the reasons why he often lashed out. It forced me to completely re-think my entire approach to teaching, and it’s one of the inspirations for this blog series. That week I found out was one of the biggest turning points in my teaching career, as I soon found out several of my other students had depression as well, and they weren’t enjoying the lessons as much as they wanted to.

June 2021 was the first time in my entire music career that I had suffered performance anxiety. I’ve had moments in life where I’ve been nervous before playing, but I’ve never actually broken down during a performance.

On this day, I had to demonstrate a bunch of scales in front of my teachers at the CON; scales that I knew inside out. I don’t remember much of that day, but I do remember suffering a panic attack right in front of my teacher and breaking down when I got home.

Taking The Pressure Off

In many ways, the period between September 2019 and June 2021 was the most prolific of my music career to date. My teaching schedule was packed to the rafters, I was learning so much about music, and I was consistently waking up at 4am in the morning to practise long hours.

Little did I know the pressure cooker was about to explode like a volcano and a very humbling reality check was on the way.

The pressure I put on myself to be this incredible musician, was not only effecting my students, but it was slowly chipping away at my mind. At the time, the panic attack in front of my teachers at the CON was a low point in my career, but it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me.

I spent much of the back end of 2021 re-evaluating what music meant to me, and what teaching meant to me. I talked to some of my favourite musicians and mentors such as Trevor Gordon Hall and Adam Rafferty, who crucially reminded me of the joy of being a musician.

Being an intense, strict and academic musician was NEVER an ambition of mine.

I remembered the first time I saw Tommy Emmanuel play. It lit a fire in me that drove me to learn fingerstyle guitar!  

I remember the first time I heard Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It made me curious to go down the rabbit hole and discover all these great jazz musicians.

All of this reminded me of why I wanted to become a musician in the first place, and ultimately my vision of sharing the joy and happiness of music with others, through teaching.

I’m still on the road to recovery, and there are days where I still fall back into old habits, and the black dog of depression bites me.

But I’ve found a way back to my roots, and the initial spark that started my journey, is back and brighter than ever. 

Out of all the people in the world who pursue a professional career in music, so many fail to reach the goals they set themselves to achieve and are left incredibly underwhelmed.

Expectations, when set with a healthy attitude, can drive us to great things. But more often than not, we end up chasing something that strays so far away from our true selves.

When the pressure cooker was about to burst, I had completely lost sight of everything and almost lost my passion for music completely.

When I finally surrendered and opened the valve, I found my way back and fell in love with music again.

Balance is key, but always remind yourself of who you are as a musician and as a person when self doubt begins to knock on the door.