Photo by CRISTIAN CAMILO ESTRADA on Pexels
As the school year winds down, summer beckons, and motivation dips, what feels like a spring slump may actually be the biggest growth opportunity of the year! Discover how music, mindset, and a little frustration can cultivate the life skill considered the biggest predictor of success… one that will ripple far beyond summer.
I’m Mindy Peterson, host of Enhance Life with Music podcast, where we spotlight all the ways music can make life better. And this is Microhance, a micro-dose of musical enhancement.
Here in the US, we are in that transitional time of year: The end of the school year is in sight; we’re getting more and more of those beautiful spring days (even in Minneapolis, where I live); and there is a crush of end-of-season events – recitals, exams, graduations – before summer arrives with its promise of slower schedules, beach days, and vacation time. If your kids or students – or you, yourself! – are longing for summer’s arrival, this can prove to be a difficult time of year to focus and stay motivated and finish strong!
Which makes this time of year especially fertile ground for developing one of life’s most important skills. Call it grit, mental toughness, or frustration tolerance – different words for the same powerful skill. And this skill is considered by many to be the common denominator for success: the thing that determines whether we actually accomplish our goals… or simply dream about them.
This shows up beautifully in music study, especially this time of year. Think about recital preparation. Taking a piece from “good enough” to “Wow!” doesn’t happen at the beginning. It happens here – when the piece is mostly learned, but the novelty has worn off. When the student is a little tired of it. When it would be easy to coast.
But this is exactly where growth happens. This is where students learn to hang in there… to refine, polish, memorize… and push through that plateau.
In her book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, Amy Morin writes that mentally strong people don’t expect immediate results. She points to what research says about the powerful benefits of delayed gratification:
- Self-discipline – more than IQ – predicts academic success.
- Higher self-control correlates with better relationships and fewer risky behaviors.
- The ability to delay gratification is linked to lower anxiety and depression, and better stress resilience.
- Children with high self-control have fewer mental and physical health problems, and greater financial security as adults.
- Self-discipline is linked to increased confidence and overall life satisfaction.
- Enhanced performance results from the mental strength that helps you reach your full potential.
In other words, when we help students learn to stay with something difficult now, we’re not just helping them prepare for a recital or an exam. We’re helping them build a skill set that will serve them for life.
Jessica Turner offers excellent perspective on the concept of frustration tolerance in her book, Your Musical Child:
“Frustration tolerance is an essential life skill that enables people to deal well with prolonged, challenging tasks and situations. Developing it during childhood is exceptionally valuable. Children can acquire frustration tolerance gradually, through repeated exposure to challenges that can be overcome only with patience and ample practice. People who do not develop frustration tolerance in childhood start to look like big babies to everyone else when life gets tough…
“So it goes that parents do not serve their children well by placating all their needs and making things easy throughout childhood. Sometimes we can do our kids more good by letting them wrestle their challenges to the ground. This is one reason music lessons are such fertile ground! Musical study provides students with an effective medium through which they can learn to delay gratification; they learn that sometimes they must settle for small triumphs and keep on pluggin.’“
And this is the good news – this skill can be developed: gradually, through repeated exposure to challenges that require patience and persistence. And music is one of the best training grounds there is.
I’ll never forget the incredible insight of one of my piano students’ parents. I had a student who was very well-behaved during lessons, but I later learned that at home, practice could be a very different story. He would get incredibly frustrated because he knew exactly what he wanted his fingers to do, but he couldn’t make them do it without effort, without repetition, without practice.
His mom commented that he was so smart that everything came easily to him, and piano lessons were the only way he experienced frustration… and was forced to struggle through it and build that tolerance. She recognized the lifelong value of cultivating this skill, and said she would keep him in piano lessons as long as possible… precisely because of what it was teaching him beyond the music.
Because ultimately, this isn’t just about finishing the school year strong. It’s about becoming the kind of person who can finish strong.
Perhaps my favorite book on this topic is Grit, by Angela Duckworth. Angela left a high-flying job in consulting to take a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. She explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success in her book and in her well-known TED Talk.
And maybe this quote says it best, from Albert E. Gray: “All successful people have the habit of doing the things that failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either, necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”
That’s what we’re building right now. So as summer approaches and motivation dips, don’t see this as a problem to fix. See it as an opportunity. It’s a feature, not a bug! It’s an opportunity to strengthen grit. To build resilience. To help yourself – or your kids or students – finish what they started… and finish well.
Because those are the skills that last far beyond any single season.
I’m Mindy Peterson, and I hope this inspires you to enhance your life with music.
In-Episode Promo
MUD/WTR: I was never a coffee drinker until about 3 years ago, after my sister coaxed me into trying espresso. I have to admit, I loved that caffeine boost and the strong flavor of espresso! But I saw that people who drank it every day didn’t even feel that caffeine boost anymore – and they felt horrible and got headaches if they DIDN’T have their morning caffeine. So I let myself have espresso a few days a week, and went in search of a morning beverage for the rest of the days – something that would still boost my mental clarity and energy. I was thrilled when I discovered MUD/WTR – it was created by an artist and dad who used to be addicted to coffee. He started to blend mushrooms like lion’s mane, cordyceps, resihi, and chaga with super foods and spices. I’ve become a huge fan of the “Original Masala Chai,” a blend that supports gut health and immune function along with energy and focus. Try it yourself – and get 20% off your first order – at mudwtr.com/ENHANCELIFE.
If you enjoyed this episode, please:
- Follow us in your podcast app: This is FREE and conveniently delivers each new episode to your device when it releases, so you don’t have to search for it.
- Share us with others: If you know of someone who would enjoy this episode, please share it with them! It’s easy to do right in your podcast listening app. Just tap the Share feature for options to share by text, email, or social media (or share this page).
- Rate & review our show: This fuels our creative energy, and also helps others find the show!
View all Microhance episodes
Note: We occasionally use affiliate links for products and services we whole-heartedly believe in. We may receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you, for purchases made through these links. This helps support the free content we provide.