6 Fears Guitarists Face With Teaching Guitar
Not Being Good Enough To Teach Or Answer Students Questions
This is a common fear which is based on an assumption about the average type of student that you will be teaching.
Usually, as new teachers, we assume that the students we will be teaching are advanced guitarists wanting to learn advanced things, and as such we need to be absolute shred-demons in order to teach them.
This simply isn’t true. While there might be the occasional advanced student, the vast majority of students will be:
- Complete beginners who don’t know how to hold a guitar
- Self-taught players who know a few chords and can sort of play a couple of songs
While you might get the occasional advanced player contact you, they will be in the minority.
This (non) problem can be entirely avoided by advertising lessons for beginners, which is usually advisable for new teachers.
Finally, no student can reasonably expect you to know the answer to every possible question.
If you don’t know the answer to a question, simply say so and that you’ll find out and get back to them at the next lesson. And make sure you do so!
Running Out Of Students And Not Being Able To Make A Living
Many potential guitar teachers have this fear, because many guitar teachers face this problem.
It is usually not a problem of there not being students available, even in relatively small areas it’s possible to find lots of students, this is usually a problem of not understanding paid advertising or brand building.
When you know how to do paid advertising properly, you can easily get plenty of enquiries for students.
When you know how to build a reputation or a brand, you put yourself in a situation where people naturally find out about you, become interested in learning guitar and enquire about lessons.
Both of these strategies take a bit of work to learn, understand and implement; but they are not rocket science, and for something like teaching guitar locally they are relatively easy to put in place.
The problem most guitar teachers have is that they do not learn these strategies and become reliant on agencies (who are motivated to give you a couple of students and DO NOT want to fill your schedule) or rely on in-effective methods such as teaching in local schools.
Feeling Overwhelmed By Administration
Once you have a handful of students you will quickly find the paperwork and administration of lessons starts to stack up. You have to:
- Schedule students
- Manage payments
- Manage re-arranging lessons
- Schedule new students around your existing students
- Deal with taxes
And on top all that, you need to manage your own life!
The truth is, most guitar teachers use a teaching model that is very easy to start, but does not scale well. 1-2-1 lessons are very easy to manage when you have 5-10 students, but if you have 30, 40, 50 or more students; all dealing with the admin can quickly take hours and hours a week.
The trick is, with a few simple systems and the right teaching model in place, managing 30 students can take as much time as managing 5. The key is to build these simple systems from the start so that you can easily take on extra students without them creating a headache or huge overheads of time.
Negative Feedback From Students Or Parents
Broadly speaking, we can say that negative feedback from a student or parent will fall into the following categories:
- Having a problem with the format of lessons (e.g. scheduling, payments)
- Having a problem with the content of lessons (e.g. you’re teaching a Taylor Swift fan how to play AC/DC songs)
- Having a problem with how the lessons are being taught (e.g. you’re attitude or approach to helping a student learn barre chords)
Problems With Format
Problems with format can fall into a couple of categories. Sometimes a student or parents might have a certain expectation about the format which differs to how you do things, so you might have to explain the benefits to them of the way you do things, and the problems with the way they expect things to be done.
They might have a problem with payments, or paying on time; or they may have a schedule conflict. You’ll then have to decide if you make an exception (usually this is NOT the right action, as they student ends up creating headaches for you), or give them a chance to find a different teacher - which is ok, not everyone is right to be your student.
Problems With Lesson Content
This is quite an easy fix - teach them something different, or put them into a different class that they will enjoy more.
This sort of negative feedback should be welcomed, because the student is effectively saying “I want to take lessons with you, and this is how you can keep me as a student”.
Ideally this sort of problem can be mostly avoided by finding out what a student is interested in at your introductory lesson.
Problem With Teaching
This may be a problem if you are new to teaching, and this is probably a fear that keeps a lot of guitar players from getting started with teaching.
When it comes down to it, it’s something you’ll have to face.
Fortunately you will probably find that students don’t tell you this directly, but you may find they only stay for a handful of lessons.
But once you have some experience and you’ve started to figure out methods and approaches that work and helping students will become easier - you’ll figure out the types of people that are coming to you and the methods to help them.
When teaching, you’ll quickly find that your students tend to fall into a couple of broad categories when it comes to personality types and interests.
Dealing With Negative Feedback
It’s never nice to receive criticism, and when you’re a new teacher it can be daunting. However, when it comes to negative feedback, it’s important to realise that a student or parent isn’t going to hate you for being who you are, but they might want a change in direction.
Which is quite reasonable.
Face the feedback and ask yourself if it means that you need to make a change. Make the change, try and prevent similar problems from arising in the future and move forwards.
Dealing With Imposter Syndrome
WebDM has the following description of Imposter Syndrome:
Imposter syndrome is when you doubt your own skills and successes. You feel you’re not as talented or worthy as others believe, and you’re scared that one day, people will realize that. Although it’s not a mental health diagnosis, imposter syndrome can cause real harm in different areas of your life.
This is a big problem that many guitar players face in multiple areas of their music, from performing, to recording, to trying to build a career to teaching.
Dealing with this is a process that takes time, and it’s important to understand the source and solutions.
When dealing with imposter syndrome it’s important to realise that everyone has context and restrictions to their lives. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you feel imposter syndrome about teaching guitar. After all, you say to yourself, who am I to teach guitar? John Petrucci is 1000 times better than me.
That may be true. But John Petrucci isn’t going to teach George down the street. So if you don’t teach, George isn’t going to learn guitar at all.
Let’s try another example.
Let’s say you feel like an imposter because other guitar teachers are in the area who have more experience than you. Let’s ignore for the moment that they may well be awful at teaching and assume they are good.
That’s fair enough. But they might have a full schedule. They might teach in a certain way that some people find hard to understand. They might not teach certain genres. They might offer lessons in a traditional 1-2-1 format that ignores other formats that could be fun and help a student make progress faster. They might be too expensive.
There could be many ways where lessons with you are more beneficial for a particular student.
EVEN IF you start out as a bad teacher, just by taking what you do seriously, trying to improve and caring about your students’ outcome, you’ll find that your teaching quickly improves.
When dealing with imposter syndrome, stop comparing yourself to others, and reassure yourself that you are going to try to help your students as much as you can.
Struggling to Balance Teaching With Your Own Practice And Writing
A lot of guitar players get into teaching so that they can make a living while working on their own music and improving their playing further.
However, some guitar players may worry that teaching will get in the way of their practice and their own creative pursuits.
And this is a risk, it can happen.
There are two ways to control this:
- Control teaching time and maximise income
- Control time “overheads” from administration outside of lessons
And this potential imbalance can be an advantage:
Control Teaching Time and Maximise Income
If improving your playing and working on your own music is a priority, then you’ll be wanting to control your teaching time and maximising your income.
It’s important to face economic realities - you can’t get money for nothing and you will have to put at least some time into your teaching.
But, it is easily possible to earn a full-time income on part-time hours, working a few evenings during the week. Now, you will have to do some admin outside of this time, but you can easily have a few days entirely free and several hours most days free to work on your own music.
Control Time Overheads From Admin
A lot of time overheads can be controlled and easily minimised:
- Have worksheets pre-made you can print for students - no more lesson prep
- Have an accountant - no more trawling through receipts and taxes
- Use online SAAS services to manage scheduling and payments
- Systems for advertising that run on autopilot, or with minimal time investment
These systems do take time to research and implement, but once done they’ll allow you to take on more students without taking on additional headaches.
Benefits of Potential Imbalance
The potential imbalance is a benefit - you now have a job where, if you want to, you can easily increase your income by running more classes or taking on extra students. This depends on having good student retention and a good volume of lesson enquiries, but with the above systems that is reasonably simple to achieve.
There are few jobs you can say that about.
Become A Guitar Teacher
Curious about teaching guitar, helping students grow, attracting new students, and building a side hustle or full-time income from it? Take a look at the Guitar Teacher Training Program.