Partial goals and excuses

Well, I think I have accomplished goals 1, 2 and 4 but I haven't achieved goal 3 because I haven't practiced much accept Chopin and Norton this week. My excuse: headaches. I've had headaches for the last few days and haven't felt like plonking on the piano. So, not sure what I will do at my lesson tomorrow because the Norton and the Chopin will not take up 45 minutes! I'll try to do some extra practice tonight if headaches go away.

Setting goals

Well, the lesson was OK but I had major memory problems on Cuban romance. The goals for this week are:

1. finish memorizing Chopin
2. improve memorization of Cuban romance (because it sucked!)
3. improve problem areas on p. 3 and p. 5 of Bach
4. play Chopin as often as possible because I am going to give it a "test-drive" at next week's monthly Beckett piano recital (yikes!)

In the midst of all of this I have also started a new Mendelssohn, the one know as the Spinning Song. Peter says it is fun; we shall see!

Breaking bad habits

I have a bad habit. You would think that having a good piano lesson would be inspiring but in fact it often has the opposite effect. If I've had a bad piano lesson (i.e. I played poorly) then I practice really hard until I have a good piano lesson and then I lose motivation to practice because I've shown myself and Peter that I could play; then I have a bad piano lesson and the cycle starts again. I had two good piano lessons in a row recently which means I am struggling to practice this week. Combine this struggle with the fact that I'm out at the Drayton Festival on Thursday night and I think I may be heading for a bad lesson. The good news is, this means I should have a good practice mentality next week! I would really like to break this cycle though. I probably should be setting practice goals for the week, for example "this week I want to improve p. 2 of the Chopin." Perhaps I'll use this blog to state my goal for the week. I have to wait until Friday though, it seems wrong to set a goal in mid-week.