Motivating Music Students Part 5: Motivation by Fear

When I say “motivation by fear”, what comes to mind? Stalin’s Reign of Terror? Your mom bringing out the belt? Both valid answers, but not quite the type of fear I’ll be talking about. As a continuation on our Motivating Music Students series, we’ll be discussing good fear and the motivation that arises from it.

Good fear - motivating fear - can propel you to prepare hard to avoid a disastrous outcome. Think of it more as anxiety or stress, just not in debilitatingly large amounts. Fear of screwing up or disappointing someone in the audience is a common motivator in practicing music (I know it is for me). However, you know your students best. Some may be more prone to buckling under stress than being motivated by it, and others excel at inhuman speeds the weeks before a recital.

How do we teach good fear?

First of all, the most important point I’ll make today: make sure your students do not fear failure. It’s one thing to prepare hard because they don’t want to screw up, but it’s completely different when a student actually fears failure itself. These kinds of students have been proven to be more inhibited, never really putting out their true potential in fear that they will fail. This makes for a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: they fear failure, so they unconfidently put out only a “safe” amount of effort - which, obviously, leads to failure.

Fearing failure also brings on a whole host of other problems that will affect their playing and enjoyment of music. A big one is that those who feared failure from early on were more likely to work towards goals not because they actually enjoyed it and wanted to learn more, but because they just needed to validate themselves - you know, to prove that they could. They were also found to be more likely to cheat because of this. And we don’t want that!

So, what do we do? Get them to embrace mistakes! Teach them that messing up (or “failure”) is inevitable, and as long as we’re learning, it’s going to happen. It’s how we own that slip-up that defines it as a learning experience or a shameful memory.

So now, your students are without fear of failure and ready to take on challenges. But as I said before, it’s all about the balance. Make your expectations clear, and make it clear when they are not met.

Finding fear-motivated students

Some students are more susceptive to this kind of motivation than others, and often you find that these students are the easiest to work with. If they sense your disappointment one week, they will work extra hard the following week in fear of seeing that same reaction. Or they’re the ones who improve exponentially right before a recital. They feel stress appropriately and put it to good use.

What to look out for

These students, although easily motivated, may not be feeling the joy in music as much as they should. For me, the success of the fear-induced preparation after a great performance seemed to be reward enough. But after years of this, it got exhausting. I saw others who were great players who didn’t (seem to) get as stressed as I did before concerts. What was their secret? Were they just more used to performing, or were they simply so good that they had no need to get anxious?

Well, after joining a music school, I asked around. And it turns out - everyone gets nervous. But those people that I admired - those nonchalant performers - they just learned to frame it differently. If their hands are shaking from nerves, they say they’re glad the adrenaline is kicking in so that they can play with all the energy they’ve got. If they’re practicing out of fear of a bad repeat performance, they just shake their head, laugh at their past mistakes, and say, “Oh boy, I don’t want that to happen again.” And then they turn that fear, stress, and anxiety into pure determination to work harder.

As much as motivation by fear of disappointment or fear of looking bad works, I think it’s more important to teach students how to take that stomach-in-knots feeling and reframe it. Your body feels stress for a reason - it’s up to you whether you let it debilitate you or push you toward your goal. When you can do this, you’ll find more enjoyment in your practice as well as making more productive use of your time.

When practice time is easy and efficient, your students are always prepared and you never have to put your scary face on. Help them out by introducing Better Practice - proven to increase practice time by 3 times!

If you liked this post, please make sure to share it with your fellow music teachers using the buttons to the bottom right.