How to Set Effective Guitar Goals

Written by Gary Fletcher

This post shows you the CROW method for setting simple and effective goals for your guitar learning.

The CROW process has two big advantages.

First, it's name makes it easy to remember and use.

No long winded instruction manuals.

Simply check your goals are CROW - Concrete, Realistic, Observable and Worthwhile.

Let's see just what that means...

Concrete

A concrete goal pins down the details of what you aim to achieve, making it easy to see what you need to do. An example illustrates this best.

"My goal is to be a lead guitar player."

I bet you've seen goals like that before. Maybe you've even set one like that for yourself.

But how many lead guitar players are there? Thousands of them, with different styles and sounds and playing techniques.

So what are you going to learn to achieve a goal like that? Pretty hard to figure out isn't it.

So, let's make that example goal a little more concrete.

"I want to play blues lead guitar in a style like BB King."

See how that immediately focuses your attention? It's much easier to figure out the skills and knowledge you need to achieve that goal.

Realistic

Only you can determine if a goal is realistic for you. It's fine to want to be a blues player like BB, but is that goal realistic for you right now, or is it just an ambition?

Goals that are too hard to achieve lead to demotivation. Simplify your goal until it represents something you can achieve in at most a few months.

Let's modify our example goal to make it a little more realistic:

"My goal is to learn the notes and playing techniques BB uses."

That's more reasonable, and it shouldn't be too hard to find the lessons and information you need.

Observable

Our goal statement looks pretty good now, but there are still a few open questions. How do you know when you have learned enough of BBs notes and techniques? And what do you mean by "learning" them, is just looking them up in a book enough?

You pin down the answers to these questions when you define a way to observe the achievement of your goal.

An easy way to do this is to picture yourself when you have achieved it. Write down what you observe when you see yourself reach your goal. If you're unsure what you'd see when the goal is reached it's a good sign you need to make it more concrete or realistic.

OK, here's another revision of our example goal:

"My goal is to play all the pentatonic major scale positions and play ten BB King licks with them."

Now it's pretty easy to observe whether or not you know how to play all the major pentatonic positions. And ten licks, well it's ten licks, not five, not twenty, and they're BB licks, not somebody else's.

Now the goal makes it's quite easy to see what you have to do, figure out the steps to work to it, and observe when you've achieved it.

But before you head off to the practice room, there's one more check a CROW goal has to pass.

Worthwhile

It's for you to decide if a goal is worthwhile to you or not. This might seem an obvious point, but it's surprising how many guitar students set out to learn something simply because a teacher, web site, friend, or book told them they just "had to" learn it.

Choose goals that take you to where you want to be, you are the only judge of their worth.

There you have an easy to remember checklist to develop effective guitar learning goals. Let's revise the checks.

Concrete, the goal is specific and detailed.
Realistic, you can achieve the goal, preferably within a few months or less.
Observable, you can see what achievement looks and feels like.
Worthwhile, achieving the goal gets you something you value.

If you want to see how effective CROW goals are for yourself, create one now. Take you current guitar learning goal, revise it using the CROW checks and see how it helps you progress. Leave a comment to let us know about your experience.

CROW goals is a technique I learned from a book by the very inspiring Dale Carnegie. I'm not aware of him being a guitar player, but if you want to learn more about CROW goals than this brief introduction has shown you then find yourself a copy of his book How to Stop Worrying and Live Your Life.

Gary Fletcher shares tips and lessons for guitar learners at his blog Not Playing Guitar.

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