Cold, Clarity, and a Notebook

How a pocket notebook brought back direction

This post will be short, because I managed to get an ugly cold so I need to go back to my bed soon haha 🫠 I just wanted to give you some updates on my recent work first, and share a great experiment I just did. But first, commercials!

1. I’m running a Black Friday Sale on my online course “Fundamentals Through Spanish Romance”. This 7-day focused course is designed to help you learn the iconic piece Spanish Romance along with essential classical guitar tools and techniques, such as barre, arpeggio, legato and more.

It’s only $50, (more than 60% off) for the next 6 days only!

2. I’m on facebook now 😃 The page is growing nicely, I post videos and photos daily, so be sure to check it out!

3. My new video about improvisation is out! I know how difficult it can feel to take the leap from playing covers and classical pieces to coming up with your own ideas or just noodling on the guitar. I thought I’d never be able to improvise on guitar, and while I’m still not quite good at it, I now know that I CAN. In this video I show you the exact method I came up with to get started, and I share what I learned about what makes a melody good and beautiful.

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And now, about that experiment… This is more of a personal discovery, but I think it can relate to your artistic or creative journey as well. I’ve been going through a difficult time mental health-wise lately. Life has been really testing my limits and found a way to push my buttons these past weeks (months?), so I started to feel how things were dragging me down and apart. I started to notice a lack of clarity in my thinking, a lack of direction in my daily activity and work, and in my emotions as well. For weeks, I knew I shouldn’t make any big decisions or commit to anything, because I’m simply not in the mental space to do so.

Let’s be real, this happens to all of us. Something pulls you into a spiral, and the next thing you realize is that you’re going down. And I didn’t have the mental clarity to swim back to the top.

I did something that was difficult, but I knew it’s exactly what I needed to gain back some clarity: journal.

I picked up a tiny notebook, small enough so it could fit in my back pocket even. I had it with me all the time and for 30 days, I committed to track the most important thoughts, feelings and triggers I had throughout the days. Each day had one page only, I didn’t allow myself to go on and on about my thoughts and what happened. I only jotted down keywords and short sentences. I tried not to overthink it, I just wrote things with no judgement on how silly they might be.

Another important thing I did was that I didn’t let myself read back the previous days. I didn’t want anything that happened before to affect my thoughts on any given day. I wanted to approach this with as much objectivity as you can with something like this.

Last week was the end of the 30 days, so the next thing I had to do was read through all the pages, look for connections, similarities and observations. I found repeating patterns I would have never thought of before. Being in the middle of stress or anxiety doesn’t let you see clearly how it relates to the other things happening in your life. Or even if you see it, the next day you may not remember. But the journal does.

I loved seeing how I repeated the same things that kept me anxious or stressed, written down with my own ugly little letters, black and white on a piece of paper. I don’t want to go too much into details on it, but I just wanted to share how much I got out of this commitment. It’s not easy to journal every day, but it’s not hard to write 1–3 sentences. It’s not easy to see yourself clearly from a wider perspective, but it’s easy to read through 30 small pages and find patterns.

I’m also, once again, grateful to see how everything I learn in one regard can transfer so well into another part of my life. I developed this reflective, self-observant, deconstructional attitude through guitar playing. And now it helped me find direction in my personal life when I needed it so much.

If you struggle with something for a while, if you can’t seem to get out of it, if you’re uncertain what holds you back, if you feel lost, stressed, anxious, directionless, afraid — please try this experiment.

And for direction in classical guitar playing, have a look at these…

1. My free course Before You Start offers beginner friendly lessons on basics like notation reading, guitar positions, common mistakes and many more.

2. Get my Spanish Romance course for only $50 (more than 60% off), for the next 6 days! Learn this iconic piece and some fundamental classical guitar techniques like arpeggio, barree, legato from scratch!

3. My Favourite 11 Exercises is an easy to follow booklet including several exercises suitable for advancing beginners to advanced level players.

4. Have a look at my shop and see if you find something you like (artworks, my album, T-shirts and more)

Thank you for reading today! Have a wonderful week! 😊

Hugs, Betti