5 advantages to learning and playing the flute as an adult

If you’re learning the flute as an adult, you may see your age as a drawback rather than an asset. Well, I have good news, being an older learner doesn’t have to mean you’re automatically at a disadvantage. In fact, learning and playing the flute as an adult comes with many wonderful advantages. Let’s explore what they are and start making full use of the benefits that come with age.

Intrinsic motivation

As adults, we get to decide what interests us and what we want to learn. Being able to do that gives us much more control over our learning and also increases our motivation.

Unlike children, who need external stimuli to learn, adults rely much more on intrinsic motivation. Learning a skill as an adult is normally a conscious choice. As a result, our approach is completely different from a child’s or someone who’s being made to study something. Our motivation comes from within.

And even when our enthusiasm does wane a bit as an adult, we always have the power to go back to our why, to remind ourselves of why we’re learning and get freshly motivated.

Life experience

Next on the list is life experience. As adults, we have a wealth of prior knowledge to draw from. We’ve been through various stages of life, learned things, perhaps experimented with different ways of learning, and acquired skills and knowledge. We’ve got stories to tell. So what is the significance of that?

Well, everything you’ve experienced or learned so far facilitates future learning. In fact, this is how our adult brains learn: We connect new information to what we already know and expand our knowledge and skills that way. While children rely heavily on repetition, previous knowledge plays a much bigger role in adult learning.

So next time you are lamenting your age, think about that. Your previous knowledge and experience is actually helping your brain to acquire and assimilate new information. And the more experience you have, the more your brain can draw from and fall back on!

Personalized learning

Another great advantage of being an adult learner is that you get to personalize your learning. So instead of being forced to follow a one-size-fits-all method, you get to carefully consider how you learn best and apply that knowledge to your learning.

As kids, we’re often just following a program or curriculum that’s been selected for us. We also don’t know ourselves that well yet, which makes articulating our learning preferences a little more difficult.

As adults, we get to be that much more specific about how we learn best. The more we connect our learning to our personal needs and goals and adapt it to who we are, the better we learn. Our learning will be relevant and meaningful and that in turn will help motivate us.

Let’s look at some examples. If you know you are a visual learner, you will be sure to include plenty of pictures and videos in your learning to maximize that preference. Or if you know you function best at night, you won’t be beating yourself out of bed in the early hours of the morning – that would be silly, not to mention counter-productive.

Maximizing learning potential is one of the things that really excites me. I love seeing students get to know themselves better and implement effective learning methods to reach their goals. If you’d like to know more about this aspect of your learning journey, check out our recent blog post entitled “5 ways to find your learning sweet spot”.

Focus and attention

If you’ve ever spent any time around children (especially younger ones), you’ll know that their attention span is short. They usually get distracted easily and can’t last all that long doing just one activity. As adults – and again, this is where motivation and knowing why you’re doing something plays a pivotal role – we can often focus for longer.

Even though we all get distracted at times (especially in this digital day and age!) older learners have usually put thought into their learning and are pursuing it very consciously. So when it’s time for a practice session, they focus and concentrate, since they know that doing so will help them to get ahead.

Being an older learner also means that generally, you are more settled in life and have probably already made many of your bigger life decisions. This may also leave more space for you to focus on your flute and pursue it in a more wholehearted, focused manner.

The ability to reflect on your learning

While kids can certainly learn to reflect on their experiences, I would say that this is not a natural tendency that they have. Children usually favor being present “in the moment” and are not so interested in analyzing or reflecting on what has been.

As adults though, along with the life experience and self-knowledge we’ve acquired, reflection may come a little more naturally to us. It helps us to know what is going well and what isn’t and try and make a plan to change that.

When we regularly reflect on our practice, we make sure that we are optimizing our learning and staying in touch with what we have set out to do.

Some last words…

In a nutshell, we generally have a lot more control over our learning as adults. This also makes learning a more enjoyable, fulfilling and meaningful endeavor.

So if you’ve been feeling a bit negative about your age lately, take heart! You have a lot of good things going for you as a more mature learner and you don’t have to stop learning either. The sky’s the limit!

Renate

Renate Yotti is a writer and language teacher with a soft spot for music. She loves creating beautiful music on her piano and used to play the cello as a teenager. Renate has co-authored a poetry collection with Tacham Deowm called Cross-Over (available on Amazon). You can also find her on Instagram as inspiredwritermama