Hi @Sourabh, welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing your idea. I hope that you find other IFR guitar students that would benefit from this kind of collaboration. As @DavidW mentioned, we do offer workshops that bring IFR students together to work on specific things. But those are always additional courses so they arenât exactly what youâre looking for.
In September of this year we will be starting another workshop called âIFR Deep Foundationsâ that could be ideal for you because it will focus on the very beginning IFR concepts and building a very deep mastery of those concepts. But this will involve new teaching content, additional expense, etc., and I know that this is not what you have in mind. I just wanted to let you know that this will be happening.
Aside from that, I do think that there must be other guitarists who are new to IFR and who would enjoy getting together with you on a regular basis for motivation, sharing ideas, etc. I wonder if you would have more success proposing to create a small study group right here on this forum? You could certainly organize Zoom calls separate from the forum, but you could use the forum itself as a place to exchange messages, post videos and audios of your practicing, etc. In other words, instead of creating a post here asking if anyone wants to meet up away from this forum, you could create a thread that IS the place where people would meet up.
Itâs just a thought, and I donât know if there is a large enough audience of this forum in order for an idea like this to work. But Iâm curious what kind of response you would get if you created a post with a title like, âIFR Guitar Chat Roomâ or âIFR Guitar Practice Groupâ or something to that effect, with a first post that introduces yourself and invites people to share their practice goals, help each other be accountable, etc. I suspect that in order to attract any participants, you would have to give a lot of content yourself first. So you would have to be the first one to share your practice goals, maybe explain your practice routine, post updates about your experiences and breakthroughs, and maybe even share videos if youâre comfortable doing that.
Hereâs what I am pretty sure would happen as a result. At first, youâll probably be talking to an empty room and that will feel strange. But in a way, even this is already a success. Your own personal commitment to share your journey online already gives you exactly the accountability you were hoping for. So this is a way that you can manufacture your own accountability check. Itâs your own commitment to publish content that becomes your motivating factor.
But over time, youâll eventually start to get some interest. If you share your own experience intimately enough, and you really expose your thought process and challenges, thatâs going to resonate with somebody. And if youâre also continually asking people to write and share their own experience, eventually somebody will work up the courage to do that. So now you have a community of 2! Thatâs not very many people, but itâs a quantum leap from being alone because now you have that accountability partner that you wanted.
And then who knows? Maybe it will grow to 3 or 4 people. And then maybe as new people join, some older people will drop off. But even if you could maintain a conversation between 4 or 5 people, this could be a wonderful accountability group for you. And what I like about this approach is that you can already get many of the benefits without depending on anyone else, because the mere fact that you commit to documenting and sharing your journey is already an incredibly motivating social factor.
Itâs also totally fine to reject this idea if itâs not appealing to you. I know itâs very different from the monthly Zoom calls you proposed. I just wanted to mention it because it feels like something that would be entirely within your control. Whatever you decide to do, I welcome you to our community and I hope you find other students that you can share your journey with!
David