Why success experiences matter more than compliments

I had a student, about twelve years old, who walked into every lesson with his head slightly too low. Not sad, exactly — more like he already knew it was going to be hard. I gave him compliments, a lot of them, and I meant every one. You’re sitting well, you’re keeping the rhythm nicely, you’re further along than last week. He nodded politely and reached for his sticks.

After a few months I realised the compliments weren’t doing anything. He simply didn’t believe them. Not because I wasn’t sincere, but because he didn’t yet have the evidence himself. He needed me to tell him — and that was exactly the problem.

The difference between a compliment and a success experience is smaller than it sounds, but in practice it’s everything. A compliment is something you say. A success experience is something a student feels. And a student who feels something work doesn’t need you to tell them anymore.

That might sound like I want to ban compliments. I don’t. But I’ve started using them differently. Before, I gave them as oil to keep things running smoothly. Now I try to let them land on a moment when the student already has the evidence. You just played that correctly three times in a row. The words are similar, but they work differently. The compliment names something the student already knows. It becomes a mirror, not an opinion.

Deliberately building in success experiences is something I’ve had to teach myself. My first instinct was always to reach for something slightly harder the moment something started to work. Progress is good, but I was rushing through it. The student could find the bass note, so now we’re going to add rhythmic variations. What I was doing was taking away the success experience before it had fully landed. It just started working, and then it wasn’t enough anymore.

Now I sometimes let things sit longer on purpose. Not to slow down, but to let it sink in. When something clicks, I want a student to play it two or three times and think: yes, this is it. That feeling — that it clicks — is the raw material of motivation. You can’t force it, but you can make room for the moment it appears.

With that twelve-year-old, I eventually split the lesson in two. The first half always something he already knew, something he was good at. The second half the new, difficult material. It sounds like a small thing, but it changed how he walked in. After a few weeks his head was higher. Not because I gave more compliments, but because he knew the lesson started with something he could handle.

There’s a trap in this too. Success experiences only work if they’re real. If you make an exercise too easy so the student succeeds, they feel it. Children are remarkably good at sensing when something has been made easier for them rather than for the instrument. And then it backfires. Instead of learning they can succeed, they learn that the teacher smoothed the path for them.

What I’m looking for are moments of genuine, earned mastery — even if it’s just over one small bar. That can take a long time. A penny that drops after three weeks feels different from a penny you guided by hand. The student knows the difference.

I sometimes wonder: how many of the students who quit music gave up without ever truly feeling that something had clicked? Not that it was good according to the teacher. But that it clicked for them. That they had a moment where they thought: I can do this. How differently might things unfold if we treated that moment as the real goal, and everything around it as the means?