Motivate Your Band - Countdown to Contest

Looking for ways to motivate your band? This series – Motivate Your Band – will feature ideas that you can put into practice immediately in under 5 minutes. Here’s our first installment – a “Countdown to Contest” sign.

Figure out how many days (rehearsals) until contest. Figure out how many HOURS you are going to have to rehearse. 7 hours until contest has a different sense of urgency than 7 days until contest. You want to emphasize how many rehearsal hours you have left.

Make a simple sign (or you can even just write it on the white board) like one of these. Be sure to update it (or have a student in charge of updating it) daily.

Or you can make it a little fancier and put a quote on it to motivate your band even further. One of my favorite “sense of urgency” quotes is:

Caution: Dates on the calendar are closer than they appear.

Another way to do this if you just don’t want to put hours is to say “12 Rehearsals Until Contest.” That still seems sooner than days and may help the kids realize how quickly the big day will be upon them.

Do you have another way you help countdown to contest (or concerts?) If so, comment below. If you have colleagues that are looking for new ways to motivate their band (or if you want to be sure you remember this when contest approaches, please share this link on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Thank you!