Neil explains the absolute importance of sticking to your word especially when it comes to your work and the advantages you can gain if people know they can rely on you. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Reliability is the foundation of everything a tutor does. 
• If we have to make sacrifices to be reliable, so be it. 
• Unreliability is a crippling reputation to have. 

BEST MOMENTS
‘This got me thinking about reliability and the role it plays for us as tutors, teachers, coaches and all the other areas of our lives, both business and personal.’
’We have to be completely reliable to be useful to our students. We have to be there for them, deliver our very best to them every single time we say we are going to be there.’
‘Who is best for the student? A really great teacher who isn’t there, or an adequately good teacher who is there?’

VALUABLE RESOURCES
The Tutor Podcast
www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST
Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD
[email protected] 

Most of us carry with us everywhere one of the most corrosive, divisive, wasteful and narcissistic forms of evil currently affecting modern society. Wherever you go, you have an electronic tag and listening device with you stealing your focus, time, energy and attention. Neil reminds us of how much better things could be if we cut the cord to the mobile phone.   

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Despite laws to the contrary, people are addicted to their phones and still drive while using them.
• Social media is corrosive with little hits of positive dopamine which are not set in reality.
• The unity of the family is being eroded by the mobile phone.
• Give yourself, and others, time away from your mobile phone. The world will not collapse without your connection to it. 

BEST MOMENTS
‘I had several near misses recently with distracted pedestrians. They’re wandering around in a dream world, they’ve got their earbuds in, watching videos or texting, not looking where they’re going..’
‘It takes you away from real life. The face-to-face communication you engage with other people should matter more to you than your online audience.’
‘I’m not saying the phone isn’t useful as a tool. What I am saying is that it’s a bloody problem when it becomes the dominant presence in somebody’s life.’
‘Are you hooked on your phone? What’s it doing for you really?’  

VALUABLE RESOURCES
The Tutor Podcast
www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST
Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD
[email protected] 

Neil explains the need to test any new idea, method, acquisition or project to confirm its efficiency within your setup and to consistently keep abreast of your measurables.    

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Change is the one true constant.
• Testing can help you eliminate less effective methods and replace them with more favourable ones. 
• You cannot manage what you don’t measure.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Looking at life in general I think that everything that you’re currently doing is only a trial. It’s an extended test of a behaviour.’

‘Write a plan so you can catch up on your weak points, so you can reinforce and maximise your strengths.’

‘Test everything! Have a bash at it and see how this testing mindset works for you.’

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected] 

Neil reveals his secret to ensuring the productive use of your time and resources every day. Before you settle in, however, grab yourself a pen and paper, because this is the equipment you will need to achieve a daily, focused, worthwhile effort in the running of your business.    

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Every day needs a plan.
• A plan is nothing unless it is written down.
• If you follow a written plan you are less likely to be distracted. 
• Prioritise your tasks in order of necessity if you think time is a problem.

BEST MOMENTS
‘As your attention is drawn onto the latest problem, crisis or bright shiny thing the chances of you achieving what you set out to do at the start of the day are massively diminished.’
‘I’m a fan of paper because paper doesn’t crash. How many times have you lost data on your phone or tablet or some other device that’s just gone upside down and doesn’t work anymore.’
‘It’s so much easier to get a list down on paper the night before so you literally just step into tomorrow.’ 

VALUABLE RESOURCES
The Tutor Podcast
www.Neilcowmeadow.com

CONTACT METHOD
[email protected] 

ABOUT THE HOST
Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

Neil’s favourite acronym, False Evidence Appearing Real, fear is the focus of this episode. With two very different students fifty years apart in age suffering the same problem, Neil focuses on this very common and familiar block to progress with two different strategies to overcome the problem. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• You may need differing strategies for different students. 
• By using the student’s personal interests and philosophies to communicate you can overcome their doubts more effectively. 
• Be ready when you overcome fear for others to be envious.
• The nature of fear changes from person to person. 

BEST MOMENTS
‘It’s fear of getting it wrong, fear of making a mistake and, ultimately, fear of even trying.’
‘Figuring out who she is, I'm going to try to use her world view. The crystal pendant that she wears suggests to me very strongly that she’s what I call ‘spiritually interested.’
‘The masses are invariably too afraid to take a shot at it. All they want to do is stay in their little comfort zones and as you and I both know, that’s where dreams go to die.’
‘All we did was take what was there, the feeling in his stomach that he assumed was fear, gave him a different suggestion that worked a little bit better.’

VALUABLE RESOURCES
The Tutor Podcast
www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST
Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD
[email protected] 

Neil shares with you the RUSH model. RUSH stands for Ruthless, Unflinching, Self Honesty. This is his core philosophy for building a robust self-image and attitude towards any useful and worthwhile project, task or opportunity.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Exercise an unflinching and dispassionate attitude towards oneself to attain a rational viewpoint of your position.
• Stay steady and forthright when meeting problems of your psyche.
• No one else can do this for you.
• Tell the truth to yourself and avoid self-delusion.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Expect pain. Expect grief and expect to suffer. Be ruthless.’

‘Get to know that shadow. Get to know that inner enemy so well then you can dance with that dark power and you can harness it and let it drive you away from your own dark side.’

‘Nice doesn’t work on its own. Nice is an empty velvet glove, utterly limp and impotent without the iron fist that is its necessary counterpart.’

‘Truth is simple. Truth is lazy. Truth is efficient. Truth is effective. Truth is eternal, it resists the assaults of time and the slander of fools.’

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected]

It may not be a completely good idea to forget, obfuscate or deny our failings on our journey to being an expert in our field. Although it seems like a good idea to only present the positive, Neil explains the advantages of being open and honest about our past failures and mistakes in the content of our teaching.   

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Honesty builds a bridge between you and your students.
• Students will be more confident and hopeful to see you have overcome your past difficulties as they are currently.
• You will be making it clear that they are not the problem. Difficulties should be expected and overcome. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘If he told them that he hadn’t always been an expert they might somehow assume that he wasn’t an expert after all.’

‘To my tiny and thoroughly addled mind, it makes absolute sense to share with my own students the sad, twisted story of my own appalling lack of talent, my own frustration and utter bewilderment.’

‘Every day I remorselessly manipulate…er..sorry..influence them so that they can get out of their own way and get more of what they want in music and in life.’

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected] 

How is it possible that in so many tutor’s experiences a student claims to forget everything they have learned as soon as they leave the teaching room? Neil shares his theories on this puzzling phenomena of instantly vanishing memory.   

KEY THEORIES

• Maybe the lesson hasn’t been embedded properly by the tutor.  
• The student may be resistant to learning for their own reasons.
• There could be a conflict in the student’s beliefs and how they visualise themselves. 
• Your teaching room and yourself have secret magical powers that imbue the student with knowledge which is then mystically removed when they leave. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s possible that I've not made the ideas stick enough, that I haven’t put it in a form that is inescapable for them.’ 

‘Students frequently tell you that they understand something when they don’t because they don’t want to look stupid. We need always to make them feel safe and know that if they don’t understand something it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they don’t understand it yet.’

‘When they go home they start to argue with themselves about what they did and begin to dismiss it.’

‘The language used will massively affect the perception of the experience that’s being coded and understood via that language.’ 

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected] 

In light of the recent Ed Sheeran’s recent success in court defending himself against a spurious copyright claim, Neil takes a look at Intellectual Property and Copyright in the UK and how it applies to tutoring in terms of teaching tools and materials. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Tutors get to add their flavour and slant to the materials they teach. These materials are a tangible asset to you and your business, your Intellectual Property.  
• Copyright is an automatic legal basis that says that if you create it, it belongs to you.
• It is a good idea to put ‘Copyright of’ and your name and the year on all the materials that you produce for your teaching.
• Marking yourself as creator solidifies your image as an expert.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Unless you’re content to just play through standard texts and, in my opinion, go through the motions you’ll doubtless be creating your own teaching materials; examples, explanations, diagrams, exercises, stories, music and so on.’

‘Let’s say you write an explanation of a concept in your own words.  And, hey presto, that particular form of words is yours and yours alone.’

‘If they do (nick your stuff) you’ll have records and timestamps all over the metadata of anything that you’ve created on a computer.’ 

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected] 

Neil shares his evil genius with you in this episode explaining how, when you overturn your student’s expectations, difficulties and complexities so extensively that they sit there open-mouthed, it really makes your tutoring job worthwhile.  

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
• Peel away the complexity and present the core of an idea.
• Resistance exists when there is no clarity.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Sometimes the things that are the most stripped back and simplified have the greatest impact and help the students to move past the limits that they thought they had.’

‘I’ve actually been called an evil genius twice today by two students whilst sharing with them, in separate lessons, a simple idea that really allowed them to dominate the fretboard and produce cool-sounding improvised guitar solos.’

‘They had incontrovertible proof that it was simple and doable. Oooh, evil me!’  

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Tutor Podcast

 www.Neilcowmeadow.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Neil Cowmeadow is a maverick peripatetic guitar teacher from Telford with over 19 years’ experience in the business of helping people. Learn how to start, grow and love your business with Neil’s invaluable advice and tips without the buzzwords and BS!

CONTACT METHOD

[email protected]