October’s Read
This month’s recommendation is “Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education” by Shinichi Suzuki (translated by Waltraud Suzuki).
About This Book
“*Nurtured By Love* is a collection of Dr. Suzuki’s thoughts on the ideas that guided his life and work.
A wonderful insight to who Dr. Suzuki was, and what we can continue to learn from him today. From short vignettes, readers learn about Dr. Suzuki’s discovery of the Mother Tongue Method, his views on talent and education, and his belief that, for great artists, high standards of art and high ethical standards for life are synonymous. This book is a must for any Suzuki parent or teacher.”
My Thoughts
This book was a great read and one that I’ve wanted to dive into for some time. The Suzuki music method was a large part of my childhood and a large part of my journey playing the violin. My parents adopted this method when I was two, and it was taught to them by our teacher Leslie Wade. When I fell in love with tennis, I asked my parents to give me the same education in tennis as I had had on the violin as I consciously associated the method with becoming highly skilled at something…It was my blueprint for how to master a craft.
Fundamentally, Dr. Suzuki has found a way to create an environment that established what he believed to be the correct stimuli for the child (or student of any age) to mimic. Most people believe that we all have the ability to imitate, but Dr. Suzuki believed that the degree to which we imitate has been severely underestimated. I personally, through my own playing and teaching, have found this to be true. Through this correct stimuli and deliberate repetition, Dr Suzuki believes that we all have the potential to learn an art, sport, or skill, with the same degree of proficiency as we speak our native language.
There is relevant neuroscience research that supports these ideas. Through ongoing interaction with our environment, our brains and behaviors reorganize to become more efficient and adaptive to its demands. This process is known as experience dependent neuroplasticity, where repeated exposure and practice lead to structural and functional changes in the brain. Long before neuroscience could describe it, Dr. Suzuki’s method intuitively leveraged these same principles, creating an enriched, emotionally supportive environment that optimized attention, imitation, and repetition.
Modern neuroscience has confirmed that observational learning activates overlapping neural networks with those involved in performing the action itself, a phenomenon mediated by mirror neuron systems. When students repeatedly observe and then physically reproduce a modelled behaviour, such as a musical phrase or a tennis stroke, these neural circuits strengthen through coordinated sensory and motor activation. Over time, observation becomes embodied skill.
Want to give this title a read?
This title can be found at https://suzukiassociation.org/product/nurtured-by-love/
About the Author
Jeremy Gibbens-Schneider is the head high performance coach and proud founder of Compound Performance.