10 Surprising Benefits of Practice Bursts - PHH 148

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Call me crazy if you want. I know your ideal day might be a day at the spa, or sitting on the beach with a good book, or going for a hike in the mountains. Although those all sound good to me. My ideal day, or at least one of my ideal days, would be a day when I could practice all day. A day when I only had to practice would be a true luxury for me. And that's really not that crazy. I think a lot of harpists would feel that way. Maybe you would too. Of course, the reality is that most of us are too busy most of the time for that ideal practice day. Usually we're sandwiching practice in between the other parts of our lives, and often our harp playing ends up taking a backseat to tasks that are more urgent or the responsibilities that we have for others. And when we do have time to practice, we don't feel that we have time to get to everything on our practice list. It's not uncommon to feel a little frustrated that we can't spend the time we would like to with the harp. We sense that our progress is hampered by a lack of consistency or a lack of time. But on the flip side, too much practice can actually be physically damaging. But it still would be nice to have an uninterrupted hour to really focus on our work or even just enjoy playing. The solution seems to be to use the time we have to practice in those small chunks of time in between other tasks or obligations. Achieving focus and getting something accomplished in 15 or 20 minutes isn't easy, though. Being realistic. These small steps are often all we have. So what I'd like to talk about with you today is how to stop thinking of your short practice spans as a practice compromise. Rather than thinking of these practice sessions as too short, we're going to give them a makeover. We'll call them practice bursts and they can be valuable practice opportunities when we use them strategically. So I'll show you how to get in gear and focus more quickly so that you can feel you are still on the path to progress, even if you have to take small steps. And I'll show you 10 ways to make your practice bursts effective, fun and satisfying. I know that sounds really good, right? And what could be better than being that realistic, than using those small chunks of time when you have them and finding a way that makes them feel productive. So that's our challenge for today and I think we will have a good time working on it. A couple of things I want to talk to you about first. First, I want to thank everyone who participated in our Finish it intensive. It was a great int and it was fun for me to see all the, all the light bulbs go off, all those. Wow, thank you for giving me permission to do this. I never thought I could do it this way. These are great ideas. To see all the change and the energy around these new ideas was really, really fun for me and that's why I do these intensives. So thank you to everyone who participated. It was a lot of fun. I know we have a wrap up call coming up this, but we're gonna kind of keep the energy going if we can. So I look forward to seeing the kinds of changes that this is going to make in your playing. So thank you for that. Our challenge in the Hub, our free jigging it challenge is in week three. So come on in and join us. It's easy enough to do that and it's free to be a member in the Hub. So you can just use the link in the show notes or the one you find on the homepage@heartmastery.com just hop in and join us there. It's fun. Not just to do the challenge, of course, but nearly every week we have a live Monday warmup where we spend, oh, about 45 minutes and we work through some sort of technical or musical aspect of playing. And you get to play along with me. Nobody hears you, you hear me and I talk you through what we do for the day. And so those are a lot of fun too. And of course that happens in the Hub. Now we have some other things happening here to go along with what we're talking about today. On the podcast, I put a link to a PDF. You may have seen this PDF in the sidebar on the blog website or someplace else, but I wanted to be sure that you knew about it for today because it's so appropriate for today's podcast. It's called 1515 Minute Practice Ideas. And so you can get in there and download the PDF that's totally free. You'll just need to give us your email so we know where to send it. But the 15 fin.

Practice ideas PDF is there for you, along with a blog post that I wrote some time back called 12 Things to Do when youn Can't Practice. So we're all about those short bursts and those sort of impossible pract moments today. And I'm looking forward to getting going, talking about that. So why don't we do that right now? When you think of an ideal practice session, you're probably thinking of one that has a certain length of time to it, right? It's not a short get in there, get something done kind of practice session, but it's one that's long enough that you can get yourself all set and you can get the harp tuned and you can, you know, make sure that you've got your beverage right there by your water or maybe your cup of tea or something and everything is just right. And maybe the sun is shining outside and you've closed the door and you're ready to work and you have that nice slow warm up time where you can breathe and feel your body adjust and get your fingers moving slowly. Then maybe you move into some technique work and you do some scales or some arpeggios and you enjoy the sound of your harp. And maybe you pull out a couple exercises or a couple etud that you enjoy playing that, you know, really get your fingers ready to work. And all this time you've been adjusting your focus, right? You're shutting out the world and you're just taking all those cares of the day away from your mind and you're focusing your thoughts on your heart playing. And then you can start getting down to maybe some strategic work, right? You can start working on goals or plans or, you know, following maybe a plan that you outlined in your practice journal. You could maybe plan to do some real good repetition and learning some new music. Or maybe you can do some wood shedding on some parts that have been just giving you problems. And you can get in there and do some focused work. And then at the end of that time, maybe it's an hour, you stand up and you stretch and maybe you kind of wiggle around a little bit. And then if you have time, you go back and you all refreshed, you sit down at the harp and you do a little bit more. Or maybe that's all the time you have. But you can leave your practice room at that point feeling like you've done some really good work and you give yourself a little gold star for the day and then you go on with the rest of your day. Now, that's a lovely way to practice. And on those days when you can do that, I'm sure that, like me, you really enjoy it because that's just, you know, it's almost like a. Like a Saturday morning moment, right, where you can just have that slow breakfast and you can, you know, read the whatever it is you want to read and just, you know, scroll through anything online that you feel like reading and take your time, have another cup of coffee, and then get moving with the day. It's got that same kind of Saturday morning feel to it, except you're at the harp. But that just doesn't happen all the time. And when it doesn't happen, then we have just. We have those crowded days where we just have those sort of catch as catch can practice moments. And that's what we're reframing today. So that those. Okay, quick, I've got a half an hour to practice. Let me see if I can get something done. Or maybe, well, maybe I can't get anything done in a half an hour. Maybe I really just. I won't practice. I'll see if I can practice later. You know those kinds of moments. And you know that with those kinds of moments, when you put that off until later, most of the time later doesn't always happen because by the time you get to later, you're just too tired to think about practicing. Now, me, I'm a morning person, so I know that I'm not going to have a big energy burst in the evening where I can sit down and practice. Oh, I can do it if I really have to. If there's something coming up that's really important, you know, I can, I can bring it up and I can do that and get my work done at that hour. But that's not my best practice time. It's not my favorite practice time. I love practicing in the morning or certainly at some point during the day, not in the evening. Everybody's different. And maybe evening works really well for you, and that's terrific. But still, whether You're a morning person or an evening person, you're going to have those days when you just don't have a chunk of practice time and you've got to fit it in. And that's not easy. The thing is that those small practice chunks can turn into moments of practice frenzy. You know, we run to the harp, we shut the door, it's okay, quick, let me see what I can get done. I've set the timer and when it goes off, then I have to do the next thing on my list. And so we're not focused, we're not thinking about how we can actually live into those 15 moments, how we can expand them, how we can use them in a way that feels satisfying to us. We're just trying to get something done. So what we're going to try to do now is in reframing those practice frenzy moments as practice bursts, we're going to make them little bursts of energy that play into your harp playing, those little bursts of energy that help your harp playing move forward even when you don't have a long time to practice. Now, can you live on a perpetual diet of practice bursts without any longer practice sessions? Well, probably not. Those longer practice sessions are so valuable for the deep focus that we're able to bring to them, and, and the extended amount of practice time allows us to really get different kinds of work done than these practice bursts. But the thing is that if this is what you have today or tomorrow, or maybe today and tomorrow, then I want you to be able to plan, to be able to use those little chunks of time and make them those practice bursts instead of practice frenzies. Now, notice that the key element here is in planning, as far as planning exactly what to do. The PDF that I mentioned earlier, those 15, 15 minute practice ideas, that's going to give you a lot of very concrete ideas of ways to use those 15 minutes. And the blog post that I mentioned as well, also, same thing, ways to use those 15 minutes that perhaps you hadn't thought of. But what we're going to talk about right now, that I think is even more important is the 10 benefits that I have identified. And as I said a moment ago, you might find more. But the 10 benefits to these practice bursts, because I want you to feel good about using them, and they can be very good for you, not just to allow you to work piecemeal on whatever it is you're trying to accomplish in your playing, but because they can actually be beneficial, they can actually be helpful. They don't have to be a compromise, they can be worthwhile, and that's the way I want you to think of them. So we're going to call them practice bursts, and we're going to get started on that list of 10 benefits. The first benefit of a practice burst is so obvious that perhaps it doesn't need stating, except that I think it's worth reminding ourselves of what is really important about this and what's, I think, most important about the practice burst. It's perhaps biggest benefit is that it uses your available time. It's practical, it's realistic, and it allows you to feel like you are handling the multiple responsibilities of your life well. It's like a little time budget. This is the time I have, and this is what I can allot to my heart. Practice, and this is what I can allot to something else. And it uses your available time. As we said before, it's not the kind of diet that you want for your practice life all the time, but it's there and you're using it and it's a positive thing, not a negative thing. And. And I think that it's worth reminding ourselves that that's a benefit of this. It's practical, it's realistic, it's going to move you forward and it's what you have. So let's be real and remember that, okay? Number two, it keeps you connected to your harp. When the choice is between I only have 15 minutes to practice, or I guess I really won't practice today and I'll just wait till tomorrow, that 15 minutes is valuable not just because of what you might be able to do to make progress, but because it keeps you connected to your harp. That connection really requires just about daily touches. It can soothe your soul, it can be all sorts of wonderful things for you, right? You have this beautiful harp and. And you don't want it to be sitting there as a reproach to you. You don't want it sitting there saying, you didn't play me today. So much nicer to actually play it, even if it's only for a few minutes. It's going to keep you connected, it's going to keep you and your harp happy.

Good benefit right there. Yeah. Number three, that practice burst will reinforce learning that you've already done. So if you've had a few good days of practice and you've made all this progress, then you get to the day when you really can't practice and you think, oh, man, I have no time and I've been making such good progress. And if I miss today. What's going to happen is everything's going to backslide and.

But if you have 15 minutes, use that to reinforce what you've done on those last couple days. You won't be able to put in the same amount of concentrated effort. You won't have the time to do that, but you'll be able to at least go through those sections that you worked on yesterday, if that's what you were working on, and reinforce it. It's the continual touches over time that allow us to make progress. Right? You can't cram practice, you can't do it all on Tuesday and then say, okay, fine, I'm, you know, I'm set for the rest of the week. It's a daily thing. It's a habit. That's actually why we call it practice. It is a practice. It is a habit. It is a practice of our lives. So the daily reinforcement is going to be worthwhile. It's going to keep the progress happening. All right, so there you go. Number four, a practice burst can be a relaxing break in your day.

So this is where that switch comes right between thinking of this little 15 minute chunk, as you know, quick, let me get some practice done that practice frenzy, or thinking, wow, I have 15 minutes, I could sit at my harp and play something. It's a relaxing break in your day. It can actually be a refresher for you so that you can go back to the rest of your day with more energy.

So that it doesn't have to be a drain for your energy. It doesn't have to be something you worry about. It can be something that empowers you to continue with the rest of your day. Totally different outlook. Yes. Okay, number five, we're moving through these nice and quickly. Number five, it is good for your body.

Playing the harp is really good for you. First of all, those vibrations that you get from holding the harp against your body have been shown to be very helpful for you. They're very beneficial all in themselves. Plus those short practice bursts are really best for you. If you have any kind of physical limitation and if you are suffering from back problems or neck problems or tendonitis or carpal tunnel or any of those sorts of things that the amount of time you can play at once, then you're going to design your practice more to be in these practice bursts because it's better for you. And this goes along with number six. If you have any sort of injury, practice bursts are going to be helpful for your recovery. Now, a couple of things here you need to be careful if you're doing, if you have a hand injury or a tendonitis or a carpal tunnel, you need to be careful that when you do that practice burst, it's not a practice frenzy. You don't, you know, come to the harp and start playing hard and loud and fast right away. You have to remember that when you're doing that short span of time, the first minute of that short span of time really needs to be a gentle refresher to warm your fingers into it. Now, if it takes more than a minute of your time, you know, maybe of that 15 minutes, maybe the first half of that time, or maybe even 10 minutes of your 15 minutes is going to be spent limbering up your fingers gently. That's okay. Limber them up gently on a piece that you're trying to learn, right? Nobody said that a warm up can't be a double duty warm up, as I'm fond of saying, right? You can warm up on a part of a piece or a difficult passage, whatever that may be for you. You just need to take it very slowly and very gently and consider how your body is moving, whether it's, you know, whether you're thinking about your posture or your arms or your wrists or your fingers. So if you have some kind of injury that you're recovering from that you need to, that makes you need to be careful when you're at the harp, then the practice bursts are ideal. Just remember to start those practice bursts gently and warm up into them. So there are two different looks right there at, you know, the, the idea that it's healthy for you to do a short practice burst because you're not going to stress your body. And the next one then being that if your body is already stressed, you can use those practice bursts to help it recover both of those things. All right, Number seven, practice bursts are actually great for memorization. So that if you're trying to memorize a piece of those practice bursts are so useful because memorization happens over time. It deepens over time. And if you've struggled with memorization at all, you know that what happens is you memorize everything you know, you work at it, and you feel like, okay, today's practice, I really learned that whole first page and I really know it. And then you come back to it the next day and you feel like you have to start all over again. Memorization happens over time, and it happens with those continual touches that I was talking about before. It happens not only in those long sessions where you're really working hard at memorizing, but in that frequent repetition that reinforces what you've done. So if you're trying to memorize anything, that 15 minute practice burst, even if that's all you have, is going to be great to say, okay, I'm going to go over to the harp and I'm going to see how much of this I can remember and I'll play through it and then I'll, you know, refresh my memorization where I need to and I'll play it through once more and I'm done. So it's a terrific way to work on things that you're memorizing. And if you're not memorizing something, it's a great way to sort of try it too. So, okay, number eight. This is an ideal time to practice your performing skills. If you have a piece that you are getting ready to play, whether it's for something, some sort of formal occasion, or for a background music job, or maybe even for just playing at, you know, a senior center or something, whatever it is, this is a great way to practice the specific performing skill of doing a cold start. I often call these drive bys for my students. We do drive bys where, okay, you're walking past the harp, just sit down and play your piece. What's important about that particular idea is that all of a sudden you're, you know, you're called on to just play. Which is what happens in a performance situation. When we're practicing and we've got, you know, all the time we need to practice, we're playing the piece over and over again and we're into it and we're ready so that when we practice starting it again, we've already been playing it. What this does for you, what the practice burst does, is it forces you to sit down, focus immediately and start to play. It gives you a chance to try out your, you know, pre performance checklist. And if you don't have one of those, then we'll have to talk about that on another podcast. But that little system that says, okay, I'm here, I my pedals or levers are set, I'm going to listen to those first few measures of the music in my head and then I'm going to, and I'm going to, you know, make sure I'm into it. And then I'm just going to start to play. And you just have to start to play and keep going. You don't get to start over. So that's its own particular skill. And when you're performing that's something you need to have in your repertoire. You need to know that when you sit down to play, you know exactly how you're going to focus your mind quickly and then start playing. So this is a great way to do it with practice bursts. How about that? Okay, number nine. This is related to that because it's quick focus practice. So instead of taking all the time that we might like to go through our warm ups and our exercises and then, okay, and then I'll start with this piece, it's going to help us focus immediately on whatever it is we're wanting to do. Now, it may not, as in the the practice bursts I talked about a second ago with the performing skills. It may not be related to performing, it may not even be related to playing a piece, but it's just going to allow you to learn how to focus on this harp task right away. So even if you're coming into your practice burst to do some technical work, to work on some scales, to play through some exercises, it's going to teach you how to do that calmly and naturally over time. But that's why the practice bursts can be really valuable for this, to teach you how to get to that calm, focused state quickly, because that's the time you have. You may not be good at it right off, but you will get better at it. And especially if you can be a little bit intentional about saying, okay, this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it now and then just do it. So quick focus is a valuable skill and this is a great way to practice it. And then number 10 on my list is that this is a great time to work on what I've called a special. I don't know if you've had kids or grandkids in school and they have, you know, each day in their schedule, they've got a special. It might be art, it might be music, it might be, you know, something or other. But the specials that I like to think of for our playing are things that aren't related to generally that. The regular kind of practice that might be, you know, technical stuff or like your regular exercises or learning a piece or something like that. Things like sight reading or memorization. It could be a particular technical aspect. Like, I keep forgetting to work on my scales, so I'm going to do scales, or I want to do these kinds of exercises, or I want to work at my note reading, or I want to learn to work with the metronome. So those kinds of specialized practice moments that's terrific repertoire review would be great for this, right? So that if you've got that 15 minute chunk of time, you can pull out a special and you can work on that. And that's a really wonderful way to keep all those things in play. So those were sort of 10 really nice benefits of practice bursts. Ways that they can help you learn things, help you stay connected to the harp, help you stay calm, frustration free, guilt free, all of those things. So what I invite you to do right now is to take a look at your calendar for this week. Do you have your regular practice times blocked out and are you going to be able to adhere to that schedule, or is there something that's getting in the way of your usual schedule this week and you have some extra commitments and things are going to be extra busy and you might run out of practice time? Is there a day when a practice burst would be helpful for you and what would you like to do with it? So think about that, and if you have a day or two where you know you're going to be relegated to some practice bursts, see if you can find where that 15 minute chunk might be and plan ahead for what you might do with that practice burst. And then as you're planning that, remember that all of this is beneficial for you. It's going to be good for you and for your playing. It's going to keep you moving forward and keep your harp happiness level high. It's going to give you a nice relaxing break in your day. It's going to give you something special maybe that you can practice or work on. And it's going to keep you moving forward, keep you connected to the harp. And that's what we need. So plan it out, take a look at it, and you might even decide that you're going to have a little folder or a basket someplace near where you practice. And that's where you keep some practice burst material. So that when you have those practice burst moments and you know, you don't feel like you can get to some of the regular music that you've been practicing? Here's some things that you can just pull out when you have 15 minutes and that's all you need to do. Fun. I love thinking about this kind of stuff because it's so much fun to think, what could I do with my practice? It doesn't have to be the same as yesterday. I might work on the same pieces, but I'll work on them in a different way. So getting creative with the way you use your practice is one of the great rewards for being able to practice and play the harp. I just love it. Next week on the podcast we're going to be talking about sticky placing. And if you don't know what sticky placing is, you will not want to miss this podcast. Sticky placing is all about getting your fingers to stay on the strings so that they can play with better tone, better technique, they can play more quickly, they can play more, more evenly, but you need to make your placing sticky. So that's what we'll be talking about next week on the podcast. I also invite you to remember to check out today's show notes to join the Hub challenge. If you're not with us on that. And that's we're in week three of that, so that's coming up and that's working really nicely. You can join. You can catch up too. You don't just have to start with week three and to download the PDF that I have linked to in the show notes about those 15 minute practice ideas because they will really help you with your practice bursts. So while you're planning your practice bursts for this week, I want you to remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.