4 Lessons From a Reformed Control Freak - PHH 103

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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 me 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. It used to be somewhat fashionable to be a control freak, or at least to declare that you were. Of course, it didn't start out that way. According to Merriam Webster, the term was first used in the 1970s, and it was the epithet of choice used to label those who belonged to the establishment rather than to the free love. Do your own thing, hippie generation. Then in the 1980s, trends like power dressing and the rise of conservatism made controlling behavior look like something desirable, something to aspire to.

Today, we understand all too well the danger of controlling behavior. So why do we still work so hard to control ourselves and the music we make?

I didn't recognize some of my own control issues with regard to my music for a long time. Maybe you don't see yours either. So let's start with a few possibly revealing questions. See if you identify with any of these. Is your biggest goal in practice usually to eliminate mistakes?

How frustrating is it for you when you don't play your piece as well as you think you should, or as well as it went at home?

Does your fear of making mistakes or not playing well enough stop you from playing for others?

Do you practice a piece or a passage over and over again to try to make it perfect? Well, if any of these sound even slightly familiar to you, you will want to learn the things have discovered in my harp journey about what you can control and what you can't, and what to do about it.

Learning to let go of the impossible and work only on the possible is a big step on the path to harp Happiness. And that's what I want for you.

Before we dive into this topic, because it's a big one, I want to invite you to join us at our summer retreat this year. Our traditionally fall retreat is being held in the summer, in the middle of August, in the beautiful mountains of Tennessee. And we still have some places open for that at the retreat. It's going to be a very small group of harpists. If you've ever wanted the chance to really just be part of a small group, you know, eight or nine harpists, just working on your own, playing, working together as a group, getting to talk harp and all that good stuff. And of course, have the instruction of me and one of my wonderful certified coaches. If that's what you want, this is your time to do it. It's a beautiful location. We have a spectacular house that we have rented for our retreat, so we'll all be together. All the bedrooms have en suite baths, so you can be, you know, you have your own place to retreat to when you need it. We have our wonderful chef Denise on hand, so we have a terrific setup here. And I want particularly to invite you to the retreat so that just in case you hadn't heard about it, you know about it, I want you to be able to make plans and get on board because we are closing registration June 1st. So you need to think about this and get on board right now. Also, I will be hosting a live sort of informational Q and A session about the retreat. It's primarily for the people who have already signed up for the retreat. We'll be talking about what we'll be doing and all that good stuff. And I do want to open it to people who are interested in the retreat but have not yet made that commitment. That particular Q and A call is going to be on Wednesday, May 17 at noon Eastern time. We'll be sure to let you know by email about that if you're on our email list and if you're not, why not? But the that Q and A session will be live and we will be posting the links in the Heart Mastery hub. So if you're a member of that, you'll be sure to subscribe, have all the information you need to join us there. So watch out for that. But you don't have to wait for that to sign up. You can sign up for the retreat right now. So the link is in the show notes or you'll find it under upcoming events@harpmastery.com and I certainly hope you come because I can tell you and so can the other people who have come to our retreats that it's just. It's a great opportunity to focus on things. It's a great way to make harp friends and really get to know some. Some terrific harpists and of course, get to work on your playing in a really focused way that's also fun. So I would encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity and sign up now. That's something you can control. But let's talk about the things that you can and can't control right now. This topic of control always calls to mind for me, the Serenity Prayer. I. I'm sure that many of you know it. The most familiar version was written by the American theologian reinhold Niebuhr in 1943. And it goes like this. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Now, that sounds pretty good, but I did just a little bit of research on it, and apparently there's an earlier version that was written 10 years before that by Winifred Crane Weigel. And she wrote the first, what is considered to be the first prayer version of the thoughts that Niebuhr expressed in some of his writings. And she published this, wrote it in her diary. And the first version of the prayer, according to Ms. Weigel, is this. I mean, this is what she wrote. Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other. Now, there are a couple things I really like about this version. I like the courage part that she put in. First of all, it comes first, right? And then she says, the courage to change what must be altered. This isn't just acceptance or even simply doing something. This is change that is calling us to action. It's imperative. And perhaps some of the things we will talk about today with regard to control will be an imperative for you. And if so, do have the courage to take action.

Also understand that acceptance of what cannot be helped isn't accepting second best. It's not lowering your standards. It's simply being very realistic about what is true for you in a particular moment. It isn't declaring that whatever it is needs to be true forever. It's just about right now. So that if your particular playing of a piece isn't up to your ideal standard right now.

That doesn't mean that it's not an accomplishment for you. That doesn't mean that it's not good enough to be shared it. It's just a work in progress, right? And that calls for some acceptance. So this is part of the difference I would like you to pay attention to. I found some interesting notes on being in control, and I found a couple paragraphs from a Psychology Today article that I would like to share with you.

And these paragraphs read like this. Although being in control is a good thing, seeking control over others or over outcomes may not be okay, now let me just stop right there and point you to that Seeking control over outcomes may not be a good thing.

And that article goes on after another sentence or two to explain it this way. The reason why says the article is simple enough. When you try to control other people. Or let's remember other outcomes, right? When you try to control other people too much, they don't like it and usually let you know it. This may explain why most parents and employees find spending time with their children and their bosses respectively, to be pretty unpleasant. Children and bosses may differ in almost every way, but the one thing they share in common is that they frustrate our attempts at controlling them by doing just as they please.

Now I have to say that from my harp biased perspective, I could have changed this sentence to read this way. Children and bosses and fingers may differ in almost every way, but what they share in common is that they frustrate our attempts at controlling them by doing just as they please, right? How many times have we found our fingers doing just what they want, despite how many hours we have spent trying to train them? So what I took away from this, or what I'd like to suggest is that trying to control outcomes can, as this article points out, can just be such a great source of frustration.

And discouragement that it actually gets in the way of your success, let alone your harp happiness.

So I want to take some of the control things that often show up as control issues for people and put them in sort of harp and music contexts for you. I'm not at all suggesting that any of you are controlling people as far as anything else goes, but when it comes to our heart playing, some otherwise unrevealed aspects of our personalities sometimes emerge. I know this was true for me, and when I discovered exactly how I was getting in my own way by trying to control some of these things, it made a huge difference for me. And that's what I'm hoping for you too, if you suffer from any of these things. So let's talk about some symptoms of musical control issues. Now what's odd I think about these statements I'm going to read and that we're going to explore a little bit is that they were taken from.

Articles, medical articles that were dealing with people with serious control issues in the rest of their lives. But they have application to us as harpists and as practicing and performing musicians. And that's what we're going to explore. I have no desire to explore psychology beyond that. I'm not qualified for it. But talking about this in musical terms and is what we want to do here. So here's the first statement that rang a couple bells for me. And the statement is this. It's a, you know, are you a control freak kind of a statement. And it's this. You spend a lot of energy trying to prevent bad things from happening.

The description that I found below this statement reads this way. Rather than prepare themselves for the storm, control freaks try to prevent the storm from coming even when they can't. They waste time and energy hoping bad things won't happen.

Okay, so this is one of those things we talk about with practice and performance preparation all the time. You want your practice to try to prepare you for the bad things that may happen. This is different from trying to prevent them. We can't prevent a string from breaking. We can try to make sure all our strings are, you know, in good shape, but sometimes they surprise us. So we can't prevent a string from breaking in the middle of a performance. We can't prevent the lights from going out in the middle of our performance. We can't prevent.

Our mind from getting distracted, although we can prepare in a way that allows us to recover from that. So the energy that we spent trying, that we spend trying to prevent bad things from happening could be much better spent in preparing for things that may go wrong and understanding that they're going to happen. We can't prevent every, you know, everything. We can't prepare for every kind of situation that's going to happen. If we could, we would never have those strange but true harp stories in the back of harp column, right? It just wouldn't happen because everybody, everybody would be totally prepared. We can't prevent them. We can just prepare for the ones that we consider most likely.

This also translates down to practice. You can't prevent a mistake from happening. A mistake is a mistake. Something. It's a singular event, something that hasn't happened before and is likely not ever to happen again. You've had that happen, correct? When you're playing in a lesson or playing in a performance and you think, well, gosh, I've never made a Mistake there. And afterwards you might go and you might play the thing three or four more times and you're still not making a mistake there. It was a once in a moment kind of a thing, right. You know, it just happened. Never happened before, never happened since. And that's, you know, that's the kind of thing that you can't necessarily prevent. Practice isn't going to prevent every mistake. It's going to prepare you for whatever might happen. So there's our first comparison. We can't prevent bad things, but we can prepare for the ones we consider most likely. Okay, next control statement.

You Believe you are 100% responsible for your success.

This is an interesting one.

Because we tend to think, and we're actually taught this, that our practice will lead to.

Perfect performances, right? Practice makes perfect. Oh, I hate that word. Perfect. And then we learn, okay, well, it's going to make it, you know, nearly perfect. Or maybe we have to do perfect practice. But that puts so much pressure on us that when things don't go the way we want them to, we become overly critical of ourselves. You know, that idea that, you know, failure isn't an option. Well, it may not be an option, but it may happen anyway.

We can prepare in a way that allows us to sort of ex. Expect. Is the word expect? A baseline level of.

Of performance competency. Right. Where we may not play at our peak, but we're not going to fall flat on our face either. So it's. It's a different way of looking at things. But if you believe that your practice is the only way, the only path, and the only predictor of your musical success, then you're creating an unrealistic expectation for yourself. Your practice room is a little bit like a laboratory where you've established laboratory conditions and, you know, it's a controlled environment. It's. And you're practicing at your favorite time on your favorite harp, with your favorite light, and, you know, nobody's paying attention to you. That's an ideal environment that will not be matched anywhere else. So you can't expect the same results in another place, in another situation. This is why part of performance preparation is taking your harp and practicing in a different place, doing preview performances for people, doing recordings and sharing them. Things that bring in a little bit more real life to your musical preparation. Okay, so those are a few ways that control doesn't work for us. Control gets in our way. But obviously control when we're playing is important, right? It's one of the foundational focus areas that I talk about. In my Kaleidoscope practice system, in my ebook and the Harpist Playbook. It's one of those five focus areas there. You know, detail, expression, continuity, control, and connection. Control is important. We need control, and our practice gives us a certain amount of control. Right. The kind of control we really are looking for is based in a foundation that includes maintaining a steady pulse, having a solid technique, doing consistent practice. That's what gives us control over what we play.

As I refer to it, in Kaleidoscope practice, you want to develop control over your technique and to develop technical control over a particular piece. You know, can you play everything that you need to? Can your fingers do what they need to in this particular piece? And then there's control over expression, which includes everything from controlling dynamics to controlling the tempo and the flow and the pacing. And this kind of control is super important. And this is the kind of control that we do need to practice because it directly relates to our performance.

And I don't mean performance in the sense of, you know, being in front of an audience. I really mean performance in the sense of playing music.

So those kinds of things that you need to do to develop control are ones that you're probably pretty familiar with. Repeating a passage and working on your fingering and working with the metronome, practicing your dynamics, practicing the flow and the pacing. All of those things. That's what you are able to develop control over. And that's important because that's where the music is. But there are some things you can't control, and I alluded to these just a little bit ago. You can't control what happens in a particular moment. You can't necessarily control how you feel. I mean, imagine you're going to play for someone. Maybe you're just going to play for your teacher. And you wake up that morning and you just. You just don't feel right. Your stomach's a little out of sorts. Your head maybe hurts. I don't know, maybe you've got allergies that day. You can't always control how you feel, and your own energy level is. Is going to affect your playing. Right? Okay. Now you can, you know, try to get good sleep and maintain a good diet and exercise and all that stuff. But, you know, sometimes you just feel better than others. You can't always control that. You can't control what anyone else does. That person that sits in the front row and swings their feet out of time to your music, or the person that slams a door in the back of the room when you're playing. Or the people as you're playing at the nursing home who walk through the room and decide to hold a loud conversation while you are trying to perform. You know, you can't necessarily control those things. The environment, is it too hot, too cold, too damp, too dry to, you know, the people sitting too close or too far away? You can't always control those things.

So your only choice is, again, this is what I was talking about a moment ago. Your only choice is to prepare in a way that allows you to play despite what may happen to. Despite, you know, to play despite the distraction of something happening that pulls your attention away from the music or something that you know, just not being comfortable in a moment or perhaps the distraction of making a mistake. This is why all of us teachers stress that you need to practice playing your piece beginning to end, without stopping. That a part of your practice. Almost from the first day you pick up a piece, a part of your practice has to be playing past whatever mistakes you make.

And there are a couple good reasons for that, right? But one is the mistake is going to show up because it's a mistake. It's something you haven't planned for, and you know it's a mistake. It just happens. And so when those things just happen, you have to be able to recover from them. So if you haven't practiced recovering from that mistake, if you haven't practiced, practiced playing past it, you don't have the tools you need to survive it.

And let's take this one step further. If you've practiced surviving a mistake in your practice, think how much more in control you will feel when you are playing a piece. For somebody, knowing that, okay, yeah, I might play a wrong note, but it doesn't mean that the whole piece is going to fall apart or that I'll have to stop and start over because I've played a wrong note or forgotten a lever or pushed a wrong pedal. Surviving mistakes is control. It's the best kind of control, right? Learning to survive a mistake, trying to prevent a mistake, that's impossible. I mean, your whole practice is designed to, you know, to reduce the number of mistakes that you're likely to make. Right? It's creating that habit. It's, you know, getting all those parts in working order and, you know, making sure that your piece is going to go well, at least within the realm of reality. Because there are some things you just can't control.

For true control. There are some things you just need to let go about, right? And mistakes would be one of them. You need to realize that they're going to happen, and you need to know how to survive them, not prevent them. I want you to think of true control in terms of being resilient. That. That metaphor that's often used especially in, you know, martial arts. You know, you want to be the willow tree that can bend.

Rather than just that stiff oak tree, the mighty oak that's just going to topple, right? We want to be able to bend, to be resilient, to go with the flow, to have that maybe, let's try calling it a serendipity mindset versus an emergency mindset. We don't want to have to go into panic mode to be able to play. We want to be able to approach our playing with, you know, I'm prepared and, you know, whatever happens, this is going to be its own moment and its own adventure. Sometimes we find beautiful things in those moments, those moments that we didn't expect and maybe didn't even want. You might find something fun in that moment, but you need to be prepared to go with the flow. And this is something. You don't have to be a master player to do this. Just practice beginning to end, playing past your mistakes. That's part of being resilient.

And letting yourself, you know, own the mistake. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, well, that was a wrong note. It wasn't a bad mark. You don't get a demerit for playing a wrong note. You just made a mistake and we can go back and fix it and another one might show up later. But having the. The technical resilience to recover from something, having the emotional resilience to not expect perfection, but to just enjoy what happens.

Having the musical resilience to create a musical moment that might be different from the one you planned. That's very much more being in control than just trying to say, I'm going to replicate this exactly the way I do at home. It has to be this way or it's no good, right? Resilience is a key here. This also means you need to develop and practice flexibility, agility, the idea that things are going to change and you can change with them. That's why the practice techniques that I'm fondest of are ones that allow your fingers and your creativity to be. To change things up a little bit. You know, if you're. If you're playing through something and your fingers do a different fingering, well, recover from it. Don't stop and correct it. Recover from it. And then do your technique work in a way that teaches every finger to do Every job, right? Your thumb isn't the only melody finger. Your fourth finger isn't the only finger that reaches an octave, perhaps, I don't know. But what you want is you want to train your fingers for different situations. This is also something that you can do by working on a variety of exercises and working through a lot of different etudes, rather than just working on one etude to perfection. Because this will train your fingers to do one thing. We want to train them to do many things. The more experience we give them at different things, the more likely they are to pick up the slack if one of them is caught sleeping.

Flexibility and ideas. Oh, you played this loudly. You didn't mean to play it loudly, but you did. And, well, so, you know, could we. Could we do something differently with the dynamic here? Whether this is happening in performance or in your practice and practicing. Different dynamic plans, different creative expression ideas with a particular piece give you a lot of insight into the piece, a lot of understanding, a lot of knowledge and a lot of confidence about how you can play it, what your ideas are about the piece, and what you know, what you can actually make it mean to a listener.

It's the fun part of practice, too, and it will make you feel more in control to have a wide repertoire of things that you can do with this piece.

And I think the third ingredient of true control is relaxation.

And this is relaxation of your fingers, certainly.

Then just having a relaxed and strong posture at the harp, something that's stable, straight, comfortable, and relaxed. Don't clench your toes. In other words, it's funny the places in our body where we can hold tension and then relaxing your mind. I'm not talking about zoning out. I'm talking about the. The acceptance again, the idea that, you know, you've prepared, or perhaps you're just going to practice, and it's like, okay, my practice doesn't have to be perfect. It has to point me toward progress. It has to. My. My goal in my practice is to make my music and to make it better than I thought I could make it yesterday.

Maybe a more relaxing sort of a statement for you for your practice would be, I'm just going to see what happens today.

And I'll dig into some of the spots and work on them. And others I'll just skim through. I'm going to play through music and enjoy it.

And I'm not going to try to impose standards that I'm really not prepared to meet. Ooh, that could be a. A tough one, huh?

To accept your playing.

For what it is right now. Even if it's not what you want it to be, eventually, to resist comparing yourself to somebody else.

That might be true serenity. And it certainly is the best kind of control. Because when your mind and spirit are relaxed, when your fingers are relaxed, when you've trained them to not only do what they're supposed to do most of the time, but be able to step into the breach if they need to, when you have that go with the flow sort of mindset.

That'S when you have true control.

And then control ceases to be an issue for you. Right? Because the thing that you can learn to control is your mindset. Your thoughts, your expectations.

That's what you can control.

I have one last thought.

One of the symptoms of a true control freak is that they lack compassion for people who make mistakes. Now, I know that that's not you. I know that if you were in a situation and somebody made a mistake, you say, oh, don't worry about it. That's fine. Oh, that's not a problem. Don't worry about it.

Are you that compassionate with yourself when you make mistakes? Can you give yourself the same grace, the same level of compassion and understanding?

I hope your answer to that is yes. But if it's not, this is something that I want you to practice every day, right there in your practice room. You've made a mistake. This is not a time to beat yourself up. You made a mistake. Try it again. That's okay. Over time, you'll work those things out. But a mistake is not a judgment. It's just a wrong note or a wrong finger. It's not a big deal. You'll get another chance at it. I promise. So lastly, I want you to remember that prayer, right? Give us courage to change what must be altered, Serenity to. To accept what cannot be helped and the insight to know the one from the other. And my question to you now is, what will you have courage to change? And what can you develop the serenity to accept?

Because both of those are how you defined peace and true control.

And it's fun, I promise.

One more time. I'd like to repeat my invitation for you to join us at the summer retreat in Tennessee in August. The dates are right on the website. You'll find them or they're linked in the show notes here. And do join me on Wednesday, May 17, for that sort of informational Q and A about the retreat. If you have. If you're curious about the program, about what we'll be doing at the retreat. I'll be telling the retreaters who are already signed up a lot more about that. And you can join us for that discussion too next week here on the podcast I'll be talking about dealing with distraction. Now you can see it's kind of a natural follow up to some of what we were talking about today, but we'll be talking about different kinds of distraction and how you can deal with it and make sure that it doesn't stop you from doing what you want to do. So as you go through your week this week, 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 into 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.