5 “Good” Habits that Cost You Time - PHH 174

When you're reading and you encounter a word that you don't know, you can still make a pretty accurate guess as to how to say it and what it means because of all the other vocabulary you know. I mean, once you've learned to read, you actually need to read, not keep sounding out the letters. These are the kinds of harp habits that I mean, if you're still doing the harp version of sounding out the letters or the syllables in each word and, and I'll give you my harp examples of that, then you're holding yourself back.

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 plan. 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.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth, mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.com join now that's harpmastery.com join now welcome to the show. If you're like me, you probably hate it when people change the rules in the middle of the game. I don't necessarily mean in an actual game, that's clearly wrong. But there are always new and better ways of doing things that require us to make a total change in what we do. Brush your teeth up and down, or side to side, or in a circular motion. Drink six glasses of water a day, or eight glasses or four. Eggs are bad for you. Eggs are good for you. It's hard to keep up. Of course, these aren't really rules at all. They're just conventions, best practices which change in order to keep up with advances or new discoveries.

But your practice is the same way. The habits and strategies that worked so well for you at an earlier stage of your harp life may not be as effective for you now, now that you have more experience. If you cling to those habits, you'll likely slow down your learning speed, spending unnecessary time and energy.

Today, I will show you five habits, good ones that may no longer be helping you. I'm sure that you are committed to at least one of these five, and I want to help you move on to a new stage in your harp life. We won't just talk about the habits you should abandon, but we'll talk about what new habits you could consider adopting to replace them. Remember, a habit should be a helper, an aid to what we need or want to do. But a habit is only a hindrance when we're ready for a better way. That's what I want to help you discover today. A better way. You don't think your practice habits need updating? Well, if you've ever thought you could be learning music faster or sight reading better, or wished you had a stronger technique, then you are ready for a refresh, my friend. Now, I guess I'm in a kind of break the rules sort of mindset at the moment, and so I've included a link in the show notes to a blog post from our archives called four Harp Rules you can break. You might enjoy taking a look at that and seeing if any of those rules rules are ones you feel like breaking. And then I want to invite you to my Learn It Tonight webinar. This is happening Wednesday, September 25th at 8pm Eastern and it's a play along webinar we are going to be working through my arrangement of the Flower Duet from the opera Lakme by Leo de Lieb. This is a beautiful piece. It's very familiar. My arrangement has three different levels. There's a pretty simple one and then there are two that are a little bit more at an intermediate level. A few more notes to play and we're going to be working through this piece. I'm going to be talking to you about how to play it, how to learn it, and in particular we're going to be looking at it with the idea that we're going to see how far we can get on that piece in that webinar. So I want you, if you can, to be at your harp and play along with me. Don't worry, nobody will hear you. That's not how we're doing it. But you'll hear me and you'll be able to play along with me and try out some of these strategies. I'm teaching a very different way than I usually teach. It's a brand new strategy and it's called as if. And that's all I can tell you right now. But the link is in the show notes to register for the webinar. I realize if you can't be there live, okay, as long as you've registered, we'll be able to get the replay out to you and you will be able to access it that way. So please go ahead, use the link register. You can also find the webinar under upcoming events@heartmastery.com it's going to be a fun evening and I think it will be fun to challenge yourself and see just how far you can get on a piece in just one night. So that's coming up very soon, September 25th, and I hope you will join me for that. And now, if you're ready, we're going to be talking about some good habits that might not be working for you. Let me start by reminding you that these are all good habits. These are things that every harpist needs to learn and do and think about. But we all need to know when they are serving us and when they aren't. We don't want to cling to them just because that's what we were taught. We want to be able to use them when they're useful and allow ourselves to release them when they're not. This isn't just about doing something different. It's about doing something that works better. So when you're starting the harp, for instance, you learn all the most careful ways to do things. So you can learn the fundamentals of technique, of fingering, of placing, of note, reading, of rhythm, all those things. But once you know those, or at least know the fundamental principles behind all those things, then they become part of your skill set, and you can add the next level to that. These are the things that you can take for granted. And I think that a lot of harpists don't know when they can stop working through all the things they need to do at that very basic level. So here's an example. Think about when somebody learns to read. The first thing that you do when you're teaching a child to read, you help them sound out every letter, right? Because then they know the letters, and then they can sound out the syllables of the words, and then they begin to recognize the words themselves without sounding anything out. And of course, then at that point when you're reading and you encounter a word that you don't know, you can still make a pretty accurate guess as to how to say it and what it means because of all the other vocabulary, you know, I mean, once you've learned to read, you actually need to read, not keep sounding out the letters. These are the kinds of harp habits that, I mean, if you're still doing the harp version of sounding out the letters or the syllables in each word, and. And I'll give you my harp examples of that, then you're holding yourself back. Once you've learned to play the harp, you need to play the harp. So don't think of this as abandoning all those good habits that you've developed and unlearning all those careful things that you have been doing all along. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about building on that skill set that you've been developing through those habits, building on that, giving yourself credit for the work you've already done, and letting yourself move along to the next level. I think that's what's key. I think that's what's important here. Thinking that the habits that you've developed have served you, but we need to step it up just a little bit so that you can move forward. And as I said a moment ago, if you are feeling like you could be learning music faster, like you could be sight reading more fluidly and faster, those kinds of things, that's the sort of thing that we're going to be talking about helping you do through these new harp habits. So if you're ready, we're going to start with habit number one. Habit number one that I Would like you to consider revamping. Is writing in all your markings first. I know it seems like a really good idea to sit down with that piece for the first time and look at all those markings. Be sure you've got all the fingers fingering in. Be sure all those petals and things are in. You may even have your teacher's copy that you're going to copy markings from and put them in. But I want you to think about that habit as not giving you credit for what you already know. So I don't want you to write in all your markings first before you know what markings you actually need. It's really tempting if you've got all that fingering in, to be reading the fingering instead of the notes. And that's not a growth habit for sure. In fact, when people ask me, oh, what fingering should I use for this? My first response to that is another question, what fingering have you tried? Because I want to make sure that they're not just looking for a fingering because there's nothing written in. You know what have you tried what fits with your hand? This is part of learning to trust the training that you have given your fingers already. And I realize that's a difficult thing. We want to keep telling our fingers exactly what they should do, but the fact is, we've done that plenty. All the music that we've played up to this point has been training our fingers. All those technical exercises and etudes that we've been doing have been training our fingers to respond to the patterns of notes with particular fingerings. And they will get automatic. I mean, think about it. If you've been playing scales for a long time and you see a scale in a piece, you don't need a fingering for that. You. Your fingers know how to play a scale, right? So what we want to do is give our fingers credit for what we've taught them and let them recognize the patterns and just play them. This is a real key to moving on to the next level, trusting the training that you've already done, that hard work that you've already done, and realizing that you don't need all the information you needed when you were starting. Now, when it comes to pedals or levers, that's a little bit different than fingering. But I'd like you to start hearing the changes that you're going to need with your ears. Oh, I hear an accidental coming up. And relate that to what you need to push, whether it's a lever or a pedal. I hear that change coming Up. And that means I need that F sharp. Now, it's easier to do this with pedals than with levers. Levers often require a little bit more advanced planning since you can't, you know, push all those F sharps at once. But even so, hear those accidentals and let that hearing of them be part of what you practice. Don't just rely on the marking on the page, use your ears as well. Okay, so you're used to writing in all those markings before you start. What's sort of the next level habit here and how to change that one up? I would suggest that when you have a new piece, you play all the way through it at first just to get an overview, even if that means hands separately or hands separately for most of it or whatever. But play it all the way through before you mark anything. This is an exploratory mission. You want to see where you may need more information, but if there's enough already there, then you don't need to write anything in. So just make that your exploratory mission. Go all the way through it and say, okay, all right. Yep, I got this. This seems pretty good. Then, as you begin to practice it with each section that you begin to learn, play through it a few times and decide what you absolutely need. Don't mark it first. If you play through it not just once, but three or four times, you'll see what your fingers can get used to without you having to mark it in. Now, this may mean that you still have to mark something, but maybe you only have to mark one finger. Like, oh, this is where I have to cross over with my thumb. Or this is where I have to put a third finger. The idea is to only put in what you absolutely need. This habit is about learning to see those note patterns, even if it's at a subconscious level, and to let your fingers play them less is more here. The fewer markings you have on the page, the less confusing your reading will be. The less distraction you have on the page. It certainly is less time consuming, and it makes you less dependent on those little fingering numbers and more in tune with the notes on the page. Good. Habit number two is learning a piece bit by bit. That little bite sized, measure by measure learning. I'm going to start at the beginning. I've got my hands separately, my hands together, and I'm going to learn it bit by bit. That's not a big bad habit. Certainly it's a good habit and we're not going to completely abandon it. But I really want a Different perspective on this for you. I want you to be able to put it in a different place in your learning. While this kind of bite sized, measure by measure learning seems like a good idea, it actually restricts your learning and restricts your learning speed. Because you're learning in these tiny chunks, it doesn't allow you to take into consideration the framework of the entire piece. So I'm not saying you shouldn't learn in small sections, but learning only this way, without balancing it equally with the entire view, will hold your learning and your musical development back. Here's an example of what I mean. I remember I had just learned to drive. I was a pretty new driver, and. And my brother and I had dentist appointments. My brother was younger and we had dentist appointments, and my mother had given us the car to use to go to the dentist. And then she had agreed that we could drive ourselves to the mall after our dentist appointment. Now, the mall was, oh, about 40 minutes actually from where we lived. So it was kind of a trek. And we knew how to get to the dentist that was close by. So we went to the dentist, we had our appointments, we were ready to go to the mall. And. And then we realized that neither of us exactly knew how to get to the mall from the dentist's office. We knew how to get to the mall from home. So we actually drove home, or close enough to home that we knew where we were and then started our way to the mall. So how does this relate? Well, here. Here it is. We only knew one way to get to the mall. We knew this turn, that turn, this turn, that turn. If there had been a detour along the way, we would have been hopeless, lost, because we didn't have an overview. We knew this turn, we knew this turn, we knew this turn, but we didn't really know where we were. That's what learning a piece, measure by measure, without consulting and keeping in mind the entire piece, that's what it's like. You get this little section and this little section and this little section, but you really don't have a good idea of how they fit together. That's where more advanced learning skills come into play. And it's not just that you're bringing more advanced learning skills to your learning, although you are, but you're developing more as you go as well. So we want to not restrict our learning to those measure by measure or small section kind of things, but we really want to keep looking at the piece as a whole, seeing which sections repeat how the parts relate. And as we start working through the piece, we'll find patterns that we didn't notice at first, but become evident after we've spent a little bit more time with the piece. So rather than just doing that bit by bit, learning like my brother and I, figuring out, okay, we can go from this corner to that corner to get to the mall, what I suggest you do instead is to play all the way through the piece, not just before you start working on it or after you can play a lot of it, but. But to play all the way through the piece at least every other day, right from the beginning, right from when you start the piece. If this means you have to do it mostly with one hand, that's okay. It's even better if you can work some of it, even if it's just one hand close to the speed that you think it wants to go, because you'll be able to hear it more, you'll be able to experience the piece the way you want it to go. So playing all the way through the piece, at least every other day, is a great way to keep the right perspective and avoid getting stuck in those little tiny sections. You can also mix up your learning sections. Don't think you have to start from the beginning and just work your way sequentially through to the end. You can actually learn similar sections at the same time. If you see that the stuff at the beginning shows up a couple of other times in the piece, or look at all of them and practice those all together to see if they are truly identical or just similar, it's going to help you learn. It's going to give you the perspective that you need to actually play the piece. If you're still looking at this measure by measure by measure, it's going to take you much longer to get to that place. So use your more advanced learning skills and use them to help you get further along in the piece faster. Good. Habit number three is getting everything correct slowly before you try to speed it up. Once again, this sounds like a great idea, and in fact, it's something that we teach. You may have heard the saying that we teachers use all the time. If you can't play it slowly, you can't play it fast. That's very true that if you can't play it slowly, it's not going to go well fast. And this actually counteracts the tendency for a lot of students, especially for younger students, to gloss over their mistakes by playing fast enough that we don't really notice them. Not that anything gets by a teacher, but I think you know what I mean, but the fact is that although that statement's true, the reverse is not true, that if you can play it slowly, you can play it fast. That doesn't necessarily happen. Just because you can play something slowly doesn't mean that it's going to automatically speed up. Well, the fact is that playing fast is different than playing slow. Now, I'm using these terms fast and slow because they're easy. We understand that by fast, I really mean at the correct tempo, as opposed to at a practice tempo. Right? And a practice tempo would generally be slower. We need to work slowly. However, I need you to keep this in mind. You've heard me talk often, I'm sure, about the coordination of processes. Right. When we play something, we're getting our fingers on the right strings. We're reading notes on the page and fingering on the page. We're thinking about the rhythm and the timing. We're doing all of these things. And when we're playing rather slowly, we have time to think about a lot of these things, to make sure that our fingers are on the right strings and that everything is happening. And we're really managing things with our brain. But as soon as we start going faster, our brains can't keep up. Our fingers can move faster than our brains. And when it comes to playing the harp, this is a good thing, at least most of the time. But the idea is that in our slow practice, we've given all our fingers the direction to develop the habits that they need to play the piece well. And now we need to start thinking at a different level, a higher level, a more overview kind of level, where the music actually is as opposed to the notes. We can't think fast enough to play fast the same way we play slow. Does that make sense? So that if we could manage consciously, all those millions of skills that it takes to do the music that we need to do, to play it the way we want to play it. If we could do that at tempo fast enough, that would be great, but we can't think consciously about that fast enough. So playing slowly is actually for us, a very different experience than playing fast. And that's why playing fast is scary, because we can't control everything the way we know we can when we're playing slowly. This is also why playing slowly doesn't necessarily mean you can play fast, but this is a simple fix, and it's a really good new habit to put in place. When you're practicing something, practice it at a variety of speeds. Slow, medium and fast or faster. If you like it doesn't have to be at tempo, but slow, where everything can be correct. Medium, where it's a little bit of a stretch, and faster, where you know it's a little bit more of a stretch. This will help you eliminate your fear of going faster. Either going faster in general or going faster with that particular piece. It will build in the flexibility that you need to be able to play the piece well. When you eventually get there, it will make the whole process of getting the piece up to tempo go much faster because you've been working at it a little bit at a time all the way along. And it will allow you to experience the different way that you experience the piece when you play it faster. It's so much different. And I know that that difference can feel very scary because you feel like it's out of control. It's not. Well, okay, maybe it is a little bit. It's not in your conscious control anymore. But you need to learn to surrender to that. So there's your new habit. You're going to work at a variety of speeds because you don't have to get everything correct slowly before you try to speed it up. And in fact, you shouldn't. Good. Habit number four is making sure you always use your best technique. I have to say that as a teacher, it pains me just a little to say, no, you don't always have to use your best technique. And I'm sure as a good harp student, it pains you a little bit too. And you're saying what? What? I work so hard to make sure my fingers move exactly right. But here's the thing. In your practice, you can't do everything at once. You can't concentrate equally on the notes, the rhythm, the fingering, the dynamics, the expression and your technique all at the same time. If you've tried to do it, you know this is true because it just sort of paralyzes you. You can't get the next finger to play because you're worri. If it's the right finger on the right string at the right time with the right technique, you have to let some things go. This is the beauty of doing multiple repetitions of a passage, because you get to concentrate on something different in each one of those repetitions. Now, I'm trusting that you do separate technique, focused work, scales, arpeggios, exercises, warm ups, etudes, all those kinds of things, or at least some of them. Every day you're doing the work you need to do to keep your technique in shape. What you can do in your practice is dedicate a repetition or two of a section that you're working on to simply correct technique. Pull the tempo way back. Do it slowly for this. And just think about getting the right fingers on the right strings at the right time with the right technique. Make sure that the technique is your emphasis for that repetition or two, and then let it go. The rest of the time, your technique is there to serve you, and you get to use it, so just let it go. As you acquire more familiarity with the piece, you can think more about your technique as you play. But the fact is that we want your technique to become automatic anyway, right? So just focus on it in separate repetitions and then let it go. Do your separate technique work. I don't want you to ignore your technique because it's the foundation for everything that we play. But you don't have to think about it all the time. Did I just give you a get out of jail free card? I hope I did. And let's get on to habit number five. Habit number five is a hard one for some people to let go. And it's this. Getting it right before you move on. Getting it right before you move on seems like the best possible habit, right? We want to make sure that it's really ingrained. We want to be sure that we have all those things in place because we don't want to do it wrong. But almost always getting one piece really correct, or getting one etude really correct before you move on to the next one, isn't the right plan for you. Because we learn a lot from a larger variety of music, from doing more than from perfecting one thing. It would be like being on a basketball team, but not playing in a game until you absolutely got your dribbling 100% correct, you wouldn't also have been working on your shooting skills, your layup skills, your running skills, your passing skills, all those other things that you need in order to be a good basketball player, you'd be putting on hold because all you'd be working on is your dribbling, and you couldn't actually participate in the game. This is a closer analogy than you might think. For instance, if you're working on an etude and it's working on particular skills, and you really get that etude right, that's the only skill you've been working on in that etude book the whole time here. And if you spend a little bit less time on that and let your fingers experience it, but don't expect 100% or even 90% perfection right now, but you Give them something else to work on and to experience and maybe get to that 75% level, maybe. And then move on to the next one and move on to the next one. You're giving. Giving them this breadth of experience that is so much more valuable because you can level up from there. For instance, if you're playing basketball on that team and you can kind of dribble and kind of shoot and kind of pass, those skills will all get better the more you use them. But if you just focus on the dribbling, those other skills aren't going anywhere. So we want to keep your fingers learning new patterns. We want to keep your reading skills in practice. We want to give you new things to do. Vary your exercises, too. Don't just do the same exercises, particularly the same exercises at the same tempo all the time. So you can do this with not just ETOs or exercises, but think about this with pieces too. Even if you need to adapt a passage or make a cut in a piece so that you can play it for now, you get to come back to it later when that passage that you cut, perhaps, or adapted is no longer so difficult for you. That's okay. You can make that change for now. But not moving on, because you need to get this right, exactly right, right now is going to keep you stuck longer. Not only stuck on that piece, but stuck at that level. This habit is really about expectations, about setting the right kind of expectations for yourself. Your expectations for yourself shouldn't be about perfection. It shouldn't be about needing to get everything correct. I would love to see your expectations for yourself set around your growth. The idea that we are always growing, we are always improving, we can always achieve another level, but we can only achieve another level when we move toward it. And being stuck on one thing is not going to get us there. So please don't feel like it needs to be right before you move on. Sounds like a good idea. And it may be a habit that has served you for a while, but it's not going to keep serving you. It's not going to get you where you want to go. So what you want to do now is keep adding variety. Set a little boundary for yourself. Okay, I'm going to be done with this for now. I can come back to it later, but I'm going to move on to something else else. It can be a time thing. It can be a, okay, I've spent enough time on this right now. Sort of limit to your practice. Or it could be, I'm only going to give myself a week on this and then I'm going to try the next one. Or I'm only going to work on half of this and then I'm going to try something else. Anything like that. But just make sure you're moving on. I hope this whole discussion around these habits has given you a new perspective on growth and a new perspective perhaps on your own practice and how you are or maybe aren't or haven't been to this point, directing it toward that next level in your playing and how the daily practices that you use as you are learning new music and new techniques at the harp, those daily practices can either push you forward or keep you where you are right now. And we all want to grow and we all want to play new music and to play the music that we love better. So think about these habits and think about what you can do to step it up a little bit. Choose one of them and change that today and see what happens for you. I'm excited about the new growth that could be happening for you and your heart playing now. Next week here we'll be talking about my favorite warmups. I'll talk about a few of the popular warmups that are out there, what they're useful for besides just warming up your fingers and how to make the best use of your warmup time. So it's all about warmups next week on the podcast. Remember, please to register for that Learn It Tonight webinar. If you're not sure that you could actually learn a piece in one night, think about the new habits that you could put in place just from our discussion on that webinar. That might help you learn any piece faster. At least that's the idea. So I hope to see you there. You can register using the link in the show notes or just go to heartmastery.com under upcoming events and it's the Learn It Tonight webinar. In the meantime, remember every day is a day that 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.