Blast the Practice Blahs: How To Practice When You Don’t Have To - PHH 090

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. By the beginning of February, which is when I'm recording this, I'm done with winter. The holiday playing is long over. Spring is still weeks away. No matter what the groundhog said, I'm feeling the winter blahs. And not just in the day to day things. This is the time of year when my practice can suffer from the blahs too. Have you ever noticed how when you have important things to practice for, you enjoy your practice more? You have more energy for it because there's a good reason to practice. It's never a struggle to practice when you have a lesson or a performance coming up. But it can be hard to drag yourself to the harp bench if there's nothing on the calendar. If you have nothing to practice for, it's quite possible you have no energy for practice. Practice is certainly easier to do when you know you simply have to practice. But what if you don't have to practice? How do you stay motivated and energized? Well, the simple answer is that you may not be able to stay motivated. Motivation requires us to expend energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere.

Now, I'm going to say something that may shock you or at least surprise you a little. I'm actually going to give you permission to not practice. That sounds like a radical idea, I know, but it's a valid technique. When you're not feeling it, maybe you shouldn't do it. However, let me quickly add that there is a right way and about a million wrong ways to skip your practice, and that the wrong ways won't help you. You'll end up out of shape, feeling guilty and miserable. Kind of like when you binge on chocolate fudge and Potato chips and have to wear your stretchy pants. Or maybe that's just me. No. What we're going to discuss today is motivation. Where it comes from, plus what to do when you don't feel motivated. I have five easy ways to pump up your practice energy, and at least four. Four of them are fun. The fourth one might be fun, too. You'll have to decide that for yourself. And I will once again give you permission to not practice. And I will tell you the right way to go about it. Now, if this sounds like you, the winter blahs, the practice blahs, I want to give you one last chance to join us on our five day intensive. Five days to Freedom. This will certainly pick up your motivation and inspire you to do your practice, but maybe a different kind of practice than you've done before. We're gonna be talking about how to free yourself from the things that don't lead to progress. We'll be giving you new practice protocols. I'll be sharing my baby steps Giant Step System. And it actually starts today. That's February 6th, which is when this is going live. And it's all right. If you haven't joined us yet, you can still join us today. But you need to do it today before we get further into the course. You can do that by using the link in the show. Not our last call to the five Days to Freedom Intensive, or you just hop over to heartmastery.com, look in upcoming events, and it's there as well. But register for it. I promise it's powerful, powerful training. It's a lot of fun, and it's only $47. So really, it's hard to go wrong. So please, if this starts to sound like you, hop on down there and register and join us today. I'm. All right, enough on that. Let's start by talking about motivation and where it comes from. Is that a new idea for you? Have you thought, have you wondered where motivation comes from? I mean, sometimes we have it and we feel very compelled to do something, and sometimes we just don't. And what we want to do is sit around and binge watch something, right? And the truth is, both of those states are healthy. It's that ebb and flow of motivation and relaxation that keeps us healthy, keeps us interested, and allows us to function well as creative human beings and as harpists, too. So both of those states are good. I think trying to maintain a high level of motivation all the time is probably impossible, definitely impractical, and probably really bad for you. So don't feel like I'm urging you to feel motivated all the time. That's not where we want to go. But there are a couple different aspects to motivation that are worth considering. One is that sort of emotional motivation, and that's actually driven by a sense of urgency. And we'll come back to that word in just a moment. But, but think about when you have to do something like a life threatening situation, right? You do it or you actually die. That's motivation. And it's not in that cognitive thinking part of our brain. We're not thinking about it. We just know we have to do it, right? Literally or, well, figuratively, I suppose, dodging a bullet. So it's survival and we need to do it. That's probably the most primal example of motivation. But it doesn't necessarily involve any thinking. It's all reactive. Now compare that to what the motivational scientists call cognitive motivation. This is the kind of thing that shows up, you know, you see a new piece or you hear somebody play something, or you are part of an experience and you think, gosh, this would be cool. And so you decide to do it. This is a motivation that starts not in your emotions, not in that, you know, reptile brain, right? But it starts in that cognitive thinking, higher part of your brain, and it's all thought driven.

The problem with cognitive motivation is that you're not necessarily truly invested in it because you're not hooked in emotionally, right? So if motivation has those two components. Emotional motivation, where you feel you are absolutely compelled and you must do it, or cognitive motivation, where you think it would be cool and you'd kind of like to do it, true motivation for what we're talking about in terms of our heart, practice and playing has to have both of those components. And as the scientists in this field describe, emotional motivation without cognitive motivation can act and can act poorly. Right? You're going to do it because you need to make this decision to avoid the, the oncoming train. But it doesn't mean you're going to necessarily make the best decision. You're just making that decision that comes from your gut, that gut reaction. So it will act, but it can act poorly. But cognitive motivation without emotional motivation doesn't act at all.

Okay, think about that again. Cognitive motivation without emotional motivation. In other words, thinking something is cool without necessarily deeply feeling it's necessary for you, doesn't act at all. This is why we can have that really cool piece of music or go to a concert and be really inspired by what we hear year and think, wow, I want to do that, but that's the problem. We thought we want to do that. So when we get home, it's kind of like, I don't know. And that thing that we thought was so cool loses its luster a little bit because we're not totally hooked in.

Now, once again, today, I'm not trying to tell you you need to be totally hooked in all the time. What I want to tell you is, is that it's okay not to feel motivated and to give you a path back to your playing and your practice so that when you don't feel particularly motivated, you don't have to feel guilty, you don't have to feel ashamed. You don't have to feel like you're less of a harpist. You don't have to feel unworthy or undeserving. And of course you don't feel any of those things. At least I hope not. But you don't need to feel any of that guilt. It's okay not to feel motivated because you've got a path back. All right, let me come back to one of those words I just used a moment ago. Urgency. There are two words that I use when I'm thinking about motivation or even just a task on my task list. One of them is urgency, and one of them is necessity. Urgency is that thing that I have to do. It just has to be done. Like, I have to pay the bills, or I have to practice for an upcoming concert, or I have to have this podcast prepared for you on Monday. So it's something that I have to do. And it's got an external motivator, right? Because it's got a consequence that will happen if I don't do it. If I don't pay my bills, my credit score will go down, the collectors will come after me, and all that kind of terrible stuff, right? So there's a consequence. If I don't practice for an upcoming concert, the concert's going to be terrible, and I'm going to be really embarrassed if I don't have a podcast ready for you. Your earbuds are going to be empty on a Monday or whenever it is you listen to this, right? So all of those things are external motivators, and they create that sense of urgency that no matter what else is happening, I have to get this done.

Speaking of the podcast, for a second, I'm going to go back and, you know, the podcast has been happening for, you know, this is, what, the 90th episode, and it comes out weekly, so you can understand pretty Much how long I've been doing that.

The blog that I started in 2012, I did for, you know, 10 plus years. So the, the blog was an every week thing. Well, it started out as three times a week, but I realized that that was crazy. So I had to create that sense of urgency to be sure that I got it done. And I can tell you that especially in the early days of the blog, that blog was published Monday morning and I'd be sitting there Sunday night still writing it. I'd be sitting there Sunday night still thinking. I have nothing to write about. But that sense of urgency, that sense that Monday was going to come and something had to be published that allowed me to find the motivation to get something done. So that's the kind of urgency I'm talking about. All right, now contrast urgency with necessity. Necessity is that internal motivation. It's something that you want to do enough that you actually do it. Right now I might want to.

Learn better.

Culinary techniques, but I don't necessarily feel motivated enough to take a class to do it. You know, that's on the bucket list, as we say. It's further down the line, it's below the line, it would be cool, but it's not on my, you know, must do list. Necessity is that internal desire and need, the internal compulsion, if that's not too strong a word, to actually do something where you truly want to do it. Now necessity alone can be very strong, right? This is the emotional buy in.

This is I need to do it for my well being. I need to do it for my self satisfaction. I need to do it in order to satisfy some desire of my own. It can be very powerful because. But sometimes that sense of necessity is just kind of on the wane, right? Necessity is what comes and goes. Urgency has a deadline. Necessity is on that motivational fluctuation curve, right? Where sometimes it's very strong, sometimes it's not so strong, sometimes it's strong in relation to a particular thing. If you have a hobby and perhaps it's heart playing that you absolutely love and you're going to do it no matter what, your necessity for that is very strong. And so your motivation is going to be strong. Now that's not to say that it won't have ups and downs, but if you're not feeling like whatever it is is a strong enough need for you, then you might not really have enough motivation to actually do it. So what I mean to say is that there are times when we just don't want to practice enough to actually do it right. Urgency is going to get you to the harp every time because there's a deadline, there's a due date, there's. I must do this because there will be consequences. But the necessity is what fluctuates and that's normal and it's okay.

But on those times when your sense of necessity is a little bit low, you may not. That sense of necessity may not be enough to actually get you to the heart bench. Now, I'm going to remind you that my purpose today is not to create motivation, to not. I don't want you to feel like you have to feel motivated. I want you to feel comfortable not feeling motivated. But that may be difficult for you. We have a lot of shoulds around motivation or around our practice, and they can be very closely entwined. Right? I should practice. I should practice more. I didn't get to practice today. And then we start wishing we had and we start that, you know, that cycle of, oh, well, I didn't practice yesterday. And so it's going to be really crummy today. So I don't want to practice today either. And, you know, that's not the place we want to go. So it's nice to think about ways to pump up your motivation. And I'll give you little easy ways when we get a little further along in this call today. But I want to warn you about looking for motivation.

I'm not sure that we can actually do that with a lot of success. I mean, when we're not feeling motivated, we don't necessarily want to be motivated.

So some of the places that we think we ought or should, places we ought to look for motivation are maybe not the places we ought to need to be going. So, for instance, those inspiring stories, you know, those stories about pulling victory from the jaws of defeat or overcoming incredible hardships on the path to success, they're great stories. And when we're in the right frame of mind, they are inspiring. And we start drawing parallels and pulling things into our lives and saying, oh, I could learn from this. But if you are not in that frame of mind, they can actually create more of a sense of frustration and more of a sense of despondency. I'm not going to go so far as to say despair, but just discouragement in general. Right. Look, this is what this person did. They must be better than I am. Even if we're not consciously thinking those thoughts. I think that's why sometimes inspiring stories just don't cut it for us. I mean, when we're feeling low on Energy to start with. Hearing about someone else's tale of action and accomplishment probably won't help.

By the way, if you're looking for a concrete example of this, anything having to do with social media falls under this category, right? You see all those wonderful photos from somebody else's vacation. And yeah, we know that they're, you know, what they call planned photos, right? They're not quite candid. They're a little bit more planned than candid. And you know, it's, it's like the, you know, the airbrushed cover models, right? It's, they're not quite real, but it can still make us feel bad about ourselves. So while those stories are inherently inspiring, we might not feel that way about them. So don't look there. Another scary place to try to look for motivation is YouTube. I mean, for most of us, seeing and hearing more accomplished harpists make us feel less like practicing. Especially if that harpist is 12 years old. Right. Sometimes, I mean, we, granted, we ought to feel like, okay, that's a great thing, I could do that. But. But if we're not feeling it to start with, YouTube isn't gonna help.

And another thing that I don't think we should try for motivation is that power through it strategy. I'm not feeling like practicing, but I'm gonna do it anyway. There are times to do that, particularly if you have a deadline coming up, right? Oh, gosh, I've got this concert coming up. I don't feel like practicing, but I'm going to do it anyway. That's when that sense of urgency or overrides your lack of energy for the project.

But in general, I don't think a power through it strategy really works. I know it's the time honored strategy for.

Getting something done, but I think that as often as it might get us back to practicing and get us moving again, it may very well just create more tension and frustration.

Of course, it's kind of funny because if you want to power through your practice, when you feel motivated and when you have that sense of urgency, it's no trouble at all. But powering through it when you don't feel like it to start with is a tough one. So I have some alternatives for you.

Let me ease your mind here. If you don't feel motivated, I don't want you to worry about it. You could do some, plenty. You know, you could do lots of good here for yourself and your heart playing if you don't feel motivated. And possibly the reason you feel sort of low energy.

Might be because you need this time to recover.

Your body might need to rest. Your hands can get a little bit of rest, they can relax. You can let go of some of that tension. Your mind can step away from the hard work of practice. And it is hard. Takes a lot of focus, a lot of energy. And you can use this time to sort of consolidate the information. Just let your mind relax and absorb things. You can let go of what was frustrating. Perhaps in your practice you can just restore your, your energy and recover a little bit. That's a win.

Or perhaps you could explore. Now, I know I just said you shouldn't watch YouTube videos, but it's all about the context here. You could go on YouTube and just kind of plow through videos, not looking to inspire yourself to action, but instead just looking to find something that's interesting or different.

Right? When we're busy practicing for something, when we're, you know, under that call of a deadline, we don't have the luxury to just kind of, you know, plow through YouTube videos or Instagram or TikTok videos, if that's what you like, right? You don't have that luxury. But take this time to explore, find out what's going on. Let yourself indulge in a little bit of. Of binge watching for this. It's exploration. Don't feel like you have to derive inspiration from it.

What is cool about this is that when you do find something that hooks you in emotionally, not just something you think is cool, but something that actually sparks that internal flame, you'll know and you'll go dashing back to the heart because you'll be ready to do it. It'll happen, I guarantee.

But you know what? A time when you don't feel motivated to practice is a great time to just sort of sit back and choose what you're going to do next. Time to set a new direction or decide what you want to focus on. Choose a new piece, choose a new set of exercises, choose a different kind of a goal, but you get to choose what to do next. It's like an intermission, right? You're not just ignoring your practicing, you're just taking a break. And you get to choose what comes next.

So what are some other ways to bump up your practice energy to just put a little bit more pizzazz in there if you think you like to get back to your playing, but you don't have the right mindset yet? I think these are important strategies, these things that I'm going to give you right now. And the reason is, as I mentioned a little bit earlier. It's not about not or not just about having permission not to practice. Say, okay, you know, you don't want to practice, you don't have to. But it's about having a way back.

Because if you just don't practice.

That, you know, spiral of shoulds or just inertia can set in. And that's not what we want. We want this to be a time of rest and restoration for you. We don't want it to be a time of just surrender and giving up. So we want a way back. So let's think about this. And it's not going to be powering through. It's not going to be watching YouTube videos. You know, there's a time and a place for that, as we talked about already. But this is something different.

So if you don't want to practice, but you think maybe you'd like to still stay connected with the harp, this is your time to indulge. Imagine that, you know, somebody gave you this beautiful box of chocolates, and you open the chocolates and you get to just eat some chocolates, some treats. You wouldn't ordinarily, but you get to have some treats. This is a great time to indulge and have some harp treats, some harp goodies. And here's what I suggest. You might have a different idea, but this would be my suggestion. Keep a little basket, or a box or whatever you like, a little basket of new music that you have that you got because you wanted to try someday but you haven't tried it yet. Keep that basket of new music right next to your harp. When you're running low on motivation, just pick out one and put it up there and try it. It's kind of like dipping into that box of chocolates, right? You're going to just have that cool stuff there that maybe you wouldn't ordinarily have time to practice. This is a great time to just indulge and put it on your stand. You can just play through it, put it back and pick out another one. You don't have to buckle down and work on it unless you feel motivated, in which case we have not just hooked into the cognitive side of your motivation, but we've hooked into the emotional side as well. So it's a great way to do that. And as a matter of fact, it'll keep your fingers going, it'll keep your music reading skills up, maybe even improve them some. It's not a bad practice to do on a regular basis, but certainly it's going to Be good for getting you back to the harp if you feel like you just can't, can't muster up the energy to actually practice. Okay, here's my second strategy. And this is my, is the one I've been talking about. If you don't want to practice, you don't have to, right? Falling off the practice wagon is, is not failure, it's freedom to recover, right? To rethink, to redesign, to refocus. So if you don't feel like it, it's okay. But here is how to not practice and not feel guilty about it. You need, I think, well, I call this, I've seen the term elsewhere and it's pretty good. I call it structured procrastination.

And what we're going to do is create a compliance standard. You're going to make a deal with yourself. You don't have to practice, but you have to allow yourself a specific number of non practice days. How many missed days do you want to allow yourself? Do you want to say, okay, you know what, I really don't feel like practicing and I'm going to give myself three days of not practicing and then I'm going to come back to practice or I'm going to give myself, I'm allowed to not practice is another way to put that, for seven days and then I have to come back and practice.

So what's interesting about this is that by giving yourself a certain finite number of days in which you will not practice.

You'Re creating a way to make it easier to come back and practice. Because like, oh, you know what? I said I wouldn't practice for seven days. It's day six, I get tomorrow off and then the next day I'm going to practice. Makes it so much easier. I also suggest that particularly if you have, you know, seven days or longer of no practice, be sure that you have a plan for what you're going to do on your first day back. And you can be thinking about that plan while you're on vacation if you want.

But you can actually create it ahead of time too. And it can be the same thing I have often talked about. When you go on vacation, literally on vacation, and you're away from the harp, decide on your re entry plan. What are you going to do those first couple days when you get back? Are you going to do exercises? Are you going to play through favorite pieces or you're going to review some things, have a very concrete plan and if you have a go to set of exercises, like for me it's always the salsato conditioning exercises. If you have a go to set of exercises like that that you always do when you come back to the harp, that will also help your re entry, your transition back into practice. And it will make your practice feel more normal and feel less of a drag because you are re entering. So, you know, while I called this structured procrastination, I called it a compliance standard. A specific number of days you're not going to practice. You could just call it a vacation because it's the same thing and we all deserve a vacation. So don't worry about it. Okay? But what if you don't want to go on vacation? Here's something else. If you're not motivated to practice, you can clean and organize your practice space. Now I'll bet you've done that, maybe even as a practice procrastination technique. I know I have. Because it always feels good to have a neat, organized practice space to put away those piles of music. By the way, in putting away those piles of music, you might come across something that just pulls you over to the harp and says, oh, I forgot this. I would love to play this. This instant motivation boost right there. We might not. That's fine too, right? Because it's, this is a great process for finding those kinds of treasures. So that's, that's kind of cool. But organizing your practice space, organizing your music is a great thing to do. You could do that on your harp vacation we just talked about. Or it could just be this time when you're going to.

Stay close to your harp music, but without practicing. It will help you get back to practice when you're ready. And you won't have totally ignored your harp, which is a good thing, and you get, you know, nice organized music on top of it. It's kind of a win all the way around, I think.

Now here's the one that's a little bit tougher. You can pump up your practice energy by creating some external urgency, creating some urgency for yourself, right? So this is about creating that deadline. You might schedule a lesson or schedule a coaching schedule, a harp meetup with some friends. You could record something to post on social media or to just send to a friend, but create that urgency for yourself. Create that sense of I must do this. Give yourself a date, a deadline, something to do that will help get you back to the harp bench. It's not.

Everybody'S favorite way to do it, but it will work. How do we know it will work? Because if somebody else called you up and said, oh, you know what? I'm having this harp meetup at my house and I want you to come play. You'd practice.

So you can create that for yourself by setting something up. It will work. It's worked since, you know, it's worked forever and it works for everyone. But it may not be your favorite technique technique, and I get that too. So I'll give you one more that's way more fun. Make practice time your time.

So don't just think of practice as heart practice and correction and focus and all the hard stuff. Let's think of it more like a spa. Let yourself luxuriate in it, kind of like in a bubble bath. Light a candle, have a cup of tea. Close that door, your practice room, you know, literally, if you can, figuratively, if you don't actually have a door there and put that imaginary do not disturb sign on it. Let your practice time be your time to treat yourself. You can pull out that, that piece from your box of harp chocolates, right, that basket of music that you keep there. But let your practice time at least for a while until you feel a little bit more energized. Let your practice be treating yourself so that you can enjoy your harp. You could give your harp a spa day while you're at it. You know, clean and polish and dust and replace strings and you know, give it the, give it the spa treatment. After all, after your harp is all shiny and polished and has those beautiful new strings on it, tuning notwithstanding, who could resist sitting down and playing such a, you know, well maintained and a beautiful instrument, right?

Okay, so there are a few techniques for not necessarily regaining your motivation, but staying connected to your harp when you really don't feel like practicing.

A couple of little warnings here. Don't be ambitious trying to do this. The idea behind these techniques is, is to just stay connected, to make this easy and to make this fun. Treat them as baby steps. Just take one. Don't feel like you have to do all of them because the point here is not to set yourself up for failure by trying to take on too much at once. So just do a little bit. But if none of these feel good to you, give yourself that heart vacation and realize that I have just given you permission to not practice. Oh, radical. Radical. A last quick reminder that our five Days to Freedom Live intensive starts today. And you can still join us if you haven't already. Is. This is a great program. I'm really excited about this and I think it's going to give you lots and lots of ideas and certainly lots of ways to stay energized and motivated or regain your motivation if that's where you are. So if you haven't joined us, hop on. Use the link in the show notes to register or hop on over to heartmastery.com, go to upcoming events, register for the intensive there and join us immediately. All the calls are recorded so don't feel like you've missed anything. You'll be able to go up. Plus we have a catch up day in the middle of the week so you can certainly do that. But you know we are starting and you want to get in there, so do that now. Next week on the podcast, in honor of Valentine's Day, we'll be talking about romantic harp music. And we'll be talking about it from several different angles. But it's not only going to be an informative podcast, but it'll have some really pretty music in it too, so you won't want to miss that. So that's next week Romantic Music. Thank you for being here today. And please, until I talk to you next 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 again 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.