Breaking Free From Perfectionism - PHH 087

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. As you probably know, one of my words for 2023 is freedom. Now, for me, it's a motivational word meaning the idea of freedom just energizes me. It's also an aspirational word meaning that I want to experience the feeling of freedom every day. Most importantly for me, it's an action word. I want to actively bring more freedom into all areas of my life and into the lives of those around me. That includes you, my friend. And that's where freedom in our harp playing comes in. I'm on a mission to set harpists free from the tyranny of some of the things that keep keep us from achieving what we want in our harp playing. That's the main focus for the webinar I'll be presenting soon on Creating Harp Freedom. I'll be talking about some of the hidden enemies of progress and what you can actually do to defeat them. But in assembling the materials for that webinar, I realized that there is one enemy that many harpists face, one that's too big to be covered thoroughly in the webinar. It's the big enough, in fact, that I decided to dedicate an entire podcast episode to it. What is it? It's perfectionism.

You see, an overwhelming majority of the harpists that I speak with describe themselves as perfectionists or type A personalities or overachievers. I'm probably more than a little of all those things myself. So I'm in the middle of this struggle with you all. In fact, there are a lot of us in this boat. A study done in 2020 by the Hardin Group reported that of the more than 1200 participants in their national survey, more than 92% of those self identified as perfectionists. And 86% of those respondents believed that their perfectionist expectations impacted their work. Now, based on my own much less scientific experience, this is not news. This is confirmation perfectionism, at least in harp playing, which is all I claim to know about, is a trap for so many of us. Now, this is not a podcast episode about the psychology of perfectionism. The Practicing Harp Happiness podcast is about harp playing. And so is this episode. I'm going to share some of the ways that I have seen perfectionism prevent harpists from making progress, from enjoying their practice, from sharing their music with others. And of course, I'm not going to leave you there. I'm going to give you some very simple but not necessarily easy ways to create your own harp freedom, whether you're a perfectionist or not. But first, I do want to remind you about my Creating Harp Freedom webinar, which is happening on Thursday, January 25th. It's going to be a fun webinar. I know it's, you know, thinking about creating freedom is terrific, right? But we're going to be talking specifically about how to break down the barriers between you and the music. We're going to be talking about some key things that keep you from really enjoying or really playing or really feeling like you've gotten to the music that you have in front of you. So we want to talk about what's, you know, what's preventing you from really playing. And we're going to be talking about the five I's, five things that all begin with the letter I that are possibly keeping you stuck. You'll notice that perfectionism does not begin with an I. So that's not on that list, which is why we're talking about it today. But we're going to be talking about those things and then again, really showing you how those things are all conquerable. Wherever you think you are now, you can move forward, and you can move forward perhaps faster than you thought. And so we'll be talking about the three big keys to moving forward. They really are pretty simple strategies. And you'll be able to do them, I promise. But I want to take the time to show you what they are. So that's what we're going to be talking about on the webinar. It's totally free. And of course, I know we've got people listening all over the world. And, you know, the, the time zone, the day, the time might just not be convenient for you. So do sign up for the webinar. There will be a Replay. And the only way we can send you the replay is if you sign up. So do sign up for the webinar and we will look forward to seeing you there. It's going to be a lot of fun. And of course, as I've been telling you, we're going to have something I, I have something special and brand new that I'm going to unveil for you on the webinar. So we'll talk about that, too. Something else that's free and fun, so there'll be that to talk about, too. But right now we're going to go with a topic that's a lot more sobering, right? We're going to talk about perfectionism. So even if that's not you, I, I want you to stay tuned because you're going to learn some really interesting strategies and things to think about for your heart playing. So if you're ready, we're going to get started. I think to start our discussion about perfectionism, I want to think about mistakes. I believe that for most of us, we think about mistakes in our playing as keeping it from being perfect. I mean, there might be other things as well, but let's talk about mistakes, because that's a biggie, right? Mistakes could be a wrong note, a wrong fingering, screwing up a pedal, losing your place in the music, forgetting what comes next, not playing, the wrong dynamic, perhaps. You know, I mean, there are a million kinds of mistakes we could make, right? But what we tend to forget is that a mistake is a mistake. It's an accident like anything else. It's just part of being human, you know, and if you tend to be hard on yourself for making mistakes, please remember that you are still human and that they will happen. And so as we start thinking about perfectionism, we have to realize that many of the things we're talking about as keeping us from playing perfectly are things we really can't help because they're just mistakes. So I was thinking about this in terms of the word error had come to mind, and I started thinking about baseball and about unforced errors. Now, I do not pretend to be a baseball expert in any way, but I do know just, you know, a smidgen, probably just enough to be dangerous. But in any case, think about an error that a baseball player might make right, and particularly an unforced error. An unforced error is when you make a mistake. And this would be, you know, a, A, a fielder, like somebody, you know, somebody who's not batting, okay? So when they make a mis. Fielder would make a mistake that he should not have made with no outside influence, meaning that, you know, nobody bumped into him, he just didn't catch the ball, or he was trying to throw it to first base, maybe, and he overthrew the first baseman or he forgot to step on a base to tag a runner out, something like that. That would be an unforced error. So it's a mistake that a player makes, and it doesn't necessarily get counted on the scoreboard, but it often has a negative impact on the game because it might allow a player to score or it might, you know, might prevent a player from being called out when he, you know, when he should have been. So it's not a good thing. It's a mistake. But as I was checking to be sure that I understood what an unforced error was, and I was doing a little, you know, little Google research here, I came across this wonderful paragraph that was answering the question, why do errors occur in baseball games? And it's just a couple of sentences and I'm going to share it with you because it really made me laugh. So it's, you know, errors occur in baseball games like in all other sports. In baseball, fielders must cover thousands of square feet of playing space on the field. Additionally, hitters often hit a baseball into the field of play at speeds well over 100 miles an hour. With these two factors, along with the weather, the lights, and potentially uneven playing surfaces, the chance for errors in a baseball game can be high. Now, does that sound like heart playing to you? Because it did to me. Okay, maybe not speeds well over 100 miles per hour, but what about speeds of 120, 20 to the quarter note? And we often have to leap our hands all the way around the harp. We have to deal with levers, we have to deal with pedals. And okay, the weather can be a factor for us, too, right? Our harps could go out of tune, and sometimes lights are in our eyes, and the playing surfaces could be uneven and our harp could be wobbly. I mean, no wonder the chance for errors in harp playing is high.

As I said, that little paragraph made me laugh because it really put into perspective the difficulty of the task that we have in front of us. Naturally, we're going to make mistakes. Now also take into consideration that these baseball players that they're talking about in these articles, they're at the highest professional level for their sport. They're being paid millions of dollars. They still make mistakes.

You know, who are we right to think we're greater mortals than These. And just to hang on to that baseball.

Thought for a second, you know, baseball pitchers, the ideal is the perfect game when they face all the, you know, 27 hitters, three hitters per. Per inning for all nine innings in a baseball game, and they don't allow any of them to get on base. Well, that perfect game is the rarest of all things in baseball. There have only been 23 of them in Major League baseball history, and the first two happened in 1880. The last perfect game thrown in Major League Baseball was in August of 2012. That lets you know, with all those baseball games for 140 years, there have only been 23.

What are we thinking of with perfection? Okay, just a little perspective to begin our discussion.

Basically, what I think this points out is that the pursuit of perfection.

Is really the pursuit of the impossible. I mean, perfection might happen, but the chances of it happening very small. We're not looking for perfection. And when we insist on that for ourselves, we're holding ourselves to a practically impossible standard. Excellence might be a more realistic pursuit. Right? So thinking about making something excellent.

Is not the same as making it perfect, or at least it doesn't have to be. Although I would wager that in a true perfectionist mind, excellence and perfection might be the very same thing. But let's see how perfectionism shows up for musicians. How would you know if you have, you know that just enough perfectionism to get in the way of doing things? Let me say again that I'm not interested in a real clinical discussion of true perfectionism. That's beyond my expertise for sure. But when I talk to so many harpists who say, well, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, when I hear somebody say that, I know that they don't have the best attitude, the most helpful mindset for the growth that they want. As a harpist, right? We need to grow. We want to make progress, we want to improve, we want to get better. We want to come ever closer to our own idea of excellence for our playing.

And that's what worries me. So what I'd like to do right now is help you identify some of the thoughts that might be getting in your way that point out just that little bit of. Of perfectionism tendency, or at least something that's not helpful to your playing. There are some key phrases to look for, even some key words, things like words like must or should. Right, I should be doing that. I must do that. In fact, we're all guilty of that sort of thing. But when we impose too many musts, or shoulds on ourselves. We're not allowing ourselves to just do and to work and to improve.

I did this the other day. I was speaking with my coach and she called me out twice for using the word should when I should have should. There you go again. When it would have been better if I had changed to an action word the way I just did. Now, did you hear what I did? I took away the word should, which has an onus attached to it, one that's not necessary, but it would have been better had I used another word or I could have substituted another word.

So thinking about the musts and the shoulds that we put in front of ourselves and in front of our harp playing every day might be helpful. That's sort of a telltale phrase.

Remember too, that perfectionist thinking can show up sometimes as.

A little bit of shyness or diffidence, like, oh, well, I'm not really good at that. Or I couldn't do that in front of people. I wouldn't be good at that. Or possibly even in terms of procrastination, well, it's not ready. I'm not ready to do that. I'll do that later.

And often those phrases show up as our own feeling, as a way to express our own feeling that we're not good enough, that what we have isn't perfect. It's not ready yet. So let's think about this just for a moment. I want you to be really aware of ways in which you might be putting that perfectionist ideal, even if you're not a true perfectionist. But you might be putting that perfectionist ideal in front of yourself, which is one we can't live up to. Please remember that, you know, we can strive, but we're not going to attain it. And we'll talk about that just in a moment. So the first step is in freeing yourself from being limited by these perfectionist tendencies is to be able to call them out. So think about.

What it might mean for a piece of music to be perfect.

For you. What does that mean? Does it mean that every note has to be right? And is that even possible? Does it mean that you have to have it totally memorized and to play it 10 times in a row, maybe in your practice without mistakes, or, you know, what is the standard that you are setting for yourself, and is that a reasonable standard? We'll talk more about that in just a second, too. But here are some sneaky ways that perfectionism might show up for you if you spend too long on one piece.

Granted, this is going to be, you know, how many months are you spending on a piece? Well, how many pages does the piece have? How hard is it for you? Right. There's not one particular number that I can give you to say, well, you can't spend longer than this many days or weeks or months on a piece. But if you never finish it, or if you routinely don't finish your pieces, it might be because you don't know exactly where finish is. It might be that your idea of finished is not realistic.

So this is one way that perfectionism might be showing itself in your practice. If you're not finishing your pieces or spending too long on a piece before you move on, it may show up as being self conscious or fearful or reluctant to play for others.

What worries you about playing for others? I mean, I know we all get nervous, but is it that you won't meet with their approval, or you won't feel like you're good enough, or you.

Are afraid of what? Of how you might be judged?

While those feelings are natural and human, they're not the healthiest ones to have, certainly. Right. And we can replace those with attitudes that are more forgiving and accepting and more realistic. We'll get to that in a moment. Here too.

The phrase that.

I think is a killer for so many of us is when we're thinking about our music and sharing it with somebody else or playing it for somebody, what do we say? We say, oh, well, it's not ready yet.

Well, it might be a legitimate concern, it might not be ready yet. But how are we defining ready? What does ready mean? Granted, we have that wonderful saying that we hear from time to time, done is better than perfect. And I am a believer in that. It's better to get something done than to tweak it and tweak it and tweak it and tweak it until it is perfect. But it sort of depends on what your definition of done is. If done is too close to perfect, you might not get to done.

And all of these things really lead us to the same direction and to the same thought. We can conquer these kinds of attitudes if we make our expectations.

A little bit more reasonable. When we hold the bar too high for ourselves, it's really hard to get across it. And the thing is that when we're learning something, whether it's harp playing or anything else, when we're learning that we don't have enough perspective, enough of a track record, enough knowledge to truly assess or accurately assess what accomplishment or even excellence looks like at our particular Developmental stage, Right. We're in the thick of it, and we don't have the wisdom of somebody further along the road to say, well, okay, this is really excellent for somebody like me, where I am right now.

You may. And you may have heard yourself say this.

You may be saying this right now. You may have heard other people say it. But phrases like, this piece should be easy for me. Okay, well, there's a double whammy. It's got that should word in it, right? But this piece should be easy for me when we're still struggling it. Or I know this is a beginner piece, but I still can't get it right.

Or I seem to keep making mistakes in this. Well, there's something we can do something about those mistakes. We have practice techniques to help make the mistakes fewer.

But as learners, we really don't necessarily understand the component skills that we need at each successive level.

Getting from one level to the next in our playing is something that somebody further along the road really needs to help us with. Because a piece of music or a particular skill might look easy, might sound easy, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy for us. So one big key to success is going to be to have reasonable expectations for ourselves, ones that are reasonable from another wiser, more experienced person's standpoint, not just from our own.

So you might consider some of these replacement strategies in the meantime. So to help make your thinking a little bit more moderate and help keep your expectations a little bit more reasonable for you, you might consider these replacement strategies in terms of the terms that you're thinking about. Right? So, for instance, instead of the word perfection, let's replace that with the word accomplishment.

I would like to. I want to stop right here for a second and think about what I heard a student say recently. They were playing a beginner piece.

Which was not totally easy for them. You know, it was the. It was at the right level for them to be working, but it didn't sound the same way that that beginner piece sounded. When they heard a more experienced harpist play it on YouTube. I said, well, I know it's a beginner piece, and I'm a beginner and I'm playing it right. How come it still doesn't sound like that? And that's because there are experience levels and skill levels that the student hadn't gotten to yet. So even if you're playing a piece that's at your level and you think that it. To use that bad word again, that it should be easy enough for you, and that you should be able to play it with.

All the style and ease that you hear somebody else play it with. It doesn't mean it's really going to happen that way because it's at the highest end of your skill level. So there's always another level to achieve. So don't. Please let yourself feel your accomplishment.

Understand that that is accomplishment for you, whether or not you consider it accomplished perfection. All right, so there's one replacement. What about this one? Instead of the word done, let's replace that with the phrase ready for now. It's not done, perhaps where you feel 100% happy with everything that you're doing, but it's ready for now, knowing that the more you play it, the more time you give it, the more time you have been playing the harp, the. The better it will become.

So done. We don't need to be done. We just need it to be ready for now.

Instead of that phrase, I should. Let's replace that with a phrase similar to I'd like to or it would be fun to. So that instead of saying, oh, I should do those exercises well, and, you know, maybe I would recommend that you do them too. But instead of saying, oh, I should do this, or I have to do those, or I have to do more scales, you could say, well, I'd like to do more scales to improve my technique, or it would be fun to be able to play scales faster. So I think I'll start practicing them. It's a small change in your wording, but it's a huge change in the way it feels. I should work on my scales. It'd be fun to play my scales faster. So I'm going to start practicing them. Huge difference. And it can make a huge difference in the energy that you bring to that task, whatever you're setting for yourself.

Okay, another replacement strategy here. Instead of thinking, oh, this is not good enough. This isn't good enough yet. This isn't. It's not good enough, it's not perfect. Let's replace that with the look what I can do idea. Now, you might not say that out loud to anybody, but I'd love it if you started saying it to yourself.

You know, the. Look what I can do. I couldn't play this piece three weeks ago, and look what I can do now.

Think about it like refrigerator art. You know, the kid comes home from school and it's a painting, and it's. It doesn't look like much to you, and you say, oh, that's beautiful. What did you Paint here. And they say, oh, well, see, that's, you know, that's. That's my house and that's our cat, and that's the tree. You say beautiful, and you put it up on the refrigerator. What if we could bring more of that idea to our playing instead of thinking, oh, it's not good enough. It doesn't look like a tree or a cat or a house. But look what I can do. All right, so we're going to do the refrigerator art principle. Okay? Think about that. And by the way, I would encourage you to find a refrigerator art moment in your practice every day. Oh, cool. Look at that crescendo. Look what I did. It doesn't matter that the fingering wasn't right or that, you know, you had the wrong petal. Okay. All right, I'll go back, you'll fix it. But find those refrigerator art moments. Okay? All right. One more replacement strategy. Instead of thinking about your mistakes as black marks or demerits or, you know, flaws that. That just get in the way of everything and ruin your music, let's recognize them for accidents. They're accidents. They're mistakes. They're signs of your humanity, but they are accidents. They're mistakes. We need to remember that. That's what they are, right? Accidents. Mistakes happen because we're human. It's not a sign of sloppiness or slipshod work or a lack of ability or unworthiness. It's an accident. We've had them before. We will have them again. Baseball players have them. We can have them, too. And by the way, those little accidents, that's why recordings like CDs that you hear that sound so perfect, well, that's why they're edited. Edited at the single note level. I'd like to punch that note in, please. That was a wrong note. It didn't come out quite right. I'd like to punch that in and fix that one. That's the kind of audio airbrushing that goes on with those CDs, right? I mean, I've done it, too. I know it happens, so. And that's because accidents are unavoidable. Now, in our own heart playing, we can minimize the chance of mistakes through our practice. We can minimize the effect of any mistake we might make through our practice, too. But accidents happen. Accept it. Realize that it's just part of the process. And everyone, whether you're talking about a beginner harpist or the most experienced master harpist in the entire world, everyone makes mistakes.

So let's just accept that. That is going to happen, and we'll. We'll move right along.

It's not going to ruin the music. It's just a mistake. That's all it is.

Once we've done that, then I'd like you to encourage you. I'd like to encourage you rather to celebrate your accomplishments right where you are. This is such a hard thing for many of us. There's always a but, right? You know? Oh, yeah. Thank you. I thought it was okay, but this happened and this happened, and I made this mistake, and this. It was okay, but. Or. Well, I seem to be making progress, but I still can't do this. This is usually pretty good, but I still made mistakes.

You know? Thank you so much. I'm glad you liked my playing, but I wasn't happy with it. Well, we need to learn how to take compliments more gracefully than that, no matter what we think. But that but.

Is our way of.

Not accepting the positive in what we've done.

It's. Perhaps you could consider it false humility.

Not that we don't believe that we would have liked it. Not to have mistakes or whatever it was.

We know that we've done better other times, you know, I played okay, but it was better at home. Yeah, it's always better at home. And that's true for all of us. But those buts can't rule our lives. Your hard work and dedication is paying off. You're learning, you're growing. Remember, our quest is not for perfection. It's for progress. It's for growth. And those are things that show up in their own time, and they usually manifest themselves at moments and in ways we don't expect. So take those moments that happen, those refrigerator art moments, if you like, and stand in them for a moment.

You know, say, wow. Okay, that was a cool thing. I did a cool thing. Nice. Okay. Yeah. So I played the last four meshes with the wrong petals, but that's all right. I'll go back and I'll fix that. But. Wow, that sounded really good. Except for the weird notes. You know, let's celebrate what we can. Recognize that progress. Your teacher would. Your teacher would never tell you that you totally blew those last four measures. So why would you tell yourself that?

Find those things that you can celebrate those moments when you can recognize growth in yourself.

And give yourself a little bit credit. Remember to trust your practice process and. And just acknowledge your growth without the buts. Who needs that anyway, right? Okay, so even if you're not a perfectionist, there are things I would love for you to take away from this discussion, and that is this, that mistakes are part of your growth process.

That you need to be aware of things that might be creeping into your harp vocabulary. Things about not things not being ready or not good enough or some of those buts we just talked about. Be the shoulds for sure, right? Think about be aware is what I really meant to say. Be aware of those kinds of phrases and call yourself out on them. Remind yourself that you're looking for progress, you're looking for growth. We're not asking perfection. Audiences don't ask that.

There's not a person listening to you in the world that would ask you to be perfect. The only person that would be asking that of you is you. And in that case, you're not being very kind to yourself.

So please watch what you are thinking. Watch what you are telling yourself. Give yourself those bat on the back moments, those refrigerator art moments. Be proud of what you can do. That's where your harp happiness will be, my friend. It'll be there and you deserve it. Okay, quick reminder. Please don't miss the webinar coming up on January 25th. It's going to be fun. We're talking about creating Harp Freedom. We will not be talking about perfectionism as such. I think we've sort of hit that topic pretty well today. But we have other things that are a little simpler, very actionable and very fun that you can do to keep yourself on the harp happiness path and certainly on the path to harp freedom next. By the way, you can sign up for that webinar. That would be a good thing if I told you where to do that. You can use the link in the show notes for this episode or you can go to harpmastery.com under Events and you can register for the webinar there. Okay. It's called Creating Harp Three Keys to breaking down the barriers between you and the music. It'll be fun, I guarantee. Now, next week on the podcast, we will be talking about inspiration. We'll be talking about muses and models and mentors and where inspiration actually comes from. And of course, where you can find a little bit more of it. Right? So I look forward to sharing all that information with you next week. In the meantime, remember, 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.