Choosing Your Next Step: How to Eat an Elephant - PHH 033

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 and welcome to 2022. Happy New Year. We are past the holidays. I hope yours were wonderful, filled with lots of love and joy and music. And I hope they were also healthy. We have the resurgence of the coronavirus all around the world and it's so hard to stay safe. And I hope that you are doing your best to stay safe and healthy. But you know, even without the coronavirus, there's an element of craziness in the holidays, isn't there? We try to do so much, whether it's the baking and the presents, the buying, the shopping, the wrapping, the delivering, the decorating, all of those things. And of course, there's the eating too, right? It always amazes me how I can eat sensibly most of the year and then throw out all of those good habits right out the window when it comes to Christmas time. Maybe that sounds familiar to you too. I mean, I know I'm not alone here. All I have to do is turn on the television and see all the diet commercials or look at my email inbox and see all the diet plan emails that are coming my way. Those advertisers know that we've made resolutions to be more helpful and they are ready to help us get back on track.

What they can't help you get back on track with is your harp playing. But after all, that's why I am here every week. To help you get back on track, but stay on track. And I certainly do have some ideas for you when it comes to getting your heart playing back on track right now. And it's actually an interesting thing when you think about it, because what's happened to your heart playing over the holidays is likely the exact Reverse of what happened to your eating right. Perhaps you followed my advice from, you know, a couple of podcasts ago and you took it easy. You took your foot off the gas when it came to your heart playing over the holidays. You practiced less and you enjoyed a well deserved break. I hope you did. It's good for you. It's good for your playing too. But the result of that kind of break is we hope you come back to the harp with new energy, renewed dedication, which is terrific, right? But there is a downside to that because it's super easy to fall victim to your own good intentions, to aim high, to set ambitious goals. Sounds good. It's a great way to set yourself up for success, but it can also be a great way or not so great way to set yourself up for disappointment. Sure, you're going to dig into your practice with lots of gusto this week, but just like those gym memberships that get bought in January and then are gathering dust in March, that energy for your practice is likely to fade over time too. It's not your fault, it's just our human nature. We can't sustain that kind of momentum for very long. So what I'd like to talk about today is how to be smart with your new year harp goals. Specifically how to ease back into your practice so you set yourself up for success by taking small but very significant steps. See, that's the idea behind the title of this episode. We're going to choose your next step. We're going to talk about finding that one next thing to get started on and accomplish not everything at once, just one next thing. See, I want you to accomplish all those lofty harp goals that you have for this year, but you need to plan to do it in a manageable, enjoyable, frustration free way. After all, when you have a big task to do, you have to do it in stages, right? How do you eat that big elephant? One bite at a time. And that's all you need to do with your practice. We're going to be talking about the three elements that you need in your practice. We're going to be talking about reducing your expectations so that you can achieve more with less effort and less stress.

Like most other things, we don't achieve more in our harp playing by working harder. We usually achieve more and enjoy it more when we work smarter. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. But I wanted to give you another opportunity, something to look forward to and a chance to enjoy some harp time and some relaxation time. We have decided to schedule another of our harp Mastery getaway retreats. This is a small retreat scheduled for the end of March, March 23rd to 28th, in Davenport, Florida, which is near Orlando. We have done this retreat a few times. Our last one was obviously in 2020. We didn't have one last year. We'd like to try it again now. This is, of course, assuming that the. The health situation is manageable, that we can hold it safely and, you know, we'll take whatever measures we need to take as recommended by the CDC and all that sort of stuff. We're not looking to endanger anyone's health for their heart playing, but we are going to go ahead and plan it and we would love for you to join us. There are. This is a single house and it's a big house and very spacious, lots of room. And of course, because it's Florida at the end of March, we'll be able to be outside for parts of it. And there's even, you know, nice shelter, cover and shade for the harps so that if we feel like playing outside poolside, we can do that. This is a wonderful opportunity and we have so enjoyed doing these retreats. We can only have about eight or nine harpists at the retreat, so it is quite small. I will be teaching along with my dear friend and colleague Mary Jane d', Arville, whom you probably know from the Virginia and Atlanta harp centers. Maybe you've gone to their Hanging with the Harp online.

Workshops and everything else on Tuesdays, but Mary Jane and I are looking forward to getting back into this, into this wonderful way of teaching. Right. Being able to be in person, being able to be in a small group, being able to work with people one on one. So the link to find out more and to reserve your room is in the show notes for this episode. So do go and check that out. And you know, we'd love to have you consider joining us. There's no obligation. We're not going to take anybody's money and then cancel the retreat. If we have to cancel the retreat, we certainly don't want to.

Do that at your expense. So while we can't, you know, hold off on making your travel arrangements, but do consider coming to the retreat. So I'd love to see you there. And. And what a great way to get some extra relaxation time and harp time just coming when we need it there as spring begins. So I'd love to have you join us. Please do check that out. And right now let's get started with finding your next step before we can Talk about what next step will lead you to success for your HARP goals this year. I'd like to think about what doesn't lead to success. And I was reminded of this very forcefully when I pulled out my new planner. I mean, I do a lot of things online, but I always have a physical planner where I can write my schedule for the day, my tasks for the day, the big projects. And I have a couple different planners that I have used over the course of the last few years. And so as I pulled my next blank copy out to start filling it in, you know, there was that little thrill of excitement, the blankness of the pages that seemed to speak with, you know, they just seem so full of possibility. There's so much stuff that can be done. I find it very easy to imagine all the wonderful things that I could do, all the wonderful possibilities that those pages could be filled with in the coming months.

But then I start writing things in and one of the planner systems that I like very much has lots of detail pages. It's got lots of places you can make plans for the day, for the week, for the month, for the quarter, for the year. And I have enjoyed using those pages because I can fill them out and they're, you know, they're, they seem so complete and they seem so deep, detailed and so well planned and organized. And sometimes that means that I am well planned and organized and sometimes it just means that I have spent a lot of time filling in the pages on the paper and not quite as much time doing the things that those pages represented or, you know, just my follow through. Right, not quite there. So sometimes I use a simpler planner, one that doesn't force me to do quite so much ahead planning. I mean, I've got the year, you know, the year sort of mapped out in terms of what's going to happen at HARP Mastery. And I have the more detail in the, in the half years and the quarters and the months and the weeks. There's a lot of stuff, right? You can well imagine there are a lot of moving pieces to something like this. And so, you know, I have a lot of planning that I need to do, but I don't need to see all of that all the time because it just feels overwhelming. And so sometimes the planner that I choose to use and the one that I have chosen to use for at least the next three months is one that's a little bit less detailed. I can keep my detailed long range plans in a separate place, but, but I don't need to look at those all the time. What I need to focus on is my next step. With all the big projects that I have, I just need to know the next thing. Now, obviously, if you keep, you know, putting your feet one in front of the other, right, you're going to get somewhere. And as long as you've got your direction in mind, you will hopefully end up where you want it to go. Oh, that's pretty logical. But what we don't often talk about, which is really where I want to focus today, is the idea that if you look at more than the next step or too much more than the next step, all the time, it just seems like too big a mountain to climb. I know I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here, but you get the idea, right? The idea that if you look at that whole mountain in front of you, it's daunting. And the fact that you've gotten to, you know, the next stage up that mountain.

You may feel really proud of your accomplishment, and it may feel like you've done a lot, but all you have to do is look up and you see the mountain of work ahead of you. And it's not. It's a little frustrating, it's a little disappointing, right? It just doesn't bring you that feeling of success that's ready to push you forward, or at least not all the time. So when you keep your eye on that next step, just the one little bit of it that you're trying to get done, you can experience the success. You can experience the right feeling, and that's what empowers you and motivates you to keep moving.

So take a look at how this might help you. Or, you know, taking that long view might actually frustrate you. In your harp playing, for instance, you've. You have big goals. You want to, you know, do these pieces and work on this technique thing and work on this musicianship thing, and, you know, you've got a whole bunch of stuff that you want to do.

So you set out plans. But if you're not careful, you're trying to do all those things at once, and there just isn't enough practice time in the day or enough energy in the day to get all that stuff done. So you might have just too many projects on your plate at once, and you might not be able to have enough time to make meaningful progress on those, as long as they're all on your plate at the same time. And it leads you to have practice that's not organized or focused because it's, well, I want to learn this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece with the result that you're doing a little bit of playing on all of those things and not really making headway on any one of them.

Now I've been there, I've had that happen to me, and it's not fun. And so I have learned, of course, over the course of time to really watch the kind of projects that I set out for myself. You know, if I want to learn an entire new concert program, I don't learn the whole program at once. I start with a big chunk and a little chunk and I work on just those things. And I'm going to show you how I do that and talk about how you might be able to do that too. Because think of the difference between trying to work on a huge project like that, or maybe more than one huge project, or that sitting down at your harp every day and knowing exactly what to work on, how to work on it, exactly when you're going to work on it, when you might be done with it so that you could be done with it and get on to the next thing, that's the difference. And just choosing that next step is where you need to start. Now deciding on your next step isn't really difficult as long as you watch out for the one trap, which is choosing a next step that's too big. The basic criteria for choosing your next step is that it has to be something that you know that you can do for a specific period of time, and that it takes you in the right direction. Okay, well, so what's the right direction? Well, that direction is your goal. Are you trying to develop a one hour repertoire? Well, then the next step might be to learn two pieces, right? Maybe it's to learn one piece. Maybe that's all you have, time to practice. Or maybe you're, maybe you have a technical goal. Well, so what's the first step there? You need to be very specific as you're thinking about the direction that you want to go. Let's be specific about what that next step is going to be. For instance, if you don't need to get every piece that you have up to tempo right now, you're going to maybe take it in stages, right? Where you're not playing that, that piece at tempo, not working on it at tempo right now. But maybe your next step is just to get it to 3/4 tempo. That's a next step goal. It's not playing fast, it's not playing as, you know, as at the tempo that you want to go. But it's playing faster than you are now. It's setting that medium step.

And if your ultimate goal is to become a really good sight reader.

It can be very hard to measure sight reading. But if your next step is to build a daily sight reading habit, right, where you read through one new piece every day, or maybe you read through some new pieces every week, right? Building that habit of sight reading is going to help you become a better sight reader.

So you need to find that next step. And here's the key. It shouldn't be the hardest step. You want to go for what they call the low hanging fruit. Look for the easiest aspect of it that you can do, and do that. So why would you start with the easiest thing instead of the hardest thing? Because the easiest thing is going to get done and it's going to build its own momentum. So if you're looking to develop that repertoire, go for two of the easiest pieces, that repertoire, or maybe just one. Start with the easy ones and maybe a little bit of a harder one, depending on how much time you have to practice, right? But start building your repertoire with some of the easy stuff and one toe into the water of the harder stuff.

Start by developing your technique with the first page in the exercise book or the first exercise in the exercise book. You don't need to make big plans for going beyond that. Say, I'm going to do this exercise for a week and then I'm going to move on, okay? You've set your specific amount of time, you've set your action.

You don't need to evaluate your results all the time.

Because results are, you know, in music, are sort of elusive, aren't they? You can play something really well one day and not so well the next. Results happen over time and they happen in their own good time. So when you are setting goals, make your actions your goal, not the results that you're looking for, they'll show up. If you're doing the right things, those results will show up, but they will take their own own time for sure.

Realize that your next step is going to be building confidence, right? So choose something that you can do. If you choose too big a next step, if you take too big a bite of that elephant, it's going to take you too long to get it done. And that's when you start to lose energy for the task. So take bites that are small enough that you can check them off. I love to say, okay, make it a week or maybe two. That's your next step. Something that simple, that small, because Then you can move along, right? And you can get that next small step. So if you're building your repertoire, don't build your, you know, one hour of background music by starting with the very hardest piece. That's going to take you a while. Maybe you start with half a page of that hardest piece, but at the same time learn your easiest piece so that you can knock that one out in a week. So that while you're working on that hardest piece in small chunks, you're also adding to your repertoire with smaller, easy pieces that you can learn quickly and review often, which is how we build a repertoire.

I want you to be sure that when you are thinking about your next step, you're not dreaming the impossible dream, but you are absolutely living in the probable, in the what you know you're going to be able to do. That will probably give you the results you're looking for eventually. So here's your step, right? You're going to figure out, you know, what your goal is. I was going to say you figure out your goal, but you already know. I don't have to, you know, tell you to sit down and work that out. You've already done that. But whatever it is you want to accomplish, what's the easiest step that you could take, that you could achieve in a week that is going to move you in that right direction? That first little step you can take, that little box you can check. Remember, we're looking for low hanging fruit, something you can absolutely do. Okay, so now there is your next step. So what do you do to make that happen? To make your next step happen, you need to be sure that you will absolutely do it. Now, part of the success of this next step idea is that you've chosen something that's easy enough, that's doable enough, that seems possible enough, that you're not going to put off doing it, right. If a task is too hard, we tend to shove it aside. If a task seems like something we can accomplish, we can get in there and do it. So making sure that it's a small enough step is the first step to actually achieving it. Then I think there are two other components. I think one of them is that you have to know that you have enough time, enough practice time to do it. How much time is it going to take to do that step? Right? And then be sure that you plan for that time, that that is practice that you can do.

And then once you know you have the time, I want you to make sure that that part of your practice is truly focused Just on that. I mean, suppose you practice half an hour a day, right? Maybe you practice way more than that, that's fine. Maybe you don't practice that much, that's okay too. But if your goal is, let's say your goal is to learn three pieces, okay? So we're going to put that first piece in the rotation. Now we need to learn that piece. So what's your first step in learning that piece? It might be to learn each hand separately at tempo. If that's what you can do in a week, each hand separately, or maybe not even a tempo, you know, each hand separately this week. Great. That's pretty low hanging fruit, right? You can do that. You can do each hand alone in a week. If that's the way you like to approach a piece, that's a great first step and it's a great next step in your plan. And you say, well, okay, you know, I generally practice a half an hour a day and that's plenty of time for me to get this done.

But you might have other things that you want to practice in that half hour. So what I'd like you to do is think about this goal, this next step as part of your practice. So if you practice a half an hour a day, don't figure that half an hour is going to be spent on just that hand separately learning of that piece, right? Give yourself just part of your practice to do that so that the other part of your practice can still happen. Your warmup, your exercises, or your etudes, or those other pieces that you love to play. Maybe you're what, you know, maybe you're a beagle type of practicer, right? And if you don't know what that is, go back to episode one of the podcast where I talked about those learning styles. And you know, maybe you are the sort of practicer who likes to have a lot of different things that a lot of different music on the stand and play through a lot of different things. Well, that's great, go ahead, indulge that. But maybe 10 or 15 minutes of your half an hour, that's focus time just on your next step.

So if that's your kind of practice time frame, half an hour, and you're the sort, you know, you don't want to spend the entire half an hour on, on just this one next step because you have other things you want to practice, then how much of your practice time do you want to spend on it? And if Your idea is 10 minutes, then work that from both ends. Be sure that you choose a next step. That will work in 10 minutes a day. And then make that 10 minutes of a day absolutely dedicated to that. You can make it, you know, that single 10 minute time slot, you can move it around during the day if that's what you want. You can do it at the beginning of your practice, in the middle of your practice, at the end of your practice, that doesn't matter. But choose that single time slot to focus on your next step. Figure out how long you want it to be, focus on it, and just work on that next step. Nothing else happens during that particular segment of your practice. The rest of your practice can be whatever you want it to be.

But that section of your practice, that's your next step. Practice, that's all you need to do. And if you keep your next step small enough, it'll fit. I urge you to fit your next step into your time slot rather than expand your time slot for your next step.

Either way can work, of course, but if you start expanding your time slot, that may.

It may not feel right to you, right? You might have more stuff that you want to play. It may feel restrictive. I mean, maybe you're the sort who really likes to get in there and just work on that one thing, that's great. But if you have other things you want to do, be sure you get those done too. So don't over structure your practice. Just leave yourself that focused time slot for your next step.

So what's the benefit? What are the benefits? Because there's more than one of working this way. Well, let's talk about those right now. Of course, we already mentioned that. The first and most obvious benefit, right, you're going to be taking steps toward your goal. You're going to be following a path and taking small enough steps that you can actually get there. All right, that's the big obvious benefit. But let's look at some other things that this particular next step habit can do for you. First of all is this. And it's part of what we just talked about, but it's a little bit different and it's its own benefit. By taking small enough steps that you can achieve them in that short time frame that we're talking about. That develops a lot of confidence in your ability to continue to achieve it. Develops, gives you the confidence to take the next step, knowing that since you accomplished this first one, you are going to accomplish the next one too. And building that cushion of confidence as you go forward is incredibly powerful. It's so supporting as the path gets a little bit steeper, as those next Steps may get a little bit more challenging if you're choosing them correctly. They'll never be too big for you. And just knowing that you've achieved those earlier steps will help you tackle whatever steps are still to come. The confidence is huge.

This also, as you work with that time slot in your practice, the way we just spoke about this, is helping you develop what I like to call your focus muscle. It's giving you the ability to say, this is what I'm going to do in this time frame. I can do whatever else I want anywhere else. But for these 10 minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour, whatever it happens to be, for this time, I'm focusing just on this.

That focus muscle is something we don't often consciously develop. And if this is something that you would really like to work on, this is a great way to work on it. To be able to put everything else aside and just work on that one thing. Now, perhaps focus isn't your problem. Perhaps you're the sort of person that once you get focused on something like that, you just dig in and you never get to anything else because it's so interesting. Doing that work is so absorbing. I know I have found that to be the case for me. Well, putting a time limit on that focus slot will help you as well. Learning to not just focus, but to contain your focus and to be able to shift focus when you need also an important skill. And working on it in your practice is a great way to help you build this kind of ability for yourself, to focus when you need to and to refocus when you need to. So building that focus muscle is pretty, pretty important.

But I think the most important part of this next step strategy is this. It develops that habit of achievement.

Not the habit of frustration or overwhelm or disappointment. I have found that that is such a damaging mindset and it's so easy to have that become your habit. I've talked to so many harpists in different situations who say, I don't have anything to play. I never seem to finish a piece. I can't develop a repertoire, whatever it is. And that's the habit that they've become accustomed to. If you can set those next steps properly, that will no longer be your habit. Because although there may still be things for you to learn about finishing a piece or developing a repertoire, and it doesn't mean that every piece is going to be easy or will finish quickly. What it is going to mean is that you've created steps, you've created a path that allows you to accomplish, to finish, at least to finish that step, right? But to accomplish, to get something done so that you're not feeling like stuff never happens, like you're just as far as ever from being able to play the music that you want to play. We're going to create that habit that moves you forward, that builds that confidence that you can finish, and that allows you that slow, step by step way to get there. You choose the steps, you choose the time frame, and you get to play the music that you want.

So let's take a minute to just recap. I think the simplest way to type all these ideas is this. Goals are great. We need them because we need a direction, we need something to aspire to. We need a project. That's where our motivation starts. So goals are great. And then a practice plan is important, right? If you're going to have a goal, you have to figure out how to get there. And so all those practice plans that you're making, that's important.

But that next step, that easy, achievable next step, is the engine that's going to drive those results. That simple next step that you know you can do in a short time frame.

Is what's going to allow you to keep practicing and not lose energy for it. And it's going to allow you to sustain it all the way to that goal that you want to achieve. That next step is where the power is. And if you can keep devising and taking those simple next steps, that's how you're going to get where you want to go.

I know it sounds perhaps like oversimplification, but it is, isn't. It's the way we do these things. It's the way I help my students plan their practice. It's the way our coaching program works. It's all about that next step.

So don't cast your sights out to the horizon. Right now.

We know where you want to go, but figure out where you're going to put your effort today and tomorrow and next week, and then we can think about the week after that and the week after that. But take that first step, that next step now. It's not hard, right? I know you've thought of a million next steps already and so have I. Just, you know, I love thinking about that next thing that I want to do and, oh, okay, well, I can start that whole journey right here. So I'm not going to hold you up any longer because I know you want to get to the harp and start practicing. So let me just tell you what we have Coming up on the podcast next week following up on our discussion this week about next steps, we're going to be talking about how to level up your technique. Technique is a big thing. It's a never ending.

You know, practice regimen. It's stuff we just continually improve and develop and strengthen and speed up and all the rest of that. But you know, before your technique can go from stage one to stage 10, before it can go from I'm just starting the harp two I've been playing all my life kind of status, there are a lot of steps along the way. So we're going to be talking about where that next technique level is for you, how to get there, how to keep your technique moving forward and and just where, you know, what is it you're looking for. The the three factors that go into developing your technique. Not just making your fingers work better, but but why and how. So we'll be talking about all of that next week. In the meantime, I hope you are choosing your next step. Do consider coming to our getaway retreat at the end of March. You'll find the link in the show notes. Oh, also in the show notes you will find a link to a blog post about developing the perfect practice plan. So if that's something that interests you, you can read a little bit more about that in the blog post from our archives. In the meantime, I hope you work at choosing that next step and putting that into your practice this week. I'd love to hear what kind of next steps you're taking, so please go ahead and leave us a comment or email us@podcastarpmastery.com you can always reach us at the podcast that way. I look forward to talking with you again next week right here. And in the meantime, be sure to spread the harp happiness this week. Share your music with someone. Enjoy playing for yourself whatever you do. But remember, we're all about practicing harp happiness here. Okay, I look forward to talking with you next week. Bye. 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.