Creating True Confidence; Why the Little Engine that Could Got It Wrong - PHH 138

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. The Little Engine that Could Was Just Plain Lucky. Now if you remember that children's book, the Little Engine that Could, when the little engine had to take over for the bigger engines to pull the train loaded with toys over the mountain, that little engine kept telling himself, I think I can, I think I can, even though it seemed clear he was much too small to succeed. While the I think I can strategy worked for that little engine, in the real world, that mindset is responsible for more failure, frustration, and disappointment than you might think. Thinking positively is not what is necessary for a positive result. It's not a bad thing, but it's not the only thing. And if it's not grounded in reality, it can actually be damaging. You don't achieve confidence by trying to build confidence itself. True confidence is a natural result of properly directed actions along with a positive mindset. Without the actions and the experience that comes with following through on those actions, a confident attitude will let you down nearly every time you need the proper ingredients to build confidence. Confidence is like the cake that comes out of the oven. That cake isn't what goes into the oven, right? What goes into the oven doesn't look like a cake at all. But if you followed the recipe, that batter miraculously becomes a cake. That's the kind of confidence that you can count on, and it's much more powerful than just a can do attitude.

Think back to the last time you started a new piece feeling confident that you could meet the challenges it would present. Of course, you knew there would be difficulties in the piece that you'd need to work on and conquer. But you were secure in your belief that you would be able to finish the piece and play it and with assurance. That's the kind of confidence that comes from positive past experiences. The habit of success Now a habit of success allows you to meet challenges and obstacles with the inner certainty that you already have the skills and strategies you need in order to overcome them. Your certainty is built on your track record of growth and achievement. You know you will be able to succeed because you have proof.

Obviously, the trick is creating those positive experiences that create that inner feeling of confidence. That's part of what we'll talk about today. We'll also talk about what sabotages our confidence and how to break a cycle of disappointment. If you ever find yourself losing your confidence plus I'll share the most important habits. I believe you need to make sure that your confidence is based on baked into all your playing. By the way, confidence isn't just for performing. We play with more flow, more musicality, and fewer mistakes when we play with conviction and confidence. So whether you want to perform for others or just enjoy your playing at home, of course, my hope is that you'll do both. You'll find today's ideas invaluable, just like the Little Engine that could. You'll soon be saying, I knew I could.

Before we dive into the topic today, I would like to offer you an opportunity to join our 2024 harp happiness challenge. It's in the Harp Mastery Hub and it's starting its second week. But it's not too late to join. And if you're looking for an easy way to build your harp happiness and to build your confidence in these next few weeks, it's a great way to do that. It's very simple. All you do is during the week you keep a list of some of the things that you that week to grow your harp happiness. They could be playing for yourself or for others. It could be just practicing. Could be some, you know, sort of serendipitous harp moments. Could be a concert you attended or a workshop you heard or all different kinds of things, things that increase your harp happiness. So we talked about that last week on the podcast and I invite you to join the challenge. All you have to do is be a member of the Hub and of course that's free. It's easy to join. You can the link in our show notes to join the challenge and if you're not already a member of the Hub, it'll prompt you to do that. So it's free. Plus for People who complete all four weeks of the challenge, they will be entered in a random drawing for a $25 gift certificate to the Harp Mastery Shop. So just a little added incentive to get that challenge moving. I'm doing the challenge myself, so it's just kind of fun to think about. Oh, I increased my harp happiness today. I did something fun that was on the harp. And I'll tell you some. It's been, you know, just practicing and playing and just having a good time. So that's a wonderful thing to do. Very, very simple. Will take you no extra time because you're already doing these things, I guarantee. So I offer you that invitation again to join us for the challenge, and we'll build your harp happiness and your confidence that way. Confidence is a funny thing. And I think, as I talked a little bit about in the introduction, I think that many of us have this idea that if only we were confident we would be able to play better, but that's essentially backwards. Our confidence comes from that track record of wins, that track record of playing well enough, doing well enough, that we can feel good about what we've done. So that's where confidence comes from. And I think if you try to layer it on the top, it's always going to be pretty shaky because you might tell yourself that, you know, okay, I'm prepared and I'm going to do a good job. But if you don't really know it, it's not going to be that kind of confident feeling, no matter how much you tell yourself it is. So that's what I really want to talk about today. The difference between just trying to feel confident or building the foundation that you need to actually be confident. So let's start by talking about those things which can sabotage our confidence. I've identified four of them, and you can think of them as the four Fs. So we'll go through each one of those and. And I don't want to spend a whole lot of time talking about what sabotages our confidence, because I want to get on to building it. But I do think we have to start here. So the first thing that can sabotage our confidence is just our feelings. Feelings that we aren't good enough, feelings that nobody really interested in what we're doing. All kinds of perceptions that we have that often come from other parts of our life, too. So without getting into any sort of psychological kind of depth here, just the fact that we don't feel confident is going to sabotage our attempts to build confidence. So I do think that if you Know that this is something you struggle with, that you think you're. You're just not good enough, or that nobody's going to care about what you have to do. I think you might have, you know, some realigning to do there, so something to take a look at. But even more than just our feelings might be our fears. Certainly there are things to be afraid of, right? I mean, what if something terrible happened? What if we totally forgot everything we had to do and we had to just stop? You know, what if those kinds of fears are real? Not that the consequences that we identify with them are necessarily real, but the fears are there themselves. I was listening to somebody describe their first trip skydiving the other day, and it was kind of funny because he said, well, you know those wonderful commercials that you see for, you know, oh, come and do skydiving with us. And, you know, it's this pretty sky, and you see everybody jumping and happy and the happy smiles, and, you know, that looks really wonderful. But then you get up there and you think, I could die. And it's just really, really scary. And all these things happen. You jump and you're falling fast, and it's very scary.

But you do get to the bottom. And once you get there, it's kind of like, oh, all right, I did it. I did it. So the lesson I want you to take from this is just because something is scary doesn't mean it isn't fun. It doesn't mean it isn't worth doing or worth pursuing. And frankly, the fears that we have around something like that may not be realistic fears. What's the worst thing that could happen? And for everybody, that's a little bit different. But if the worst thing that you could. That could happen to you in a performance is that you just have to stop and start over or stop and walk off the stage, what would happen if you actually did that? I mean, the world wouldn't stop turning, you wouldn't stop breathing. Lightning won't strike you. There are a lot of bad things that won't happen. What if you break a string? Will you stop and you fix it? What if? Right? There are a lot of what ifs, but if we let the what ifs stop us, we will never build confidence. And that's why I've put fears on the list as one of those things that sabotages our confidence. If we let our fears stop us, we will never feel confident. The third F that I have identified here is our false ideas. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I know that's not news to you, but we have these ideas about performance that are definitely wrong. Ideas like, well, it has to be perfect. If I'm playing this for somebody, it has to be perfect or it's gone perfectly at home. So I expect it to go perfectly in performance. That's a false idea. It almost never happens.

But the pieces that I have have to be hard. They have to be difficult. They have to show everything I can do. No, they don't. They don't have to be the hardest piece you've ever played. They just don't have to be. That's a wrong idea. Or here's a false idea, one that is, I think, very sabotaging. Oh, I don't have to do that performance this time. I'll wait and I'll do it next time. I could do it another time. Well, how many times do we put something like that off because we don't want to do it in the moment, and then that next time never shows up either, because the next time that does come along, we have a different excuse for it or a different reason for not doing it. So I think that this is something that is worth all of us examining and seeing. You know, what are we thinking? That is perhaps not really a fact that's getting in our way. And the fourth F is the big one. And those are our failures. Yeah. Every time we screw up, sure, that's going to have a cost, and it's going to cost us some confidence. Well, I'll tell you a little bit how to avoid that later. But you start feeling, well, I screwed it up the last time, so why should this next time be any different? Every failure that we have, we can see as another reason to fear the next performance.

It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, we can change our feelings, we can dispel our fears, we can contradict our false ideas, and we can survive our failures and even thrive because of them.

If we know what to do. I think these are true enemies of confidence, and I think that they all present their own variety of slippery slope to slide down. But we don't have to go there. So if that's where we are now, let's talk about how to get out of there. Let's talk about how to break a cycle of disappointment. If you've had some performances that haven't worked for you, let's talk about how to change that and how to create those positive experiences that create that inner feeling of confidence. The first thing we have to do to create a positive experience is we actually have to create a positive experience. We have to find a win. Because when you have a win, you have something that you can build on.

And when I say start with a win, I'm talking about setting a bar very low for yourself. So if you feel that a win is going to be just getting through a piece of music that you're playing for somebody else and feeling like you're in control of it from the beginning to the end, then let's figure out how to get that done. So you're going to find a piece that's probably very short one that's really easy for you, and you're going to start there.

So many times we think that we're going to create a win in the moment that we are right now where we are. I can play this terrific piece, and I'm going to really prepare it, and I'm going to play it for these people, and that's going to be a really great thing, and it's going to make me feel really good. And it may. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, but it's certainly the hard way to start. It's jumping into the deep end. We want to stick our toes into the water one toe at a time. Because in this particular kind of a circumstance, every wind that we get, every next toe we get into the water is helping us feel better about the next one. That makes sense, right? You don't need to have the hardest experience. Be the one that you want to be. Stake all your confidence on. Just start with something small.

Play in the lowest pressure situation you can find, Play the easiest piece you can play.

You know, get yourself comfortable, make it easy for yourself, and even if it doesn't go exactly the way you've liked, you're going to do it again.

But the thing is, if you set the bar low enough, it's probably going to be okay. And then resist the temptation to take a really big step up.

Think about going into that cold water. I'm really going to use this if, you know, if you're in a place where you have cold ocean to go into, and it's like, oh, oh, my toes are cold. And then you try to get up to your ankles, and your ankles are cold, and you try to get up to your knees and your knees are cold, you know how that works. And granted, when it comes to cold water, the best advice is probably to dive right in and get all wet. But that's not the easy approach. Most of us don't even like that and when we need to build these experiences from the bottom up, that's not what we want to do. We want to take teeny weeny little steps. So if you've taken that first small step and you've gotten your win because you set the bar low enough, then I want you to repeat that same win as often as you can. So you're going to take that same piece and you're going to play it in a different place, and you're going to play it in another place and you're going to record it and you're going to post it online and you're going to send it to these people and you're going to do that same thing. I don't know, half a dozen times more, if you like, because every time you do it, you're going to get better at it.

Now, having said that, I'm going to just backtrack a little bit from that statement because it's not a true linear progression in that I've done really well. On Performance A, Performance B is going to be the same or better. Performance C is going to be the same or better. Performance D is going to be the same or better. That's not the way it necessarily works. Performance A might be great. Performance B might be almost as good, but maybe not quite. Performance C might be really terrific. Performance D might be a really bad day for you, and it just doesn't go well. But then E, F and G all go okay. So you can't expect that continual linear building because we're people. We have bad days, we have good days. We're, you know, feeling stressed one day, we've got a headache, whatever it is, you know, we're different every day. So don't expect that every next one is going to be good. And that's why you don't just take that first small win and do it once. You do it a bunch of times, and then you will have, over those bunch of times, experienced a number of different scenarios and a number of different results. That's a good foundation for confidence because it's going to be okay. All right, so it didn't go exactly the way I wanted, but it didn't go badly either. That's confidence you can rely on. And then after you've done that, you've done that same small win, you've taken that same piece out any number of times. You can take a step up, but be sure to make it a small step. We're not going from your ankles to your waist. We're going from your ankles to your knees, to use my cold water analogy. So that's what we need. We need to take those small steps, and that's going to build what I call a cushion of confidence. It's that track record that I've been talking about, and that's how you get those positive experiences. So just to recap, again, you're going to start with a very easy win. Set that bar low. And if you think you've set it really low, set it one notch lower. It's like, okay, well, this is a piece I've played a lot, and I think it's going to be good. Good. Find one that you've played even more, that's even easier and do that. Don't be afraid to stack the deck in your favor. That's what we want. We need that here. Especially if you've had some performances that have made you a little bit concert shy, this is what you need to get back on track, to get your mind back in the right place and to start building the experiences the way you.

So that's the first step toward building that cushion of confidence. Right. But there's another one. A moment ago, I used the phrase concert shy. You know, you had a bad experience, and so you're not in a hurry to do another one and recreate that bad experience. So you put off playing again. It's natural. We know that we do that. We also kind of know we shouldn't. You know, there's that get back on the horse thing. Right. Get back behind the harp. But it's hard to do. That's really hard to do. The problem is that there's, you know, the curse of inertia. You know about inertia, right? A body at rest will stay at rest. Well, a harpist who's not performing is going to continue not performing or not playing, if that's what it comes down to. So not doing that performance or whatever it was again is going to continue to make it harder. You really do need to get back on that bench and do it again. And a nice way to think of this, I think, is to think about it as failing forward. We failed. And maybe it wasn't a big fail, maybe it was just a little fail, but we failed. We're going to make that propel us forward. So in simpler terms, when it doesn't go the way you want, do it again until it does. Right. Thomas Edison had thousands of failed attempts before he finally got to the light bulb that worked. And you just have to keep doing it again until you find out what does work. One way to think about this is that every disappointing experience, everything that doesn't go the way you want, is one step closer to a performance that does go the way you want.

And while that might sound like it's just sort of feel good talk, it's exactly why all experienced performers, and I'm talking at the very highest level, do preview performances. They don't want their first performance of a new piece or to be the to be the high stakes one they don't want their career to be riding on. Gosh, this is the first time I've ever played this piece for a person, and now I'm playing it for thousands of people and kind Carnegie Hall. They don't want that. They know that that's putting too much pressure on the situation. They do preview performances, little practice ones where they'll play it for a small group of friends, or they'll play it here, or they'll play it in a small venue and they work up to the big venue. These aren't student performers. These are virtuoso performers. This is what you do.

And if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for the rest of us. So in order to prevent the failures in the time that it really counts, you need to create the failures in places where it doesn't really count. Would you rather have that special piece go badly for some family and friends at home or go badly for the audience that's paying $20 a ticket? Now, maybe those aren't the circumstances in which you usually play, but I think you understand the analogy right? So you need to think of something that doesn't go well. An experience. The concert, a performance, whatever it is that doesn't go well. As one step on the way to the performances that will go well. You will learn from those. You can't let those stop you.

So when you combine that fail forward strategy with a strategy of creating the positive experiences with those small, tiny little wins and building on those, you have a pattern that is going to allow you to build your confidence and to build it the right way from the ground up, so that it's really something you can rely on and not just that positive feeling that you try to paste on top of your nerves. So let's quickly recap what we've talked about so far. We Talked about those four Fs which can sabotage and undermine our confidence, our feelings, our fears, our false ideas, and our failures. And then we talked about how to turn those failures into positive experiences by failing forward and combining that with a strategy of small wins with that bar set very low so that we know we can win and we do those over and over, over again so that we can start feeling more confident and more comfortable in our playing circumstances. So that's a beginning of an action plan for creating confidence. But I wanted to share with you some habits that I think you can start to put in place right away that will help support that and help you find the courage and the fortitude, all that good stuff, to move forward with this and start building confidence. There are lots of habits that you might want to put in place. But we're going to talk about five today. And the first one, which I think is maybe the most important of all the five, although I like all of them, is to learn to embrace imperfections. Okay? I'm not talking about erasing imperfections. We're not talking about getting rid of mistakes. We're talking about embracing them when they happen. And this is whether it's in your practice or whether it's in your playing. You need to remember that mistakes are not only a natural part of the learning process, they are a necessary part of the learning process. They show us where we can still do better. They show us where slip ups might happen another time. So we need those mistakes to happen. So don't be afraid of them when they happen. As you're practicing, you know, give yourself a little pat on the back. Oh, screwed that up great. Now I know what I can fix. And you go in there and you work on it. And remember that you will likely never be mistake free in a particular piece. You're going to reduce the number of mistakes that you're likely to make. And over time that number will get smaller and smaller and smaller over the months and the years that you play a piece. But they're still going to happen. There's going to be that moment of mental slip or when your finger just doesn't cooperate. Things happen, mistakes happen. And so don't worry about them, don't dwell on them, expect them.

Just celebrate them as part of the learning process. This is an opportunity for growth. So it's not about mistakes. It's not about getting rid of mistakes. It's about letting them happen and learning from them. Completely different mindset, but one that will stop you from berating yourself for having made a mistake.

And that's important. Okay? So I want you to consider that one, please. Because I think it's a place where a lot of us get stuck and we don't have to, we just don't have to. Okay, habit number two, Record yourself weekly. And I don't mean like W E a K, I mean every week. Record yourself every week. This is performance practice at its best. Remember I talked about those virtuoso performers doing previews? Well, this can work that way for you. Just put your phone on and record yourself. You don't even have to listen to it. It's going to give you the sense of performing and it's a very low stakes testing ground for your current level of preparation on any piece. So just, you know, turn that recording device on, whatever you're going to use. It could be your tablet, it could be your phone, it could be a computer, anything that you like. But turn it on, record yourself playing that piece that you're working on. It will be even better if you sort of set a single intention for that recording. Like this time I'm going to test out my dynamics. I'm going to see how, how much I can really add in the way of dynamic interest to this piece. Or this time I'm just going to try to get to the end without stopping. I'm going to listen for my flow. Might be another one. I'm going to see if the piece flows. I'm going to do this as a tempo check and see if what I think of the tempo that I'm using for this piece, Is it too fast, too slow, or is it just about right? Are there breaks in the tempo? Choose one of those. Just one set, a single intention. So that if you, if you plan to listen to it and you listen to your recording, then you have something to listen for. Right? Okay. How well did I do keeping the tempo steady or how well did I do with my dynamics and where might I want to improve embracing those imperfections. Again, if you don't want to listen to it, that's okay. You'll have an idea of what you did just because you were the one playing it at the time. So you'll have that experience. It is a pretty subjective experience. It's very difficult to get an accurate idea of what you're playing when you're busy playing it. So that's where a recording can really help. But you don't have to listen to it. Just recording it is going to help you get a little bit less fearful of the idea of playing through something for somebody. The third habit, and it's sort of a step up habit from the second one, is to play for others regularly. Yes. Like playing for other real people. You could do that in a playing Class where you get together with other people and just play for each other. The sounding boards that we have for our my Harp Mastery members are very much like that, where it's just a small group of harpists who just get together every month and play for each other. Right.

Be sure that you're saying yes to opportunities to play. Even if you're scared, even if you're worried, even if you think you're not ready. Playing for other people regularly is part of that experiential process that develops confidence. It becomes less scary the more you do it because you will have done it before, right? So the more you do it, the less scary each particular time will become because it won't be such a big deal. You will have done it before and you're going to know you're doing it again. There won't be quite so much emotional weight placed on a single performance that you do want to do. So be sure that when you can, you are playing for other people. The more you do it, the better you'll get. Simple fourth habit.

Keep an I did it list. It's an I did it list is a Yes, I did it. And it's just simple, simple wins. It could be something that you did in your practice that day. I got all the way through the piece for the first time. Beginning to end. Yes, I did.

Might be something that you did in a lesson. Woo hoo. I did a really beautiful harmonic. Okay. I learned something new about a scale. I did it. Write a good I did it. Every time you record or every time you play for other people, find that win and write it down. Remember the I did it are all wins. We're not I did it. I really screwed up. We're not putting those wins down on paper. Believe me, you'll remember those without any prompting. But the problem is we so often forget what we actually do that is valuable. That was a win. That was good. So finish your practice every day with a quick win. A quick I did it. Just make it a simple list. Don't make a big deal out of it. Maybe you just record it in your practice journal. I did it. Yes. This was my win for the day. I got it up to tempo once and then it fell apart. That's okay. You got it up to tempo once. That's an I did it. When you have a list like that, you are recognizing what is going well, which, guess what builds confidence. And also when the going gets rough, when you're finding yourself losing some confidence, you can go back to that list because it Will remind you of your wins. It's a powerful tool and so, so simple. It feels funny to some people. I think they don't want to keep track of of wins. They don't want to, you know, pat themselves on the back for something. But you know what? Nobody else is there practicing with you. So if you don't pat yourself on the back for something that goes well in your practice, nobody's able to do it for you. So you have to do that.

And it's going to serve you and it's going to serve your music. So try that I did it list. It's actually kind of fun when you get it going. So I'd be interested to find out if you decide to try that. I'd love to know what you think of it and if it works for you. And the last habit I'd like to suggest to you today, it's a little bit trickier.

Try replacing the perfectionist mindset with the musical mindset.

It's easiest in our music making to keep score, to say, oh, okay, there were mistakes there. I saw the mistakes. The mistakes didn't happen. I have to go back and fix them. And even if we're not by nature perfectionist, this can lead us toward that kind of a feeling. If you're naturally a perfectionist, then you already know what I'm talking about. I don't have to tell you how it goes. But the idea of keeping track of your mistakes, of trying to erase every little bump, every little missed fingering or something, it's not a useful mindset. It tracks the negative. It does not track the positive. And you don't even have to think about it for a minute. Tracking the negative is not a good way to build confidence. We're not going to ignore those things. We're not going to become sloppy players or practicers just because we're going to ignore the mistakes. But that's not where we want to put our biggest attention. That's not how we want to value our playing. We're all about playing music and creating music. And music doesn't have to be right in order to communicate to someone, in order to reach them, in order to touch them, in order to mean something to them. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be the very best, the very hardest thing. It doesn't have to be a star performance. It just has to be communicated from you to them. And if this weren't true, you know, no one would listen to any musician except for the very best, right? It doesn't have to be the very best to be meaningful to a listener, because if it did, nobody would listen to any cellist other than Yo Yo Ma or nobody would listen to any violinist other than Itzhak Perlman or what, you know, think of your favorite performer. But we have a lot of performers of all different levels who enchant and delight audiences, who touch the hearts of people in hospitals and nursing homes, who touch the hearts and inspire the minds of children, who reach out to those who are ill and dying and serve them. It's not about being perfect. It's about playing music. And that's where your confidence can come from. Nobody can do that but you. You are the only one who can play your music. No one is counting your mistakes except for you. So stop. Remind yourself instead that the music is more powerful than you are. The music's going to survive our playing of it. It's not a fragile thing that we're going to damage. In fact, we, we the performers, are absolutely necessary to bring it to life. Otherwise, it just lies mute on the page.

We are the music. We are part of it. And it doesn't have to be perfect to be meaningful.

If that doesn't build your confidence, I don't know what will. I hope our discussion today about confidence has been helpful, has been encouraging, and has inspired you to take some more steps toward sharing your music with other people, but particularly to just feel more confident about what you're playing and to learn how to build that confidence and to build it in a way that's going to support you and not let you down when you need it. If you found this podcast episode helpful, I would love to know. And you can email the show@podcastarpmastery.com and just let me know what you thought. I just. I'd love to hear from you, so don't be shy. Podcastarpmastery.com don't forget we have the Hub Harp Happiness Challenge happening. It's an easy one, and you can use that to build your confidence as well. You might find that those harp happiness things are things that are on your I did it list. Nice blending of topics there. Next week here on the podcast, we're going to be talking about time management. Time management in your practice and in your learning process. We'll talk about how to keep from getting stuck in your same old practice routine and how to actually schedule your piece so it finishes more or less anyway, on time. So we'll talk about time management here on the podcast next week. Remember, in the meantime, 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.