Enjoy a Guilt-Free, Harp-Free Vacation with the Perfect Re-Entry Plan - PHH 060

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. Well, summer is definitely here, at least where I live. The sun is shining, the grass is tall. The roadside vegetable stands are back in business. The bees buzz busily in the daytime, and the fireflies make each night sparkle. It's time for picnics, trips to the seashore. It's also time to prepare for the end of summer, at least where your harp playing is concerned. Okay. I could almost hear your mental breaks squealing. Summer's barely started, and we want to bask in every moment of it. Why should we think about the end of summer now? Well, because a little bit of planning now will save you a couple of weeks later. Don't believe me? Well, maybe this scenario will sound familiar. Okay, let's pretend it's late August, early September. Your vacation is over. It was terrific fun. But you're glad to be back home. Well, of course. There's a mountain of laundry to be done, stack of bills to be paid. The dog is acting weird since he came back from doggy camp, also known as the kennel, and you think he needs to see the veterinarian. You look into your harpoon with a mixture of longing and dread, wondering how many strings will have broken or will break as soon as you start to tune. Well, that doesn't matter yet. You don't have time for that right now. You have to get to the grocery store. Now, eventually, you find the courage to tackle the harp. You tune it, change strings, tune it again. It still sounds terrible, but you decide to play anyway. Your fingers feel like sausages. No control or agility or strength. After 15 minutes, you discover they don't have any calluses left either. Ouch. Better stop practicing and do some more laundry. Now, I imagine that many of you listening have had this end of vacation experience. I certainly have. In fact, almost every vacation ends something like this for me, except for one part, the harp part. As a professional harpist, particularly when I was doing a lot of freelance playing, taking a vacation with was a luxury. It was hard to find time in between performances to get away. And naturally it was often not possible to have a harp with me. So I needed to learn how to be able to jump back quickly into playing after an extended absence. How to get my harp, my fingers and my music back in shape in just a few days. And I learned that the key is planning ahead. And today I'll share all the tricks I have used for years to bounce back after vacation. But particularly the three things you need to do before your vacation in order to be sure that you'll be a happy harpist and not a harried harpist when you return. That's how you have a guilt free harp free vacation. Now, I did want to tell you about another new thing happening at Heart Mastery. Well, you know, we've been, we spent all last month, the month of June, celebrating our 10th anniversary and we've released a lot of new merchandise and sheet music and things into our online shop. But I wanted to tell you that we have just released the new version of our very popular Spark Practice Journal. Now this isn't just any practice journal. Those of you who have used it, you know how powerful it is. It's an entire system. Now you don't have to use the entire system. You can use just pieces of it. But that's great because every time you use the Spark Journal you're going to find more that you can do with it. It helps you plan in that famous 9037 one system that we use, how to plan a goal and how to break it down. It teaches you how to do this and it helps you keep yourself accountable, helps you keep moving forward to things that you want to achieve. Not just logging what you did every day, but planning what you're going to do every day. Now see how that fits in with our topic for today. We're talking about planning. And our Spark Journal is a great way to do that. We have a new supplier as well as a new design for our Spark Journal. The contents are pretty much the same, but we have two nice new sizes. We have the standard sort of journal size and then we have a larger size. And these are big, both spiral bound. They're beautiful books and they're printed just for you and shipped directly to you. So you will find the link to the Spark journal in the show notes today. And we hope that you give that Spark journal a try. And I know you'll find that it's a big help as you plan your practice, whether you're talking about pre vacation or after vacation kind of practice. So let's start talking about planning. If that post vacation scenario I talked about earlier was familiar to you, you might have another scenario that's familiar to you as well, and that is that having experienced post vacation harp stress, you might be dreading your vacation because you know how hard it's going to be to come back. And that keeps you from totally enjoying your vacation. Oh yeah, you're going to have a great time. But there's going to be that little thing that every once in a while pops up in the back of your mind. Oh yeah, but my fingers are going to feel terrible. Oh yeah, but my harp is going to be breaking strings. I read about the weather at home and it's going to be horrible. And you know, there are all kinds of things that can just nag at you and think, oh, I wish that, you know, summer, that coming back after vacation wasn't going to be so hard. Now, maybe it doesn't bother you as much as it bothered me when it was, you know, when I was doing a lot of freelancing and the professional concern level was very high, it was a constant worry. But I know that most of my students, most of the my Heart mastery members are committed to their heart playing and they don't want to lose all the ground that they've, you know, that they've gained over the past year. I mean, what a terrible thing to think. Will you spend nine, 10 months really getting somewhere on this heart playing? And then you go away for a few weeks and you come back and it feels like you're back at square one. Okay, you're not. But it's frustrating nonetheless. So what I learned was that planning ahead can not only bring you back into the, the harp world a lot faster, whatever your harp world looks like, but it can save you that little nagging doubt while you're on vacation. Right? Because you know, you've planned ahead after you've done this once you realize that you're going to be able to relax and you know exactly what you're going to be facing when you come back. Now, I used to a version of this same kind of system. I tweaked it considerably, but the same sort of thing when I was working with college students who weren't music majors for quite a while. I taught non harp majors at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. It's a wonderful liberal arts college, but they don't have music performance majors there. What they do have are some incredibly gifted and extremely intelligent students. And the harpists that I worked with there were brilliant students and committed to their harp playing, but they were more committed to some other aspect of their studies. They just wanted to keep up with their harp playing while they were at Swarthmore, and so they studied with me. But what I knew and wanted to tell them at that same time was that, okay, college is great, and we're keeping you in touch with your harp playing, but once your undergraduate studies are over, you're going to spend the next portion of your life working on whatever your life's work is going to be. And you're going to be away from the harp for a while, and you're going to have to find a way to come back to it. And so we would always set up a plan for this is the music. You know, these are the exercises that you need. This is how you're going to come back to your heart playing when you're ready. And so we're going to scale that way back, because we're just talking about a vacation here. We're not talking about a life change. But some of the principles remain the same. And the biggest one is that you just have to prepare to come back, prepare for a sort of a rehab and understand that you're gonna have to just gear back into it and that that's okay. Nothing wrong with that. It's just part of the process. A vacation from your heart. Playing is a good thing. We need a vacation. We need that break. It refreshes us, renews us, brings us new energy, but only if we know that we're gonna be able to come back from it and feel confident about our ability to return and not frustrated by the obs that we find along the way. So let's start with our first step, which is to decide on your rehab routine now and put it in your calendar now. All right? I'm saying put it in your calendar. You can put dates there. You know, it's like, okay, I get back from vacation on this day, and this is the day I'm going to do, start my rehab routine, which we will talk about in a second.

If the calendar thing isn't your thing, that's great. You can put a little schedule on your music stand in your room. You can put a sticky note on the refrigerator doesn't matter to me what your system is for knowing and, you know, sticking to your rehab plan. But you have to have that rehab routine, and it's best to get it in place now. You don't want to be trying to create that plan when you're in the middle of the laundry and the groceries and everything else. It will take just a few minutes to create your little rehab routine now, but it'll save you so much time and worry later. So here's what you need to do. The first step in your rehab routine is going to be to set aside 30 minutes sometime after your vacation is over just to dust and tune your harp. So we're setting aside 30 minutes. You're not going to practice. You're going to do some basic maintenance and getting your harp ready for you. It takes 30 minutes, might take 15 minutes, might take you even less. But set yourself.

Set that time aside now. Plan it. Maybe it's the time you usually have a cup of coffee in the morning, and you can have your coffee while you do this, but set it aside. Say, all right, that first day when I get home, that's always a nightmare. But the next day, that's when I'm going to start this. And that's where the calendar aspect comes in. Plan it now. If you don't plan it now, it's going to get delayed and delayed and delayed. So go ahead and calendar it, as they say. Get it on there. So in that 30 minutes or less stretch of time, you're going to dust your harp, you're going to tune it, you're going to change any strings you need to. And don't worry if you can't get it perfectly in tune today. Don't you know, don't worry that it's not going to stay in tune yet. Get it needs to readjust, too, the same way you need to readjust to being back home. So tune it twice a day, every day this week, and by the end of the week, it will be back in shape. That doesn't mean that you have to wait until it's back in tune, totally and settled in before you can start playing. But let's get the harp started on its rehab right now. So you're going to dust, you're going to tune, you're going to change the strings, you're going to tune again, maybe you'll even tune again. But also know that as you go through the that first week that you're back playing, your harp will help it adjust more quickly. At the same Time as you adjust. So don't wait until it's in tune to start. You got that? Then let's plan. Now for the. The things that you are going to use, the, the pieces that you're going to use to help you rehab your fingers and get them back in shape. These could be exercises, they could be etudes. Um, we're going to have pieces that we review, pieces that we refresh that you were learning. So put those out front. Now those are the things you're going to have on your music stand looking at you when you get back so that you remember your plan.

Now I suggest that you include in this little stack, I like the number three, but you can use fewer or more if you like. But I like three favorite slow and easy warm ups. So these are the things that you're going to warm your fingers back up. They're easy, they're supposed to be slow because we're going to break your fingers in gently because we don't want to break your fingers, if you know what I mean. So we want slow and easy warm ups. And at least one of those should have basic fundamentals like scales and arpeggios and chords in them. So we know that you're warming up on those very important building blocks. Right? So.

That'S part one of your rehab toolbox. Three favorite slow and easy warmups. Part two. The second thing in that toolbox, choose two different exercise books. I know you've got them. Choose two different ones. Why two different ones? Because they all have different approaches. And I would like you to choose to three exercises from each.

I told you I like the number three. So there it is. So you're going to. So that's six exercises total.

Then I would like you to choose three short, simple review pieces. Note the words. Short and simple. These are pieces that you know very well and that will be perfect for just making you feel happy as you start your rehab journey to the harp. So this, these are the materials that you're going to use, as I said, those tools in your toolbox, how you're going to rehab your fingers. Notice that the operative words here are slow, easy, simple, short. Nothing complicated for this first week back. So for your rehab toolbox, let me review again three of your favorite slow and easy warm ups. At least one with scales and arpeggios and chords. Right, Those fundamentals. Choose two or choose three exercises. Let's put it this way. Choose three exercises from two different exercise books. So you've got six exercises all together. And choose three short, simple review pieces. Now what you're going to do is create a little rehab routine from here.

And you need to make this routine very gentle for yourself. Remember that you're doing physical rehab too, right? We're not just rehabbing your music and rehabbing your harp. We're having to get your fingers back in shape, which is why everything is slow and easy for a little bit. And your calluses may have gone on vacation too, too. So I'd like you to be sure that you're preventing blisters and any sort of injury. We don't want you to push or to overdo anything. So we're trying to. We're going to break your practice into short sessions so that we can minimize any kind of blister or sore fingers and so that we can be sure that we're not overworking your fingers and hands right when you come back. So here's what you're going to do. We've got our toolbox of the slow and easy warmups, the exercises and the short, simple review pieces. So let's create an entire schedule, a six day schedule from the tools that we just talked about. So I would suggest that whatever day you decide to start your rehab routine, after you come back, you start with the. That 30 minutes of harp rehab that we talked about, right? Where you're going to tune, you're going to dust, you're going to change strings, you're going to get your harp ready and that's all you need to do on day one. Remember to tune if you have the patience for it. Anytime you walk by the harp, tune it. It's not going to hurt it, right? Okay, so that's day one. That's all you've done. Day two, we're going to start playing. And now the. I have some suggestions for time limits and this sort of thing, but I want to tell you up front that these time ideas that I'm giving you for how long to practice will be ones you want to personalize, depending on how much you're used to practicing. So if you're used to practicing less than I'm talking about, then make your sets shorter. If you're used to practicing more, you can make them a little bit longer at the beginning. But certainly as the week goes through, as we go through the last five days of this six day plan, you can up the time limit probably a little bit faster because your body's used to it. But it never hurts to err on the side of caution. So this is a great routine, no matter how much playing you're used to doing day one's harp rehab. Day two, I want you to do three 15 minute sets, three 15 minute little blocks of practice. Be sure that you're tuning. Then I want you to choose one of the warmups, one of the exercises and one of the review pieces. And that's all you do in your 15 minutes. Oh, wait, you also tune again when you're done. So you're going to tune before you start. You're going to do your warmup, your exercise, your review piece and you're going to tune again. And that's all you need to do. It probably will fit beautifully into a 15 minute set and then you can do two or three of those sets on that day.

If one of them feels like enough, then just stick with one set. Don't do more than three. And you can use a different warm up and a different exercise and a different review piece in each set if you want. Because I know you're going to be itching to get back into your playing. We all do.

Day three, you're going to do exactly the same as day two. You can. If you only did two 15 minute sets on day two and you want to try three on day three, go for it. But don't add any extra time to those sets yet because your fingers are going to be feeling it after day two. If you need to remind yourself to play more softly. And even if these are pieces or exercises that you're used to playing with a full sound, play more softly until your fingers are used to it again. Right. You don't have to dive in full force right away. So day three, you're going to do the same thing as day two, three 15 minute sets. In each set, a warm up and exercise, a review piece and tune. Day four is essentially the same thing, but let's add a little bit of time. Try doing three 20 minute sets.

Same idea where that set, you tune, you do a warmup, you do an exercise, you do a review piece and you tune.

Day five, same thing as day four. Now by day five, you should feel like you're really up and ready to go. You know, you're doing the same thing, you're spending a little bit more time. And if I know you, you've added an exercise, you've added a piece and you've been just itching to get back to everything else. And by this time that's okay. If you want to throw in something a little bit extra, I don't mind. But remember to still be cautious. You're only five days back from vacation.

So we're going to give you one more day. And on day six, I suggest that rather than having three 20 minute sets the way you were on days four and five, try two 30 minute sets so that you're just sitting there a little while longer. You're using your fingers just a little bit more in one shot.

Once again, don't forget to tune. Although by this time your harp should be pretty stable and you should feel like you are back and ready to go. So on day six, when you're doing those two 30 minute sets, be sure that you spend some time on day six planning for your regular practice next week, because you should be back and ready to go. Now, there's nothing magical or, you know, mystical obviously, about any of these numbers.

Tweak them as you feel you can. But there are two important things here. One is that you need to go a little bit more slowly than you'd like because there's no point in getting blisters because that's just going to slow your rehab down. So we want to avoid blisters, we want to avoid physical injury, and we want to avoid frustration. So that's why the sets are short. That's why we don't have you diving back into your hardest pieces when you come right back. And that's why sticking to these shorter segments that leave you just a little bit hungry for more heart playing is going to be pretty powerful. So that's one thing. The other thing that's, that's really good about this is that it is a system. You don't have to make up your plan when you get back because making it up as you go is not the most efficient way or perhaps even the smartest way to do it. So have this simple plan in place before you go. You're going to get your music out, you're going to get your. Your plan calendared, you're going to leave yourself notes about it, and you're going to be able to go on vacation knowing that you can come back and it's all going to work. You know exactly what to do.

Now, deciding on that rehab routine is really only the first step. It's the biggest one, but it's the first of the three steps that I wanted to share. The second one is, I think, extremely powerful. And it's only going to take you a couple minutes. And you need to do it now. Set up that first lesson. Now, that lesson that you're going to have after you come back from vacation.

Set it up now because that Deadline. Having that on the calendar is going to help hold you accountable. Even if you need to change it later, right? Even if you need to change it because your schedule has changed. Go ahead, set it up now.

But I hope you noticed that this was the second step. Because if you have your rehab routine planned on your calendar, you know when you're going to be ready for that first lesson. And it may be at the end of that first week. You may want to give yourself one more week to be back into regular practice before you get your lesson. Depends on how you feel about having a working lesson, right? Like, okay, my fingers are back in shape and I'd like to meet and you know, go over a plan and play some things for you, play through some music and see what we want to work on. However you like to use your lessons is great. But let's get it on the calendar now. So that's step two, step three.

I'd love you to plan a new and exciting heart project for the fall. Do your first step now. So, you know, what is your heart project going to be? Maybe it's a new challenge piece that you want to learn. Or maybe it's putting together a one hour set of music you can use for playing in various places. Or maybe it's working on Christmas music. Or maybe it's a musical collaboration. Like maybe you want to do musical evenings with a friend. That could be fun. Getting involved with a local harp group, getting involved with your local American Harp Society chap are also possible, right? So all these are great things. Think about what would be new and exciting for you to do this fall and do that first step now. I mean, if your project is to work on a new challenge piece, get that music and mark it up now. A one hour gig set. Start your plan. Christmas music, get it out, dust it off. A musical collaboration. Phone a friend and get that set up too. But have that new project all ready to go. You know, it's not, you know, it's not something that you have to be that you can't change your mind about later. But it's so nice to come back from vacation and dive right into something that's ready and waiting for you. Now, of course, I have a suggestion that is a heart mastery related suggestion. You know, we always have a coaching trimester that starts in the fall. You could join our first to know list now and get that started. There's a first step for you, right?

So, but whatever your project is.

Identify it and take that first step. Write that one down too, right? What Your project is so that you're not trying to reinvent the wheel. It's like, oh, what was I going to do? Oh yeah, that was it. Now, so those are the three big steps. Plan your rehab routine, get that first lesson on the calendar, get it set up now. And figure out that new project for the fall and take your first step. But I do have a couple of other tips that I would be very remiss if I didn't share with you. You might already have thought of them, but if you haven't, these are going to be lifesavers. Here's the first one. Check your string supply. I mean, you know that those strings are going to break. They're either going to break while you're away or in that first week where you're really trying to reh rehab. Because that's the way those things happen, right? It's like, oh, look, my harp is perfect. None of those strings broke. And you tune it up and boink, boink. And that first week you're back, two strings break every day. So be sure that your string supply is up to date, right? You need all those strings because it would be horrible to have your plans totally jettisoned just because you were waiting for a string to be delivered. So get those now before you go. Easy enough to do, right? And here's the second one. Please remember that whatever it is you're doing this summer, enjoy a totally relaxing, guilt free kind of summer. No matter how much or how little heart playing is included.

Your life is about you. And I know it sounds like I make your life about the harp all the time. You know, the harp's a big part of my life too. But we have to remember that, you know, our life is not a distraction, right? Our life is part of our life, whether it includes harp playing or not. So.

Just enjoy your time away. Now, if you really don't want to lose touch with your music, you can always do away from the harp, mental sort of practice. And that will help you stay connected to your music and connected to your heart playing, whether you're actually playing or not. And creating this plan is going to help you really enjoy that time away and savor it and come back into your heart playing with the right sort of spirit and energy and as little frustration and pain, whether that's mental or physical as possible. So you've planned your vacation, you've planned your rehab. Now enjoy your vacation. And when you enjoy it, you'll come back refreshed and ready with that plan already in place, scheduled and Ready to go. So that, my friends, is how you enjoy a guilt free harp free summer vacation. And I certainly hope you do. Before I go, one more quick reminder about our Spark Journal. Our new and redesigned Spark Journal, all your favorite parts of the Spark Journal, just in a really pretty new format. But the idea here, the best thing about that Spark Journal is it helps you plan. And while it's got a lot of features to it, you don't have to use them all. You can start with just the ones that interest you. So we're going to put that, the link to the newspark Journal in the show notes. And by the way, when you purchase the Spark Journal, we've got a lovely little course that comes with it to show you how to use the components of the Spark Journal. So it's not, you know, so you don't have to just get it and wonder what you're supposed to do with it. I mean, we've tried to include as much guidance as we can, but our, our little course that comes with it gives you just that extra, extra insight that you might want. So check out that newspark Journal and you can have one of those waiting for you on your music stand when you get back from vacation as well. Next week, I'm going to give you a little masterclass in how to play and practice pieces that have changing meters and changing sections. I'm sure you've run across the kinds of pieces that, I mean, they go along and they do one thing for a little while and then they change the mood, they change the time signature, they change the key signature. It feels like a whole different piece and you have to negotiate the counting, the dynamic, shift the whole musical idea. It can be very confusing and it can really cause you some practice problems that keep you from learning the piece well. So we're going to talk about how to make sense of all those complexities and how to turn the complex and complicated looking page into a piece of music. Not just when you play it, but as you're practicing it and as you're thinking about it. So we're going to be making the connection here between what's written on the page and how you want it to sound. That is our masterclass for next week and I certainly hope you join me for that. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and to your spirit. And all you have to do play. 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.