Everyday Opportunities to Grow and Discover - PHH 194

I mean, we have plenty of rational, well considered, mature reasons to not choose the opportunity. Not yet. I'm not ready. It's basically what they add up to. But almost always behind all the logical reasoning is that lizard brain that's simply afraid of the unknown, afraid of screwing up. And it can be very hard to convince that little lizard brain that the price of failure is very low compared to the price of not trying.

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.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.com join now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. When my husband and I moved into our new house about four years ago, we were moving from a very small house that was part of our business in the mountains to a nice roomy house in a neighborhood. Now, when we moved to the mountains, we had too much furniture to fit in the little house. For instance, we had dining room furniture, but the house had no dining room. We had to put that furniture in storage. When we moved to the bigger house, though, we were able to bring out all that furniture again. It was a little like Christmas, or at least like meeting up with old friends. But there were some spaces in the new house and that needed furniture that we didn't have. And one of the things we decided we would like to get was a desk. Specifically a desk with pigeonholes for sorting papers and a lid that closed so we didn't have to look at those papers all the time. Of course, pigeonholes are great for organizing papers or mail or stamps or paperclips. They keep everything in their proper place. They keep the right things in and the wrong things out, which is precisely why they are so damaging to our harp life. I can hear your mental breaks screeching right now. Saying what? How did we get from desks to harp playing? Well, I'll tell you how. It's the pigeonholes. Most of us harpists aren't aware of the pigeonholing we do with our playing. Our warm ups, exercises and etudes stay neatly in their respective pigeonholes, as do each of the pieces we're practicing. We may see the intersections, but we don't exploit them. We also try to put our learning in those little boxes, labeling our pieces and even ourselves as harpists by a skill level who can tell you that you're an intermediate player or an advanced beginner, or a beginner advanced player. There isn't even any clear definition of what any of those terms mean, and no harpist fits completely into any one of them. We all have individual strengths and weaknesses that make our level unique to us and no one else. The worst result of pigeonholing, I think, is that it shuts the door on opportunity. When we choose a label for ourselves as a harpist, we overlook possibilities for growth and for pleasure in our playing.

So today I'd like to reveal to you some opportunities you may be missing. I'd like to show you some different ways to think about your playing and about yourself as a harpist. Ones I hope will help you find more joy in your harp Journey. By the way, my husband and I did get our pigeonhole desk. And while the pigeonholes are organized, the smartest thing we did was to get a desk with a lid that we can close. There's a lot going on in that desk.

Obviously, one of the pigeonholes in my harp desk, if you want to continue the imagery, is the. The pigeonhole that holds my technique and my technical work. We all know technical work is really important, but we want to be able to develop our technique in a way that it truly serves our playing. And that's what our February seminar series is all about. It's called Just scales and arpeggios 2. And it's actually a course from 2015 that I pulled out and totally refurbished. Made it a lot more powerful with a lot more stuff going on. And this is a four week course where we'll be looking at how scales and arpeggios really help your technique. The first week we focus your fingers even and relaxed and strong. Second week, we focus on precision and clean placing, accuracy all through the lens of rhythms. The third week, we focus on speed. Oh, yeah, you have to be able to play just a little bit faster, don't you? And so we'll work on some drills for that. And then the fourth week is all about flexibility and facility and agility by working on some different patterns. So we'll show you how plain old scale and exercise practice can be really useful for what you're doing, not just in an abstract sense, but in a very real way at creating those attributes that we want our fingers to have. So you can sign up for the February seminar series either in the app or on heartmastery.com and of course, I've put a link to that in the show notes as well. One of the nice things about these seminar courses is that they're limited to the month. They only happen in the course of that one month. So you don't have to make a huge commitment. And while there are four live calls, those calls are recorded so that if you can't be there live, you can still get all the benefit from the calls as well as all the PDFs that go with them. Now, this is sort of a myharp Mastery light. You know that my Harp Mastery is our membership community and it's a very rich experience with a lot of stuff in it. Oh, 70 courses and all this stuff. So there's a lot that goes on besides these Monday calls. The seminar series gives you a little way to taste the My Heart Mastery community without diving all the way into membership. I really strongly suggest that this is something that you take a look at if you are looking for a way to continue your learning, to deepen it without a big commitment of lessons. My Heart Mastery is a wonderful way to do that. And it's such a generous community of harpists that you get to be part of, and a worldwide community, in fact. So I really encourage you to use those seminar courses as a way to try it out and see what you think and then join us in My Heart Mastery. We would love to have you there, my Heart Mastery members. Also beginning with this month's seminar series, you'll notice that in the PDFs for this course, I have identified the portions of this course that are going to relate to the different levels in the Scale of Success, our unique curriculum that we have as part of the My Heart Mastery membership. So if you're working at one of those levels, you'll see which exercises every week are really pertinent to those levels. So you can be sure that you're working on the ones that are going to matter most to you at your particular stage. Right now, as with all level sort of things, they're totally arbitrary. So feel free to work on anything that you want to. Of course. So it's the seminar series, just scales and arpeggios 2 this month, that will help you with that technical part of your heart playing. But that's not the only thing we want to talk about today. We want to get out of the pigeonholes. So we're going to be talking about opportunity. Perhaps you're one of those people who seek out adventure and look for new opportunities, pursuing them fearlessly. That doesn't sound like you. Oh, that's right. That would be Indiana Jones. But we aren't talking about finding the Lost Ark or surviving the Temple of Doom. We're talking about harp playing. So there's no reason to raise your blood pressure. It's just music. Now, the opportunities we're going to talk about are what if moments. We're not talking about stepping on stage unless that's what you want to do. But we're not talking about the opportunities that are necessarily the big scary ones. We're talking about the ones that are the small scary ones. They're those what if moments. They're simple, next step kind of moments. In fact, they don't seem like they would be difficult. But these are the ones I see many harpists afraid to take. And so, for the purposes of our discussion today, I've classified these opportunities into three categories. Daily opportunities, growth opportunities, and discovery opportunities. Now those don't sound too scary, do they? Daily opportunities, growth opportunities, and discovery opportunities. They're not scary. Doesn't mean they won't feel scary at the time, but we'll talk about that too. So take a deep breath and we'll start in with daily opportunities. These are the opportunities that exist, whether you recognize them or not in your practice every day. Most harpists don't recognize them, and it's not their fault. They haven't been trained to look for them. And of course, some of the blame for that belongs on us, the teachers. Traditional music instruction hasn't always encouraged students to think for themselves. Instead, it was, you know, all about following directions. Do this, do it this many times over this many weeks, and then I'll tell you what to do next. Those may have been the kind of music lessons that you had when you were a child. Fortunately, that kind of music lesson is more and more being relegated to the past because that's not really the kind of atmosphere in which we, any of us do our best learning. And of course, I had much more enlightened instruction than this, and I'm certainly hoping that you have had too. But we music teachers are famous for holding that long term plan in our head. We've got it. We know what's going to happen. And either because we just don't even think about it, or because we don't want the student to be thinking about it too far ahead, we don't always reveal it to the student until that whole plan is nearly accomplished.

This can work for a child because the child doesn't necessarily need to see the long term picture. Perhaps, although I stopped teaching this way many, many years ago, even with the young students that I had. But it certainly doesn't work with adults. We want to know where we're going, we want to know why we're doing things. And so when a teacher holds onto that plan, we feel like we're just kind of going through the motions and we don't understand why. So that we get stuff accomplished. And then there's this little ta da moment. And it says, yeah, okay, I'm happy, this is great, but I'm not quite sure how I got here. And of course, it's also not teaching the student a framework that will allow them to repeat that success. Right? And of course, you know, that's what your teacher's for. You don't. The student doesn't need the framework. Right. Well, that's not what we want. So we're Going to look for those ways that we can make more progress in our practice every single day simply by finding the opportunities, those what if moments, and choosing them. Here's one that comes up every day. And it might not seem like a what if moment to you, but let's explore it a little bit. It. It's that piece that just won't get up to tempo. I still have to do my slow practice on it. I'm not ready to take it up to tempo. Well, how do you know? And what if you tried? Well, I can't try to get it up to tempo because I'd make a lot of mistakes.

But what if you persisted just a little bit longer, passed some of those mistakes, and tried to see if you could iron them out at that faster tempo? Well, what if I get a lot of bad habits from it? Well, there's an answer for that, too. Now do you see? We'll explore this a little more in a minute. But do you see the what ifs here? So many times we fight back with the what ifs so that it's, well, I can't get it up to tempo. Well, what if you tried? Well, if I tried, I might not be able to do it. Okay, well, and what would happen if you couldn't do it? Well, I'd have to do some more slow practice. And then what would happen? Well, I guess I'd have to try again. Right. There's not ever an end to the what if process. You can keep on what if ing it until you finally get to a moment of success.

Let's keep playing out this get up to tempo thing. Well, I can't play it fast and I can't try it at tempo yet because my fingers won't do it. Well, what if you tried? Well, my fingers would make mistakes. Well, what would happen if you kept on trying? Well, my fingers would keep making mistakes or maybe they'd get used to it. All right. Well, what if we found out? What if I developed bad habits? Well, you could go back and fix those, could you not? So there's, you know, there's that moment where it's, well, I might be. I might need to take it up to tempo, but I don't know if I can. Well, what if you just try?

Here's something else. So the. The piece I want to. I really want to play that piece, but it's just too hard for me. Well, how do you know? Have you tried it yet? No, but it looks really hard and it's way more pages than I'm Used to. And it's got techniques I can't do. All right, well, how can we make it more manageable for you? How could we step you into learning that piece? What could you do that would get you ready? What could you do that would level up your technique? You don't have to accept the fact that that piece is too hard for you as a closed door. It could be an opportunity for you to learn more things, but you've got to get in there and choose it. Now, I imagine these little examples aren't doing a very good job convincing you that there's opportunity for you in these what if moments. But let's explore a couple more. Imagine you've just done 10 repetitions of a tricky passage, and you're really trying to get it correct. So you've practiced it quite slowly, very carefully. Your technique is good. Your finger placement is nice and precise. Everything is really good. You've done 10 repetitions of it, and you're hoping that one of these days it's going to get smooth enough that you can incorporate it in the rest of the piece. So where's the opportunity here? Well, what if you were to do three more repetitions or five more, or even just one more repetition, but at your goal tempo instead of at your slow, careful tempo? Do this at your goal tempo just to see what it would be like. Well, let's take a look. There's our what if? There's our opportunity, right? Because we could do it faster. And let's look at the opportunity risk. Where's the upside? Well, we get to see what the goal tempo would be like, and hopefully that experience of the goal tempo will make it easier to try the goal tempo again another time. Where's the downside? Well, it's going to be pretty messy because we know that we're going to be playing wrong notes and wrong fingering, and our fingers are going to fall off the strings and stuff. But that will probably only happen the first few times. Eventually, over time, it should get better. So that's looking at your opportunity, risk, reward, balance. Right? Where's the upside? Where's the downside? And that's the way we figure out the opportunity in the what if. And if you're worried about all those mistakes and you're worried about ruining all that good practice you just did. Well, there's a way to deal with that, too, right? After you've done your fast repetitions, go back and do one more slow, careful rep repetition, just to remind your fingers and to, you know, reassure yourself that yeah, you. You still can do it correctly. Phew. Okay, fine. But there's some reward there, too. There's an opportunity. You don't have to stop at those 10 slow repetitions or you're doing your daily technique exercise. Okay, but what if today you tried it in a different key? Where's the upside? Well, you're going to add some variety. You're going to be able to, you know, practice a different key and refresh your understanding of key signatures. You're going to be able to practice transposition. That's putting something in a different key. And you're going to give your ears and fingers a slightly different experience. So there's an upside. Well, where's the downside? Well, it's going to be harder. Yeah. Okay. It's going to. It's going to cause a little bit of upset. It's not going to be quite as smooth and correct. If it's the kind of exercise you do every day and you're used to having it be exactly right, this is going to be a stretch and it's going to involve some mistakes. So there's the risk and the reward.

And how is that balance? How does that balance out to give you a way to seize the opportunity here? Because there's opportunity to stretch your skills and to grow a little bit. And maybe you don't do your whole technique exercise in another key. Maybe you just say, okay, I'm going to do this part of it in a different key and then I'll go back to my regular key so that you can manage that risk, reward, balance for yourself. But there's opportunity there. If you see it and take it. Here's one more. In this particular daily category.

And I've heard this from people. Well, you know, I have my own system for learning a piece and I don't like to vary it. Nothing else really works for me. When I hear a statement like that that's so definite, my first response is to question it. To say, well, have you tried something else? And if you've tried something else, well, have you tried yet another way? Or did you try that some other method? Again, this comes up often when I suggest to people that they start a piece, hands together from the beginning and not just hands separately. Oh, I've done it before. That doesn't work. I really need to learn this hand and this hand, and then I can put it. Hands together. Well, okay, but why doesn't the hands together thing work for you? Well, it's too hard and I make a lot of mistakes and I can't really focus on it. Okay, well, what if you could? What would be better about that? Well, I could learn faster. If I didn't have to spend so much time at hand separately. I could get to playing my pieces faster, and I would learn them faster. Okay. Anything else? Well, it would probably help my sight reading, too, because my hands together would be better, and my. My technique, my whole coordination would be better because of it. Okay, well, what's the. What's the downside here? What's the risk? Well, it would be hard, and I'd make mistakes, and it would be frustrating. For how long would it be frustrating? Well, for a while. Well, could you survive it? Well, yeah, I guess so. Well, could you balance more hands together, playing with your hands separately, Playing right at the beginning? Like, do it a couple times hands together and then do some hands separately? Well, yeah, I guess I could. All right. There's a way to look at that opportunity. An opportunity to grow, an opportunity to stretch your skills, to move forward with something that you do every day. Which leads us right to our growth opportunities. I don't think these will be so scary. I don't think they'll sound so scary. The daily opportunities are the ones where I think we push back the most because they strike at habits that we have and that we have come to rely on. But the growth opportunities are ways you can push your heart playing forward exponentially over time just by asking those what if kinds of questions and looking at that opportunity, risk, reward scenario. For instance, setting goals.

Setting goals can be a little bit daunting. But what if you chose a specific objective for your harp playing right now and you gave it a Dubai sort of date? Right. You know, I want to get this done by this time. Goals help us accelerate our progress. They teach us more about our learning, show us more effective ways to accomplish those tasks that we need to on the way to that goal. So goals are terrific at learning. They also give us a predictive framework that we can use for our next goal. Right. So there are lots of upsides, but what's the downside here? Well, what if you don't get to your goal? That would feel bad, right? Well, but if you're in charge of your own goals, you can just reset your goal and you can recalibrate, you can pivot, you can do all that sort of stuff as you go. If you're tracking your goal, you don't set your goal too far out in the future. Certainly not more than two or three months in the future. Right. Keep your Goals close so that you can track them, set those goals, and then, you know, work toward it. What happens if you. If you make it? Ooh, well, lots of good stuff. What happens if you don't? Well, you get to try again. No harm, no foul. Just reset your goal and get going. Not a big deal. But it's a big growth opportunity right there. Setting goals will help you grow. Here's another one. This one is a little trickier. For some people practicing memorizing or practicing sight reading. The obvious sort of response, well, you know, would be, well, I never have to memorize. I never have to sight read in my heart plank, so why should I actually practice it? And sometimes even if, you know, we're willing to acknowledge the fact that improving these skills would be good for us, we may not see the need to actually spend some of our practice time. We don't have enough that anyway. Right. Spend enough of our practice time on it to help get better at these skills. But what if we did what might be different in our playing if we were better at memorizing or better at sight reading? Well, we could learn music faster. We would have something to play if somebody asked. We wouldn't need to have our music with us all the time. We wouldn't have to worry about the light being bright enough to see our music, because as long as we could see the strings, we could play. We'd be able to learn music faster if we were better sight readers. And we could test out those pieces that we think we want to learn and find out if we actually want to buy the music or not. You know, sometimes it comes down to something that practical. What would be the risk? Well, it's going to take some time. Yeah, absolutely. What if I turn out not to be good at it? What if it's hard? Yep. Well, you get to choose your own hard, right? You get to decide. If it's too hard for you, you can stop. Nobody says you have to go on. You know, what would be the harm in trying? So there's an opportunity. Taking lessons. I think taking regular lessons is also a wonderful opportunity, and it comes with its own risks and rewards. Well, what if I don't like the teacher? What if the teacher doesn't like me? What if it's too hard? What if it's too expensive? What if it takes too much time? What if I don't practice enough? Okay, but what if you did? If you did, Lessons are such a powerful way to propel you, to propel your playing. It. It takes care of all that. Stuff that you don't know, because we don't know what we don't know. And you could have the opportunity here to harness someone else's experience to help guide you in the direction you want to go. Definitely an opportunity for growth. And now let's take a look at some discovery opportunities. These are just ways where you can have more connection to the world of the harp, right? And to harp friends. And I would say that that would be my first discovery opportunity. I would recommend to you find a group of peers to play with or to play for at least once a month. And I do mean peers, right? You know, friends who are going to help support you. I mean, what would be different for you if you had harp friends to share music with? I see a lot of rewards there and not a lot of risks, but you can weigh those for yourselves. But what an interesting opportunity to have a place to share music, to have a reason to prepare something, to have a reason to try playing something for somebody without a lot or any downside, right? It'd be a little bit scary, but no, it's a judgment free zone. Or playing in an ensemble, like a harp ensemble or even an orchestra or a band of some sort. What if you could play with a group? Risks, okay, could be scary. You might find out you don't like it. You might find out that it's just not for you for any number of reasons, right? But the reward could be a ton of fun. You could meet new people, play new music. You could learn about the musical skills that are required for playing in a group because they're a little bit different and they will help the rest of your harp playing as well. It's a voyage of discovery for sure. Another discovery opportunity. Be sure to think about pursuing participating in classes or masterclasses or harp events. These give you a breadth of experience and exposure to other viewpoints, other ways of playing the harp that you just wouldn't find out otherwise. Gives you a chance to talk to people rather than just experience videos or even podcasts. Gives you a way to talk to people. I mean, what would be different for you if you discovered music or ideas that you never even knew of before? Be cool, wouldn't it? There's so much out there that waits for you. I know opportunity often looks scary, like jumping out of an airplane, right? We're either going to float to the earth with our parachute or we will die. There's no middle ground. But risks in harp playing aren't like that. Nothing is fatal, nothing is forever. And nothing is either or either I do it or I don't. The risk of opportunity truly isn't in taking the chance and failing. It's in not taking the chance to find out the answer to what if? We have plenty of rational, well considered, mature reasons to not choose the opportunity. Not yet. I'm not ready. It's basically what they add up to. But almost always behind all the logical reasoning is that lizard brain that's simply afraid of the unknown, afraid of screwing up. And it can be very hard to convince that little lizard brain that the price of failure is very low compared to the price of not trying.

The opportunity has equal value too, whether we succeed or whether we don't, because we will have learned something we needed to know. Rarely is that failure absolute. It's a this time occurrence. Like I couldn't play it fast this time, but that has no bearing on next time. Except that perhaps it's just a step in the process. All of failure is a step in the process. It only takes changing a few letters, by the way, to turn the word failure into the word future. Just something to think about. Opportunity isn't a win or lose game, it's just a choice. I hope you enjoyed this topic and I'll be interested to know if there are some opportunities that you decide to take advantage of that maybe you hadn't even noticed before. So feel free to send me an email@podcastartmastery.com or you can just post in the hub because I'm always there and I will see that posting as well. Remember, we have a couple opportunities available to you at Heart Mastery as well. The February seminar series Just Scales and Arpeggios. And of course there's my Harp Mastery membership. Lots of people there waiting for you to join us Next week on the podcast. We're going to keep this arpeggio theme going. We're going to be talking about kinds of arpeggio pieces, the ways arpeggios show up in our music. We're going to be looking at some examples and thinking about those pieces and how the arpeggios play into them, and some relevant exercises or etudes that might help you work on your arpe for that kind of peace. So that's next week on the podcast and I certainly hope to be talking with you again then. In the meantime, remember, every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit, and all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp happiness every day. See you next time.