Failure to Finish: Why You Might Be Missing Your Goals - PHH 070

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, the 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. Have you ever looked at your closet full of clothes and said, but I don't have anything to wear? Maybe you've looked at that big stack of music next to your harp and said, but I don't have anything I can play. I don't know which is more frustrating. Actually, I do. When we spend hours doing days and weeks practicing a piece of music and it still doesn't get to the point where we can actually play it for someone, it goes beyond frustrating, doesn't it? How is it possible for some people to have hours worth of music that they can play and others not to have even a single piece? I remember how shocked I was the first time I realized how common it is for dedicated, hardworking harpists to have nothing ready to play. I was teaching a workshop and talking about what to do when you finish a piece and getting a room full of blank stairs. So I asked the question, how many of you don't have a piece that's finished right now? And about 80% of the students raised their hands. Until then, it had never occurred to me that so many people would be stuck in practice mode and never experiencing the joy of playing. So rest assured, if you're one of those harpists with nothing to play, you are not alone. There are plenty of others just like you. But I would love to change that for you. Starting today.

When we think about goals for our harp playing, we most often include as a goal a piece that we want to learn to play. We imagine ourselves playing it beautifully with confidence and musicality and. But every time we don't finish that piece and we don't take it to that point of seemingly effortless, expressive playing, we disappoint ourselves. It's another goal that is left unaccomplished on today's show. I'm going to tell you about three factors that might be causing you to miss those goals you set for yourself. Three factors that are keeping you from from finishing your pieces. These sneaky little jobbers can cause those pieces to stay in limbo rather than being pushed all the way to the point where you can truly enjoy playing your music. And of course, I'm not going to leave you without a plan for success. I'll give you a remarkably quick and easy three step fix.

Now, there are specific practice techniques that can help you finish your music, but that's not what we're talking about today on this show. You're going to learn to set yourself up to finish those pieces or to achieve any goals for that matter. And why you might actually be sabotaging your efforts instead of allowing yourself to make progress the way you want. Now, those practice techniques that I'm not going to cover today, they're also essential. And as a matter of fact, they're so essential that I have created a free webinar where we're going to talk about those practice techniques that you need. And the webinar is actually called three Good. And that word I put in quotation marks, by the way. So think about air quotes right there. Three good practice habits that are keeping you from playing the way you want and how to break them. That's right. You may be doing everything right. Everything that you know is, is the right way to practice and still not finishing your music. Think about that. 80% of people in the room that I was teaching right who didn't have music ready. So that might be exactly where you are. Maybe you're that. Maybe that's the place you get to with most your pieces. You get to a point you're doing all the right things and they still don't finish, so you put the piece away. Well, I would like to show you how some of what you're doing is actually stopping you from making progress. And we're going to talk about those specific practice habits that you really need to go beyond. We want to keep them there because they're good. They truly are good things to do. But there are other ones to move on to that are going to allow you to finish your pieces. So that's why I've called the webinar, you know, the three good practice habits that are keeping you from playing the way you want and how to break them. This is a free webinar and it's happening on Thursday, October 13th, and I really hope you join me for this. You will find the link to join that webinar in the show notes for this episode. You'll find it also listed@heartmastery.com under events so you'll be able to easily register for that webinar. And I think it's the perfect way to follow up on the discussion that we're going to have today. So be sure that that you take advantage of this. You won't want to miss it. It's so well timed for thinking about how you want your.

Sound during the holidays, right? I mean, I know it seems easy to seems early rather to be thinking about the holidays, but you know, it's not. This is the time to plan. This is the time to prepare. And this webinar is going to help you do that. So don't forget to register for that webinar. But let's start talking about those mindset factors that may be sabotaging your goal achievement, keeping you from finishing those pieces. Before we get started on the exact hows and whys of all of this, I just wanted to take a moment to talk about goals. I mean, I entitled this episode Failure to Finish why you might be missing your goals. And I want to be sure that you and I are on the same page when we're talking about goals. At Heart Mastery, we talk a lot about goals. But goals don't have to be something lofty or impressive. It doesn't have to be playing at Carnegie Hall. It doesn't have to be playing a full length recital. It doesn't have to be any of that. It just has to be doing what you want with the harp, playing what you want. And most often for most of the students that we work with, that I work with in the Gold Circle or that our certified coaches work with in our coaching programs, one of the goals is to play a particular piece of music, right? Our students want to play music. I don't know a harpist that doesn't want to play music, right? So being as that's a goal that's pretty much common to all of us, that's really where I want to talk today. And that's why I started out in the introduction to this episode talking a lot about finishing a piece. Because if you don't have a piece that's finished, if your, if your mo lately has seemed to be playing a piece, getting it to a certain point, and then not feeling like it's really done or really ready to play for somebody Then this is a show that you need. But these techniques apply to any kind of harp goal that you have. Truthfully, they probably apply to any kind of goal in any field of endeavor, but I don't feel qualified to speak to that. I will talk about heart playing today. So when we're talking about reaching those goals, achieving those goals, attaining those goals, please remember that I'm talking about your goals for you, what you want to do, and if you're not sure, then pause this episode and take a moment to just write down three things that you might want to do with your heart playing. Maybe it's three pieces that you want to learn. Maybe it's a piece that you want to learn and a technique that you want to develop or a specific place that you want to play. But take just a moment and think about what it is you want to do. Lots of times we spend so much of our time doing right, practicing, and just getting down in the weeds that we forget to take a bigger view of our heart playing. So if you haven't done that or you can't bring a goal to mind, immediately take a moment, think about those things, and then come back to this podcast. Now, the first thing I want to be sure that you understand is that if you're not achieving your goals, if you're missing your goals, if you're not finishing your pieces, it's not your fault. It's not. Nobody tells you how to do this. If you think you can work with the best teachers in the world. But still, a lot of the time the teachers will give you instructions to follow, but they don't necessarily let you into the process. Now, if you took music lessons as a child and you might remember playing on your teacher's recitals, and that just seemed to happen, didn't it? I mean, you worked on something and and your teacher had you learn it and then you played it and it was all fine, and then you went on to another piece and you worked on it and you played it and there weren't big problems, right? There was a system.

But that system was something you worked within without necessarily understanding. If you came to the harp later as an adult student, and perhaps it's your first instrument, you likely have been in the position where your teacher has helped you through a lot of technique and through a lot of repertoire, but maybe not a lot to that finish point. And so you haven't learned the system either. So I'm not going to be able to share that whole finished system with you today. That's something that we'll talk about another time. But what I want to do is to talk to you specifically about what you need to change now to help you get past where you are and get on to the right thing. And the reasons that you're missing your goals have more to do with your mindset than with anything else.

Once you have discovered that it's not easy to finish pieces, you can start thinking it's your fault. And it's not. But let's talk about what you really need in order to. To finish those goals, in order to achieve them, in order to finish those pieces, the first and most essential step that you need is you need the right resources, right? Imagine if you don't have the resources you need, you're not going to be able to do what you want to do. And what kind of resources might we be talking about? Well, obviously you need practice time, right? And not just time to practice, but consistent time to practice. Practice happens gradually, progress happens gradually, practice makes progress gradually, and it's that continual drip of practice that leads to progress. So you need daily practice for an adult, at least five days a week. I mean, five days a week is great. If you practice two days a week, it's going to be really hard to make progress. Progress is just going to come slower. I would rather have a student who practiced 20 minutes a day, five days a week than a student who practiced two hours, but only over two days a week. Granted that two hours is a lot more time, but if you're not doing that consistently, if you're not at the HARP daily, it's going to be much harder to make progress. So the consistency is important here. Then your practice also needs to have a degree of structure. And I'm not talking about necessarily something that's the same every day.

But if you want to make progress at something, if you want to finish a piece, if you want to improve a technique, you have to put the structure in place for doing that. So that, for instance, if you're trying to improve your technique in a particular way, maybe you're, maybe you want to develop more speed or more fluency, or to work on particular, a particular sort of a pattern, then you need to put that into your practice routine all the time in a specific way so that you are working on that and not just hoping that it happens, or not just remembering to practice it every once in a while. That needs to be part of your daily task in your practice. With pieces, it's a little bit trickier.

Because there's a lot to do in A piece of music, right? We have notes to fix. We have fingering, we have levers or pedals or tempo or dynamics. And there's all kinds of stuff to work on in a piece, and it can bog you down. So lots of times it's easier to do a little bit on that piece and then just play through another one. Well, you're sabotaging yourself right there. Right. So be sure that you put that structure in place. If there are a number of things you want to work on in a particular piece, maybe spread that out. Right? Maybe work on the notes one day, the dynamics another day, the tempo another day. But be sure you're touching that piece and working on it in every practice session. So that's a basic kind of structure.

And then the fourth, and I think most important resource would be some accountability. This most often is in terms of lessons with a teacher or a coach. It can be just a harpist friend, though, that you have an accountability agreement with. It's like, okay, we're going to check in every week and see what we're doing. But accountability can be as simple as just keeping a practice journal where you are determined and careful and systematic about writing in that practice journal every day what you've done and creating a plan for the next day, creating a plan week by week so that a practice journal can help hold you accountable. So there are four important resources that I just talked about. One is time to practice, followed quickly by consistency of practice. Right. It's not just about the time. It's about being consistent. It's about having a structure that allows you to get to everything that you said you wanted to get to. Don't overload your practice. That's no good either. Right? But if you want to get something done, then you have to put it in the plan, and that may be enough structure for you. Just a plan, that's fine. And then the fourth resource that is essential is accountability. Teacher, coach, heart, buddy, practice journal, all easy ways to stay accountable. So if. Let's take a quick check here. Right? Let's take a quick check. If you're missing those goals and you. And you've identified your goals there and you want to see what's going on. Do you have those pieces in place?

This, of course, is ideal. I mean, we're talking about what to do if you're missing your goals and how to. How to, you know, retrench, reorganize your systems for this. But this is great to do at the beginning of a goal, right? Let's be sure you have the resources you need. So if you're thinking now, for instance, about pieces you want to play in the next month or so, check right now that you have those resources in place. Practice time, practice consistency, practice structure and accountability. Okay, now we've solved the easy one. So that's the first, the first thing that you might want to address. I'd like to look at the next one, which is considerably trickier.

You might not believe that your goal is really that important.

Now, before you dismiss this out of hand, let me tell you that this is a sneaky one, and it shows up in ways you don't expect.

So take a moment to consider this. Do you really, deep down believe that your goal is important? That it's important to you and important enough to pursue and to achieve? I mean, maybe you think, maybe you feel that it doesn't really matter.

If, for instance, your goal is to finish a piece of music. Maybe it's not important because you figure, well, nobody's really going to ask you to play. And so if you don't finish the piece, it's really not that important. Or maybe you don't ever want to play for anybody ever. So, you know, you just want to play in your living room, right? So it's. Maybe it's not really that important that it's not finished. Or maybe, well, you know, you're not going to be a professional. You have no desire to be a professional harpist. So it's not really important that you finish your music.

You might even be actually afraid of finishing your music, because then, after all, if you have a piece ready to play, someone might ask you to play. You won't have that excuse. I used to use that excuse all the time when I was a kid. My, My parents would have company over, you know, and the harp would be sitting there in the corner, and my parents would say, oh, you need to play for the. You know, play for our guests, please. And, and, you know, I, I'd be begging off. Well, everything I have is, you know, I'm learning everything. I don't have anything ready to play. Now, for me as a. As a young person, this was just a way to get out of playing for the, for the grown. But.

It was likely just as true that I didn't really have anything to play.

But I've seen it, seen some students who try to use it almost as an excuse. Well, if I don't have anything ready to play, then I won't have to play. So that when somebody comes over to the house and they See that harp? And they say, oh, could you play something for me? Oh, no. Well, really, everything. I'm just working on things right now. I don't have anything ready to play. Well, what a shame, right? These people are interested in the harp and they're interested in you and they're interested in your music and you don't have anything to share with them. What a shame. Hmm. All right. Well, that's not a good reason to not finish a piece of music. And the thing is that no matter how much we tell ourselves we don't need or want to finish a piece, you know, oh, because nobody's going to ask me to play because I'm never going to be a professional.

It. It doesn't really matter if I don't finish it. No matter how much we tell ourselves, it really does matter to us. We want that satisfaction of playing a piece. Well, now that doesn't mean that we have to perform it for an audience, but it does mean that we want to be able to know that we can play something, that we've achieved something that we don't have a drawer of half finished pieces that, you know, we just aren't quite good enough maybe to play. I mean, that's not a good feeling, is it? And it's probably not true. It's not that you're not able to play it, it's just that you haven't learned how to play it. And those practice techniques for finishing we will talk about, just not today. But right now I want you to address the underlying problem. You need to believe in the importance of your goal. Now, you may be trying to tell yourself that, oh, I really just enjoy practicing and I just want to improve. And I really only want to play for my own satisfaction. But, you know, music is meant to be shared. And most of us, no matter how convinced we are that we really are doing this for our own satisfaction.

We forget that a part of that satisfaction is being able to share something we love with somebody else, somebody who matters to us. I mean, imagine the joy of being able to just play a piece, do a quick recording of it, or maybe even a quick zoom call and just share it with a loved one who's far away, or maybe with a loved one who's sick and can't come to visit you. I mean, just, you know, it's pretty cool, what a great feeling that would be. And I don't want you to feel like you can't do it when it's so likely that you just don't know how. But you have to start by believing it's important.

Okay. I'd like you to spend just a couple minutes over the next week thinking about that and thinking about what might be important to you about finishing a piece of music and to write those things down. I already asked you to write down a couple goals. Well, next to each one of those goals, write down why it's important to you. It doesn't have to be important, you know, to the rest of the world. That's okay. But if it's not important to you, then you shouldn't be spending time at it. Right? If it's not important to be to, you know, learn that particular piece or work on that particular technique, then why are you spending time and energy on it? So we know it's important, and I'd like you to write down why. That is perhaps one of the most powerful things you can do to help yourself take that piece or that goal, whatever it is, all the way to the finish line. When you know why it's important and you believe that it's important, it's much easier to find the energy, the motivation, and the momentum to finish it. So promise me you'll do that. All right, Now I'm taking your promise as given, and we're going to move on to the third reason that you may not be finishing those goals.

You might be stuck trying to make your piece right.

Ooh. You say ooh. Well, isn't it supposed to be right? Well.

Yes, but I tell you that with qualifications.

Pieces get righter. They get more correct, they get more fluent. They, you know, they. They do better over time, but they never get completely right. And if that's what you're trying for, you are trying for the wrong thing, my friend. And this is something we're going to spend just a few minutes on because it's a topic worthy of some discussion. I've worked with a lot of harpists over the years who describe themselves as perfectionists. They want it to be perfect, and they know that this might be holding them back somewhat, but at the same time, they're hanging on to the idea that they can make their music right.

And while they know that it might never be perfect, that's not stopping them from trying.

Okay? There's nothing really wrong with that. We all want our music to be correct. And we, granted, we spend a lot of our practice time trying to get things right, trying to get the notes right and the fingering right and the timing right and the rhythm right and everything else. We're trying to make it Right. But in our quest to make something perfect.

We'Re losing a lot of the music.

Music isn't about.

Perfection, it's about expression. Expression is personal. And when something's personal, it's never quite perfect, clean and correct. It's always a little bit messy. Now, I don't want your music to be messy, so don't get the wrong idea here, but there are always those blurred edges, those places where the individuality happens. And individuality in music is what makes a piece of music expressive. And yes, we want things to be right. Please don't think I'm trying to help you do less than your best. I want you to do your best. And we know that the music deserves your best. But don't go looking for perfect. And don't let that quest for correctness hold you back or slow you down, because you can still play a piece well. Play it musically. Make it beautiful and expressive, even when it's not quite. Once again, read my air quotes here. When it's not quite right.

My dear friend Mary Jane has a phrase for this. She calls it getting wrapped up in right. And I think that's such a terrific phrase. When you're wrapped up in right, you're not letting the music flow. I mean, imagine that as an image for a second, right? That, that correctness, that idea of, of making something right is wrapping you up. It's imprisoning you. It's like a straight jacket holding you in. When what we want is to let the music out and to let it flow. And if you're wrapped up in right, if you're stuck trying to make something right.

Then you're not going to be able to make that music flow. So we need to find a way to get past the idea that something has to be right before it's valuable, before it's worthy, before it's beautiful. Because the correctness can develop along the way. Things can get more right, more correct even as you're playing them at, you know, sort of an in between stage. And this is such a barrier to finishing a goal, to finishing a piece, to feeling like your technique is improving. Things aren't going to be perfect. This is a never ending quest. And I don't want you to look at that as discouragement. I just want you to look at it as reality. This is a pursuit, right? Think about that phrase, pursuit of excellence, right? Nobody talks about the attainment of excellence. They talk about the pursuit of excellence. That's what we're looking for. But it doesn't mean that until you get closer than you are now. You can't enjoy the music, you can't enjoy sharing your music. You can't meet those goals. You may just need to adjust your idea of what meeting those goals is like.

Okay? So don't get wrapped up in right? That's going to keep you from finishing. So very quickly. Here are the three things that I think are most likely to stop anyone from finishing. To create that failure to finish despite what you know, no matter what harp goal you're looking for. And that would be you don't have the resources you need. And we talked about those, right? Practice, time, consistency, structure, accountability, that you don't believe that your goal is really that important. And I've asked you to take a moment and figure out why those goals are important to you, because they are, or you wouldn't be working so hard at them. And then the third one, you're stuck trying to make it right. You're being. You're wrapping up in right instead of allowing that music to flow and to, to be part of, you know, part of the universe, to add to the world, you can do that. So here are three things that you can do to start fixing that situation for yourself right now.

Take a look at that list of resources that we talked about. Find resource. Find one resource on that list that you think you need and add it now. Do you need a better practice plan? Do you need a teacher? Do you need a reliable practice time? Do you need a harp accountability buddy? Find one thing on that resource list that you think you're going to need that would make a difference for you and figure out how to add that. Now schedule a lesson. Call a harp buddy, whatever it is, block out time in your schedule, but find that resource that you think might be missing and add it so that you've got it. Create the support system for your success. Okay, there's step one, Step two, create your meaningful goal. This is something that we have all our coaching and my gold circle students do. We ask them about their most meaningful harp goal. And I would love for you to create a most meaningful harp goal for yourself. What touches you deeply about the harp and about harp music and about music in general?

Where does it connect with you? What just warms you up and energizes you? What about the harp playing would be meaningful to you? Would it be sharing your music in a particular way, being able to play in a particular way, or to play a piece, to share it with a particular person? But think about what your most meaningful harp goal is.

And then think about how you can bring that kind of meaning to the individual goals you're working on. I mean, if your most meaningful goal would be to be able to share your music with people who are sick, for instance, well, how can what you're trying to do with the piece you're working on now play into that?

Would finishing this one particular piece mean that you'd have a piece to play for someone? And if you finished that piece, could you maybe record it and email it to someone that is sick as just sort of a starter toward that meaningful goal?

Let what you're doing every day have meaning in a deeper way for yourself and acknowledge that meaning. Okay. Create your most meaningful harp goal. And the third step. This is the easy one. I think it's the fun one, and I also think it's the one that you won't do. So you have to promise me you're going to do it. I want you to play something. Play some heart piece for yourself every day as if. As if it were done, as if it were correct. I just want you to play it. Let yourself make music. Remember that the warts don't matter here. The wrong notes, the wrong fingering, just play it because it's still going to be beautiful. Just play it for yourself. You don't have to play this for anybody else, but be sure that you're playing something every day. Don't let your heart playing be only about practice. Let your heart playing include play.

Make the music that's in your soul. Let it happen and enjoy it, warts and all. That's the idea. So there's. There are three powerful fixes here that will help you get closer to those goals. As I mentioned before, there are practice techniques that also help you finish your pieces. And that's what we're going to be talking about in the webinar that we have coming up here in just a few weeks. The three good habits that might be preventing you from playing the music the way you want and how to break those habits. Don't worry, we're not just breaking them. We're replacing them with habits that are going to take you to that next level. It's a pretty impressive webinar. And I gave this webinar, Ooh. Four or five years ago and got a terrific response from it. And I thought it was time to bring it out again now. So I've refreshed it and amplified a lot of the ideas, and I'm bringing it back free webinar October 13th. Be sure to check out the link in the show notes or go to heartmastery.com and register for this webinar. It's going to take what we've talked about today to the next level and I really don't want you to miss it. So that's coming up next week. Here on the podcast is one of our Quick Fix episodes. We're going to be talking about some quick fixes for your fourth finger, and you won't want to miss this. I know our fourth fingers often get short shrift when it comes to harp playing, right? We depend so much on our thumbs, our second fingers, and even our third finger as we work in three finger chords. But those fourth fingers can get a little bit overlooked and it's time we took a moment and worked on those just a bit. So quick fixes for your fourth finger next week. Until then, 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. 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.