Get Out of Your Own Way: The Story of the Sacrificial Leaf - PHH 051

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. Are you trying to do too much as a harpist or a harp student? It's easy to feel overwhelmed. There's so much music to learn, so many skills to develop, so much technique work you need to do, and not nearly enough time to do it all. If this sounds distressingly familiar, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that this is totally fixable. The bad news is that only you can fix it. Don't give up. Though. I do have some powerful suggestions and advice for you today that will help you figure out what is really important for you to practice and what isn't. My guess is that about half of what most of us practice daily is isn't really essential or even helpful. That's a scary idea. Stop for just a moment and imagine the implications of that. It could very well be that you're spending an hour of practice and really getting only 30 minutes worth of results. You think you're using your time well, but you may be doing too many repetitions, or warming up for too long, or trying to learn too many pieces at once. In other words, you may be sabotaging your own progress. Now, don't feel bad if this sounds like you. We've all done it, including me. Learning to do less is not instinctive.

Now, on occasions, maybe, when you've seen master musicians performing, perhaps you've noticed how graceful and efficient their movements are, whether they're harpists or playing another instrument. That economy of movement is due to their understanding that the music requires less from them, not more. Extra motion impedes their technical ease and the music's flow. In addition to being distracting for an observer, efficient movements allow for greater technical freedom and deeper musical Expression. Now, sometimes you can do more with less. You just must choose what to keep and what to let go.

So on today's show, I'll share seven things you might want to let go of, and we'll talk about what to keep instead. And I'll start by telling you the story of the sacrificial leaf, something I learned about on a recent trip to the Everglades in Florida. But before we get to that story, I have something else to share with you. I always think that this is a difficult time of year. We have so much energy and we're just bursting to get out of the house and do things. And we're looking at the great weather and we're thinking about all the wonderful things we can do outside and do inside. You know, lots of improvement we can make in our heart playing, lots of energy, but not necessarily a lot of focus. And when you don't have a lot of focus, it can be really hard to find momentum because you expend a lot of energy, but it goes in a lot of different directions. So you set goals, but they just don't actually seem to happen. And this can be very discouraging, as you probably know. So I wanted to be sure that you knew about a course that we have at Heart, Mastery, that was specifically designed to help you find your focus and find your momentum, to help you maintain that momentum so you can see progress in your playing and keep your playing fun at the same time. Because that's what we want this time of year. We want things to be fun. So this course is called the Momentum Miracle Intensive. Now, I created this, oh, last winter sometimes. So it would have been in 2021 that I created this and I ran it as a three hour class and it was a really successful online event. And then I decided that, you know, it was wonderful, but there's a lot of learning that can happen for people who weren't able to attend that. So we published it and it's published as a course on our website. But maybe this is the time I need to remind you about it because this is the time when it might be really valuable for you. So it's one of our, our bargain courses. You're going to really enjoy it. It's simple, it's cheap, there's, there's about, oh, I don't know, three hours worth of video. And of course, you know, you have access to it. Um, you don't have to watch it all at once. You can watch it on your own time. But there's a lot of on the, at the harp kind of workshop warmups that you get to play along with me. Um, and then in the workshop itself and in the seminar, I help you learn how to create that momentum. We talk about how to, how to set goals, how to work on your, you know, practice with some special practice techniques. So this is a really powerful course and it's on our, on our website. It's easy to find and I'm going to link to it in the show notes. But I think that what I like most about this course is that it's really simple. There are not a lot of pieces. You know, there's just the, the, the workshop and then the seminar and the workshop. Granted, there's a lot of video, but you can, you know, pick and choose and poke your way through it. The PDF is very, very helpful. We'll guide you through everything that I talk about. But on this, in this course, you're going to learn how to set those goals, how to design your practice so that it creates energy for you instead of taking energy away so that you know you're going to make progress and you're going to be able to do it in a sustainable way. So I really encourage you to try this course at this time. If you're, if you've got all that extra energy and you're ready to put it into your practice, but you're not quite sure how to harness it and use it well, this is a great course to do. And I, as I said, I just wanted to be sure to tell you because this is exactly the time when so many of us need this kind of energy and this kind of focus. So once again, that course is called the Momentum Miracle Intensive. I will link to it in the show notes so you can click through right from there. Or of course, you'll find it in our courses@heartmastery.com as well. So that's momentum. Right now we're going to be talking about things to let go of. And I want to start by telling you the story that I learned about the sacrificial leaf. It was really just a few weeks ago that we were having our Harp Mastery retreat in Florida. And the retreat was fabulous. And after we were done with that, my husband and I took an extra week and, and we visited with some friends who live in the area down there. And we all four of us took some time and went to spend a few days in the Everglades. We stayed in Homestead, Florida, and we used that as sort of a base of operations to go do the Various walks and hikes and tours and all kinds of things in the Everglades. Stopped at Everglades City on our way back, which is also a very cool place. And while we were in Everglades City, we took an airboat ride. I know it's one of those touristy things to do, but we did. It was a lot of fun and our guide was really great and he told us some things. But there was one particular thing that he shared with us that stuck with me and that's the story I'm going to share with you today. So this is about mangroves. I don't know if you know mangrove plants, if you've seen them, they're, you know, they're one of those things that grow in coastal areas in tropical and subtropical kinds of climates. And they're thick, right? They're part of what make that kind of an environment so mysterious. And they have very special roots. And what's unusual about the mangrove is that it's a plant that has learned to adapt to salt water, to the salinity in the water. You know, salt water would kill most plants, right? Well, the mangrove is no different in that salt water really isn't good for it either. But it has developed some mechanisms and some structures that allow it to live despite the salinity in the water. And the story that was told about the mangroves for years and has only relatively recently been shown to be not necessarily the whole story is the story of the sacrificial leaf. So if you look at any mangrove plant, you'll see that most of the leaves on a given branch are beautiful dark green leaves, but there's one that's yellow and old and ugly. And the story is that that is the leaf that gathers all the salt. So that when the mangrove sucks up the water through its roots, distributes that life giving water through the plant, the salt that the plant doesn't need is gathered in that one leaf. And that one leaf is the leaf that dies, it's the leaf that drops. It's collected all that extra salt. It can't survive, but it is the sacrifice that the plant makes in order to live and thrive. Now, as I said, this has been shown in more recent studies to be not the complete story, but it's a beautiful story anyway. To think that there is just one thing that that mangrove plant can let go of, can release in order to thrive. And the other part of that, that perhaps if the mangrove plant throws strove to keep all of its leaves, the whole plant would die rather than Channeling the salt, which is poison into that leaf and letting that one leaf go. So the mangrove plant then thrives because it lets something go. It lets go of the sacrificial leaf. I mean, you can tell, can't you? Just hearing a story like that, you could tell that my mind would just be instantly drawn to that thinking, wow, that applies to so many aspects of our heart playing. And of course, that's exactly what happens. So we're in the airboat and.

The story time is over and they put the speed on the airboat and the wind is whipping past us and it's just a lot of fun. And we're turning and doing all this kind of stuff. And my brain is still playing with this idea of the mangrove and the sacrificial leaf. And that's because I work with so many students who are one sacrificial leaf away from progress, that if there were one thing that they could just let go of, they would be getting out of their own way and moving forward at a pace that would totally surprise them. I mean, it's happened to me too. It's happened to all of us, right? You think, oh, gosh, I just have to stop doing this and then everything will be okay. Doesn't matter if it's heart playing, it could be any aspect of life, right? But when it comes to heart playing, there are so many things to consider. We're thinking about our technique and our posture and our warm ups and our expression and our notes and our fingering and everything else. And it seems like there's so much to do. And that's the problem. There is a lot to do, and if we try to do it all at once, we're going to die. We'll be like that mangrove plant, taking up all the salt and distributing it through the whole plant. We're not going to thrive. But if we can let go of just one thing, or let go of just some of what we're trying to do, then we have the energy and the momentum to move forward and to make progress and to actually finish pieces or develop that skill that we're trying to develop. Instead of just making teeny weeny little bits of progress on it, we'll actually be able to do something. So it's about focus and it's about progress. But most importantly, it's about putting some things, or one thing perhaps aside so that everything else can move forward. So what I'm going to do today is walk you through seven particular things that I think a lot of people struggle with. That if we made those, the sacrificial leaves, if we got rid of them, if we chose to put those to one side, at least for the moment.

Everything would be easier. So I know that sounds like it might be a ridiculously easy sort of a cure, and I did tell you that the fix for the, you know, the overwhelm is totally in your hands. And this is what I meant because it's not easy. You are going to have to decide if you really want to let go of these things or whatever. One of them might be part of your problem, right. Might be part of what's holding you back. But even if you don't feel overwhelmed right now, I want you to consider these things and see if you might be just leaning into one of them a little bit too much and use them perhaps not as a fix if you're not in a position where you need that overwhelm to be fixed, but maybe think of them as just caution signs, things to watch for, like, you know, bumpers in that. In the bowling alley. Right. We want to keep you from going into the gutter, as it were. So. So let's take a look at these seven things and see what you think. Now, here is the first one.

This may be real. This may be one of the hardest ones for you. I'm just warning you, I'm urging you to let go.

Thinking about results from your practice and learn to embrace the process.

So let go of results and embrace the process. This might also be the hardest one for me to explain, but I'm going to try. So think about your practice as.

Water and sunlight to a plant, right? When you plant a seed, you water it, you put it in the sun, you keep it warm, whatever it is that particular plant is going to need. But it doesn't mean you get instant results. The plant is going to germinate and blossom on its own schedule. And that's what happens with practice. I think lots of times we expect our practice to make things better. You know, you'll. And I will tell you that this is normal. So here's what happens, right? You practice something, and you're working on a really tricky passage, and you practice it, and then you come back the next day and you practice it again, and it's getting a little bit better, and you practice it again. And the third day, you come back and it's a little bit better still. And then the fourth day, you come back, and it's like you never saw it again, never saw it before. It completely is falling apart. Your fingers have no idea what to do. That's normal. That's part of the process. And that's what I mean when I tell you to let go of thinking about the results. I mean, we know we want the passage to get better and we know how to practice it, or at least I hope we do in order to make it better. But you have to understand that a practice process is back and forth. The results, we'll get a glimpse of them and then we won't see them again for a while, and then we'll see more of them and then maybe not so much, and then they'll start to be more and more predictable over time. But those results are going to show up in their own time. Just because.

The piece was going really, really well for a few days doesn't mean that it doesn't still have some learning to do. So what is really happening in this case is that the piece might be getting better and you're sensing that progress. And then you actually hit another learning level where things don't fit anymore and your piece needs some readjustment and it might feel like you're back to square one, but you're not. That's part of the process. And when you learn and can accept that that's part of the process, you'll be much easier with the varying results that we get from. From our practice. Not a straight line. I wish it were, but it's not. It's more like one of those graphs. You know, the lines that go up, they go down a little bit. They go up, they go down, they go up, they go down. Right. So let that be a reminder to you that it's not about steady, better, everyday kind of results. It's about better every day for a while, and then back to the drawing board a little bit, and then we get better again. So it's the process. And when you learn to not be frustrated by it, everything is easier. Okay, Now, I told you that was perhaps one of the hardest ones for me to explain or perhaps for any of us to do. But I think it's an important one. But the next couple are a lot simpler. So let's go on from here. This is an easy one to explain. However, if it's your standard method of operation, it might not be so easy for you to do either. I would suggest that you let go of learning five new pieces at once and start with one.

Okay. The number five. There's nothing magical about that. I just picked that out of a hat. But if this is something you do, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And you know, I'm talking to you, you. We can't learn too many new things at once. Without focus, nothing's going to get better. And we only have a limited amount of practice time. And if we spread it over a whole bunch of pieces, we're getting a little bit of work on a lot of pieces and not a lot of work on any of them. And that's what I mean here. Certainly you can learn more than one new piece at a time, but you have to know how you learn. You have to know what is really going to give you forward momentum on a piece, forward progress. And you need to sort of have your own timeline. I mean, if you want to learn the pieces quite slowly, then learning a lot at once is going to be fine. But if you want to get one learned more quickly.

Then that's what you have to do. Learn one or two. I mean, one of the things I like to recommend is that, you know, you want a variety of repertoire to play. Who doesn't? Right? So maybe have one or two fairly easy short pieces that are new for you that you can learn quickly and turn them over in maybe a week. You know, say, okay, yeah, I've, you know, gone this, gone through this quickly. And maybe working through a book is the easy way to do that so that you're continually learning new things and keeping yourself interested. And then maybe you have one or two kind of halfway there pieces that take more work. They're, they're already learned, but they're still in that messy middle stage and you're still working on them. And then maybe one, either one brand new kind of challenging piece or just a challenging piece that's going to take a little bit longer. And so it's, you know, that's going to be part of your practice, practice regimen for quite a number of weeks perhaps. And so this gives you a way to keep refreshing your practice and making progress on some of the tougher pieces and learning something new. But don't try to tackle five new things all at once. Not a good plan. So, you know, do pay attention to how you learn. But try letting go of learning too many new pieces and just start with one.

All right, Number three, let go of trying to do everything every time you practice. You know what I mean? If we tried to do everything in every practice session, it would be a marathon. We're going to have a warm up and we're going to have scales and arpeggios and chords and we're going to have exercises and we're going to have etudes and we're going to have the. The new. The pieces that I just talked about, right? We're going to have the short ones and the medium ones and the long one. And we're going to do review and we're going to do some sight reading practice and some memorization practice. Maybe some improvisation would be nice. Well, you get the idea. You can't do everything every time you practice, but you could have one day to focus on one of those things while you work on your core pieces. So let's say you've got those, you know, easy, medium, and challenge pieces on your plate, right? And we're going to spend a few minutes warming up before we start practicing, because that's a good thing. And we want to do some technique work. Great. But maybe you want to take one day a week where a good chunk of your practice time is focused on just technical stuff, and you're going to take a half an hour of your practice and just do technical exercises. All those things that you're not doing every day because they take too much time. And maybe that half an hour, another day would be dedicated to review pieces, or maybe that half hour could be dedicated to sight reading or to some of those other things that you want to work on. But if you have those chunks of time dedicated to focus things, then you get to rotate them. Because the truth is that, you know, except in real specialized circumstances, you don't need in depth technique work every day, and you don't need in depth exercise anything every day. You want to work on your pieces, you want to keep your technique fresh, you want to work on all those things. But let's limit the amount of time we spend in addition to our pieces.

And have some special focus time. Maybe two or three days a week. Maybe you just take one day a week and make that a focus day. Where you say, okay, let's see, Saturday is going to be my focus day. And so instead of practicing the pieces that I've been working on all week, I'm going to. Let's see, the first Saturday of the month I'm going to work on technique, and the second Saturday I'm going to review my music. And the third Saturday I'm going to do sight reading. And the fourth Saturday I'm going to review my music again.

How much easier would that make your practice the rest of the week to know that you're covering everything, just not trying to keep all those balls in the air at once? The trick here is rotation you don't need to do everything every day. So choose how, choose your system. Choose how you want to do it. But you know, make it easy on yourself. You don't have to do everything every day. Okay, that's number three. Number four.

Let go of two goals in order to achieve one. I mean, how many things are you really trying to accomplish? That's what this question is about. If you are trying to.

Work your way through this exercise book and learn this piece, and memorize this piece and prepare a one hour repertoire and do this, you can see this goal is related to. This little statement's related to the last one, right? If you have too many goals, you're not going to get any of them done. Once again, limit yourself, let go of some of those goals and choose one. And then when you've achieved that one, you can get to the next one. But by only having one goal, that allows you to work on it with focus, which is what allows you to achieve the goal. All right? So once again, you don't need all those goals at once. You'll have them in series. So start with one, get that one done first. Granted, there may be goals that piggyback, right? Like you might be able to, to work on one big repertoire goal, say, while you're also developing your technique, and maybe that's another goal. But don't load yourself down with too many. Let go of everything that you can, everything that's getting in your way of achieving that one goal. Okay, that's number four. Number five, let go of doing more practice and try doing more focused practice.

Now, granted, this could apply to any of the things that I was talking about before, right? You could be, you could reduce the number of goals, or you could have a focused day, or you could be learning fewer new pieces, and that would help your practice be more focused, and you wouldn't have to do more practice in order to try to accomplish all those things. So that's part of it. However, there's more to it than that. Oh, you knew there would be, right? Okay, so think about it this way.

If you only had. Well, let's, let's pretend that you have an hour every day to practice. If you only had 45 minutes instead of that hour, and you still wanted to get the same amount of work done, you still wanted to practice the same things, how would you rearrange your practice? What would you do with that 45 minutes to still get everything that usually takes you an hour done? Now this is my favorite on the list, by the way, because I love thinking about efficiencies, and I love thinking about things like double duty practice. Okay, well, let's see. If I use this passage from my piece as my technique work. Ah, that'll save me some time. Or perhaps if I don't play the whole piece three times, but I play the whole piece once and then work on the spots of the piece, maybe that's a way to save some time. Or maybe you save some time by warming up on the hard spots in your piece and do double duty that way.

But learning to find those practice efficiencies is so powerful because it's not just going to save you time. It's not just going to make your practice more effective. It's not going to, at least in my example, just give you 15 minutes more that you get to use for something, right? But it's going to teach you how to teach yourself. It's going to help you learn what you need to do to really learn those pieces and to learn them well and to learn them quickly. It's going to show you a lot about what you do in your practice and how that translates to the way you want to play a piece. So you're going to learn a lot through this, and it's a fun exercise. Think, okay, this would be my hour of practice, but now it's going to be 45 minutes. And as I said, that gives you 15 minutes to do something else, right? You could play another piece or you could get a cup of tea or whatever it is that you want to do with that 15 minutes. It could be fun. I know you've. You've got ideas already. I can just tell. All right, that's number five. Number six, let go of performing and start sharing now. You know, we've talked about this before. At Harp Mastery, we don't think so much about performing. We try to stay away from that word. And in my Harp Mastery, especially our membership community, that's one of those things that is important to us on our scale of success. It's important to share your music with others, to play with and for other people. Music is about communication, but it doesn't have to be about perfection. It doesn't have. And we'll get to that in a second. It doesn't have to be about being the best. It just has to be about bringing your own self because you are good enough and your playing is good enough. So think in terms of sharing your music instead of performing and think about how that might open up avenues to you musically that you hadn't Thought of. I mean, if you're just sharing your music, not performing it, does that make it easier to think about taking your music to shut ins or to sharing it with family members who are far away or playing for a group of friends?

Playing at church, perhaps? Right? It's not about performing.

Sometimes it is, and for some people it is. But for most of us, if you're not, you know, playing a formal solo recital, it's about sharing. And I'll let you in on a secret. Even if you are playing a formal solo recital.

The people who learn to do that well are also sharing their music, not performing it. So let's make that vocabulary switch and see if that makes a difference for you. All right? And our last one here, number seven, let go of perfection and make music. You knew this was coming up, didn't you? And I sort of gave you a little clue a second ago. But perfection holds back more harpists than just about anything else. And I run into so many harpists who say, well, you know, I'm a perfectionist. And so whatever it is, there's not really room in music for perfection. Music isn't about perfection. It's about the moment, it's about the meaning, it's about a message, and it's about the people you're sharing it with. It's not about being perfect because you will never be perfect. Nobody is. Even the master performers. Even the ones, you listen to them and you think, wow, that was perfect. If you asked them, they would tell you it wasn't perfect. Now, the things they consider flaws are maybe things that you wish you could do. But.

You know, perfection is one of those, you know, one of those relative kinds of things. But it's not attainable if you can let go of thinking that you need to make it perfect and you think instead about just making it music.

Harp happiness will be not far behind. I know that that's a hard one to do. But if this is one that you particularly resonate with, if this sounds like you think about ways in which you could let go of perfection, you could play a piece for someone before it's ready. You could start a new piece before you felt like you were ready.

You could forgive yourself for mistakes. You could be more satisfied with your playing. Now, I'm not talking about, you know, setting the bar so low that you don't feel like you are playing anything with quality. That's not what I'm talking about. We strive to do our very best all the time, but it's not going to be perfect. And don't expect it to be because your expectations will never be met.

But when you let go of having to be perfect, of having. What are other. Other some other ways to say that, of having to be excellent, having to be the absolute best you can. When you can let go of that and decide that it's really about the music and about making the music the best that you can make it and letting it be good enough, ah, that's where the magic is and that's where you'll be able to start really enjoying your playing.

I know it's hard, but it is something you can do. And I urge you to give this a try. So let me give you a quick recap of all seven things I think you might want to let go of. Let go of results and embrace the process.

Let go of learning however many new pieces and just start with one.

Let go of trying to do everything every time you practice. Rotation, my friends, rotation. Let go of two goals in order to achieve one.

Let go of doing more practice and try doing more focused practice.

Let go of performing and start sharing.

And number seven, let go of perfection and just make music.

It sounds so easy. And I know it's not. You know it's not. And if you are suffering from overwhelm, find one of these things and try it today. If you're not suffering from overwhelm, at least just at the moment, you must be doing something right and so let me know. But I would urge you to find one of these things and see if you can tweak what you're doing now.

To make your heart pulling even more enjoyable for yourself. Ooh, there's a radical idea. Okay, so those are our sacrificial leaf ideas for you. I want to remind you about the Momentum Miracle Intensive. If you're looking for some momentum, if you're looking for some help setting goals or with some of your practice techniques, this course is great for that. So the link is in the show notes and you'll also find it at heartmastery.com, but read about it on the webpage and see what you think it's an easy course and that it's just a couple of videos and a big PDF and you can do as much of it or as little as you want on your own time in your own way. But it could make a big difference.

To finding momentum and sustaining it through this spring and summer season. Next week here on the podcast, we're going to talk about the best exercises for fill in the blank. We're going to be talking about some of the most common technique challenges that we harpists face, and I'm going to give you my very favorite Fix It Fast exercises for each of those. So don't miss next week's podcast. It's going to be fun, it's going to be very informative, and hopefully it'll help you find fix some of those finger issues we all have. In the meantime, remember, every day is the 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.