Here’s Your Sign: How to Tell if You’re Making Progress - PHH 197

And we have to do the right kind of practice to make the progress that we're looking for happen. So it's not just practice, but it's practicing the specific things that are going to lead us to progress. And this is where lots of us get stuck.

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 and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp 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 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 joinharp hyphen now. Welcome to the show. The day this podcast episode is released, we will be living day 55 of this year, 2025. So according to the calendar, we've already had 55 days this year to get things done, to grow, to accomplish. We've had 55 days to play the harp. If you set goals at the beginning of the year, this is a great time to check in on them. Are you where you thought you'd be? Are you ahead of the game, checking things off your list and moving on to your next steps? If you are, here's a huge high five from me. That's the way to create harp happiness. Today we're going to revisit your goals. We'll look at how far you've come, we'll confirm your direction and realign your course. If necessary. We will focus on the progress you've been making and where your next steps may be. But if you haven't seen the progress that you'd hoped for or expected, no worries. Progress is tricky to measure and sometimes hard to spot. Even when it's happening. When you're walking the path, you can't always tell how far you've come or how far you still have to go. And that can be unsettling or even frustrating. We're talking today about how to create progress and, and more importantly, how to measure it. I'll share the three things I think are absolutely necessary for you to make progress, and I'll give you some ideas for progress markers you can use to make sure you're moving in the right direction. I want you to keep this in mind too. Sometimes all you need is a fresh look at where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. It is often just that simple. And I think that's what our time together today will help you do. Find those simple next right steps to move you and your harp playing forward. Actually, I just got done teaching a lot about those right next steps to go forward. Recently we just finished the Harp Mastery Retreat in Kissimmee, Florida. Had a great time with five fabulous retreaters. We just had a terrific time doing everything harp. I mean, we played, we worked, we had a good time. We, of course, we are all in the same house. And so it. One of the retreaters mentioned it just felt like a family and I think it does. And that's what I love about these retreats. So that just finished up, we had a great time and I just want to give a special shout out and thank you to, to the retreaters who were there and of course to my special Gold Circle members who were there before the retreaters and we spent some days together working and learning and having a great time. And that was wonderful as always too. So thank you all for being the wonderful harpists and people that you are. It was great to spend time with you. Couple things that are also happening now at Harp Mastery that might be your right next steps forward. We have redesigned our coaching program and it's now a lessons program so it has a lot more flexibility than the program we had been using before, still features our very wonderful Harp Mastery certified coaches, and it's still geared toward taking you where you want to go. The coaches work with each one of the harpists in our program to be their compass, their guide, showing them where to go. They challenge them to to take those big steps in the right direction. And of course they're there to champion them all the way along the journey. So we have a newly redesigned program, as I said, and I'd love you to go to the coaching page on heartmastery.com and check it out. It's a really flexible program designed so that you can take your lessons at the frequency you want, you can work on what you want, and the coaches are there to guide you to help set the right direction for you to set that course so that you get where you're going and don't miss any of those important things you might miss along the way if you're just doing it on your own. So as I said, we have the best roster of coaches and I'm so pleased that they are part of our Heart Mastery team. You will love them and it's easy to sign up. You can just hop on over to the coaching page and get right in there. Unlike the program we had before that required you to wait until we reopened the program, you can jump in at any time. However, since we are reopening the program and of course we have some of our continuing coaching students already in the program, our coaches rosters are a little limited, so don't wait. I would encourage you if you're thinking about coaching, check out everything that is on that webpage and get your lessons set and reserved now so that you know that you have a spot in your favorite coaches roster. So please check that out. I've put the link in the show notes. Or you can just go to heartmastery.com, go to programs and you'll see the coaching page there with all the directions about how to get started. As you may know, we have a new course for our My Heart Mastery members every month and we have lately been offering Those courses on sort of an a la carte basis. To those of you who aren't My Heart Mastery members, if you haven't gotten the bug to commit to the full membership yet, but you're interested in some of these courses, our seminar series is the perfect way to do that. It's just, you know, you get to take the course for that month and then no other obligations, no continuing membership, just that one off course. And we offer it for the ridiculous price and of $12 a month, this month or next month, I should say coming up in March, we are sort of taking an Irish twist and we are working on a new arrangement. I did variations on the Irish ballad Bendemir's Stream. So we're taking that very familiar tune and we are doing a whole set of variations. I've composed a theme and six, I believe, variations. And the coaches move be working with you week by week, teaching you exactly how to work on all those variations. So you'll get sort of the technical tricks and workout that come with a usual set of variations. Plus you'll have all the musical insights and things you need to make this piece really, you know, share worthy. I mean, I think you could play this anywhere, anytime, and people would enjoy it. And I hope you will enjoy it too. So if you, if you're a My Heart Mastery member, that's what you have to look forward to coming up in March. If you are not, you're welcome to join us as a My Heart Mastery member. We'd love to have you. But if you're not quite ready for that step, do check out our seminar course for March Variations on Bendemer's Stream. And you'll have access to those live calls and all the recordings of those calls and the PDFs that go with it. So you'll get an entire piece and instruction on how to learn it and play it for just $12. Can you believe it? Okay, so that's what's going on at Harp Mastery. But let's see what's going on in your harp playing right now. Of course, I'm talking about progress. That's what should be going on in your heart playing right now and in mine and in all of ours. Right? We want progress every day, but sometimes progress is elusive or sometimes it's invisible. It's really hard to figure out if we're actually making progress. I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a formula for progress, you know? Okay, just do this, add this, wait, this, whatever it is I'm thinking. And maybe I'm just thinking spring here, but I was thinking about those seed packets. You know, when you go and you buy those seed packets, I. I always have loved looking at the displays of them in the stores because it's. They just are burgeoning with possibility. Right? Oh, I could plant carrots, I could plant cucumbers, I could plant lettuce, I could plant flowers. All these things, these nice little packages. And the whole secret of the plant is right inside that little paper packet. And maybe you've had the same experience that I'm going to talk about, but maybe you're just a better gardener than I am. But, you know, I get the seed packet and I look, okay, I need to do it this way. I need to plant the seeds this way, and then in this amount of time, they're going to germinate and I'm going to see sprouts, and it's telling me everything I need to know about how to monitor the growth of that seed, what kind of progress to expect, what it's going to look like and what to do. Okay, well, when it gets to this stage, then you want to thin out the seedlings. It's great, right? It's right there on the seed packet. It's got directions. Our heart progress doesn't come with directions. But to go back to that seed metaphor for a moment, I'm reminded of a story. My mother was a city city girl, born and raised in the city, in Philadelphia. And when she and my dad got married and they moved to the suburbs, she was entranced by the idea of starting to garden. And so she got all the seed packets and she got all the books and all that sort of stuff, and she planted her seeds. And she was very excited because she knew that, you know, she had to take care of these things. And so she got out there every day and she weeded and weeded. And then she was really mystified at having followed all the directions. None of her plants came up. And she spoke to a neighbor or two ones who were more experienced in gardening than she was, and she discovered that all those things that. That she was imagining were weeds that were sprouting in her garden were actually the little seedlings. And so she had pulled up all the seedlings that were starting to grow. She didn't make that mistake again. She realized, oh, okay, so some of those things coming up might be weeds, but some of them are going to be plants, and I need to let them grow. And my point with that story is that we don't always know what our progress is really going to look like. I'm not worried about the weeds here, we're not worried about that. But we are needing those signs, right? We need those signs to let us know that we're on the right path. And unfortunately, our heart progress isn't mathematically predictable. It doesn't come with a timetable or a pretty little seed packet. So we really need to understand what goes into creating our progress and what progress actually looks like for whatever it is we're trying to make progress on. Progress is growth. And that means that it's a process. It's not a box that you can check off because you don't get done with progress. It's something you're continually making. So instead of checking the box at the end of it, since there's no end, we measure it in growth stages. Kind of like those marks on the door jamb that we use to measure a child's height. You can give it those kinds of markers and we'll talk about how to do that so that you can see, just like you can on that door jam, exactly what kind of progress you're making and where your growth is. Now, you can also give progress a timeline, but it certainly doesn't come with a built in one. And a timeline can be helpful. It can help you keep moving forward instead of just going in circles. And we'll talk more about the timelines in a little bit. But right now I want to share with you the three things that I think are absolutely necessary for progress. Now, they all start with the letter D, so you can remember them. And the first one is direction. Direction is pretty simple. If you're going to make progress in something, you need to know where you're going. You need to have a destination, you need to have a direction, a way to go. Progress only happens going forward or upward. It doesn't really happen in a circular motion. Right. It doesn't meander. We want it to go kind of straight ahead. So what might a direction look like? Well, it could be to improve something, maybe you want to improve a skill. It could be to learn something, maybe like learning a piece or learning a particular skill that you haven't tried before. It could be just to grow. Maybe you want to grow as a musician, whatever that might look like, and you better get specific for that. Or it might be to grow your repertoire. Right. Maybe you just want to have pieces ready to play. You don't need to have an endpoint to your direction. Your direction is simply going to be a direction. It doesn't have to have a point of arrival. Sometimes things do. If you're going to learn a piece, well, you know, you need to. You will learn it, and you'll have a certain number of things completed. But even with that, there are different kinds of learning a piece, right? Do you want to learn it to perform it? Learn it to perform it from memory. Learn it just so you can play it for yourself. They all have different levels of requirement is a word I can use there. But in any case, the improvement, the learning, the growth, all of that is part of progress. And as I said before, it happens going forward and upward. You can think of it kind of like a spiral staircase where you're going upward and upward. You may be retreading some of the same skills, but at a higher level. So that's what we're looking for. And remember that it's the direction that's going to guide you. If you don't have a direction, you. You won't have progress. Sort of the opposite of direction would be meandering, wandering, just sort of, you know, la dee dah ing through your practice. And I think that is a number one enemy of progress right there. If you don't have a specific direction, you won't be able to make progress. You actually might grow and improve in certain areas, but if it's not directed toward one particular thing, your progress is going to be slower. Makes sense, right? However, direction by itself is not enough. And that's where the second D comes in. And that's desire. Desire is essentially the motivation for your direction. It's your purpose. You can think of it this way. If you know where you want to go, then your next question is, why? Why do you want to go there? This why is important because it's going to help you keep your focus when Mr. Squirrel comes, when those distractions, oh, I'd like to learn this piece instead. I'd like to work on this. Oh, maybe I should work on this. All those other ideas are going to be easier for you to resist. To put in that, well, I'll do that later pile. Because you have a reason to pursue a particular direction, it's going to keep you on track. In other words, now, this why for your progress could relate to your big why, why you're playing the harp. Or it could just be a smaller project. Right. Simply, what is going to change for you when you make this progress? I think that's the essential question. And it's really important because it can help you make sure your destination is right for you. Right now, so what might change when you make the progress? You've got your direction. You think, okay, I want to improve this, or I want to learn this or grow in this way, because it's going to do this for me or for my playing. Now, this is how that question can help you. Let me give you an example. For instance, maybe you're trying to develop a repertoire and you've got one big piece, like a really monster kind of piece that you really love. Well, if your object is to develop your repertoire, learning that one big piece may not be the right thing to do. Now, it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of energy, a lot of your practice resources in order to do that. What might facilitate developing your repertoire a little faster might be learning several shorter, easier pieces because they'll give you more stuff in your repertoire. Now, maybe the big piece is the way to go, maybe the shorter pieces are the way to go. But when you ask the question, then you know that's the question. What will change for me when I make this progress? Well, when I have learned this big piece, I will be able to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the answer we're looking for. You won't say, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course. You'll fill that in with what's important for you. Here's another way to look at that question. What is it you really want? And does your progress, destination line up with it?

Going back to the repertoire question, if what you really want is to be able to play some background music or to play at a senior center or something somewhere, you then how does that thing that the stake you've made for, okay, I want to learn that big piece. How does that fit? Does that line up with this goal? Or are you better off with several shorter pieces? This helps you course correct before you get too far down the wrong course. Got it. Another important reason to consider your desire. If the direction isn't important enough to you that you can't make it line up with your desire, then you won't be able. You won't invest in it, you won't commit to it. You won't do the work you need to do to make it happen. So your desire doesn't have to be big and lofty, doesn't have to be a supreme kind of goal. It just has to fit with you now. So with direction and desire, you have two of the three essentials for progress in hand. Without those two, we can't go anywhere.

I like the idea of progress as going somewhere so let's compare this. You're going to get in your car, you're going to go for a drive. Obviously you need a destination. That would be our direction, right? It's our plan, it's our map. It's where we want to go. No big deal. There, we got it. Now, the desire, I think that the desire is sort of like starting the engine. You get in the car and you turn the car on and it's ready to go, but you still need to go somewhere. We've got the power, but we're still sitting in the driveway. We know where we want to go, but the car's not going anywhere. And that brings us to our third D, which is doing. Doing is stepping on the gas. That's the commitment we need to make. We have to do something. Turning on the car, sitting in the car, okay, that's all really good, but until we actually put the car in gear and do about it, we're not going to get anywhere. It's the action component of progress. Because without action, there can be no progress. The change we're looking for requires our commitment to doing the work to make the change. That's stepping on the gas. Now, lots of times it's really tempting to stop at that starting the engine phase and think that we've actually done something. Oh, I know what I want to do, and I'm creating a plan to do it. Well, the plan is great, the energy is great. But until you're actually doing it, nothing's going to happen without actually doing it. We can't go anywhere. There's no progress. And I know, you know what, the doing is right. That thing we have to do is practice. And we have to do the right kind of practice to make the progress that we're looking for happen. So it's not just practice, but it's practicing the specific things that are going to lead us to progress. And this is where lots of us get stuck. I don't believe the sticking part is for most of us actually doing the practice. I think most of us are willing to get in there and do the practice. And I don't think the sticking part is actually not knowing what to practice. I think the harder part is to have very clear signposts that keep us on the right path and let us know at frequent enough intervals that we're going the right way. Think of them as like landmarks. If you were driving your car again and you were going somewhere unfamiliar, you'd be really comfortable. If you had landmarks, every, I don't know mile, couple miles, whatever. On your journey, if you had landmarks where you could say, okay, yes, I'm passing the store with the blue sign and now I'm passing the giant chicken next to the road or whatever it is, you'd get comfortable knowing that, okay, yes, I can see I'm going the right way. I'm still going to be there. I'm going to get where I'm going. Those signposts, those landmarks are really helpful. And I think most of us do one of two things, or maybe we do both of them, but we don't post our signposts frequently enough so that we can check our progress and realize that we are making progress frequently enough to keep us motivated and energized about that progress.

And then the other thing is, I think we forget to recognize it, that when we get to that signpost, we don't take that moment and say, okay, look, all right, I got this far. What's the next leg of my journey? Where am I going next? What is my next signpost? You know, you could think of it if you like, like the little trip odometer on your car. Okay, I'm going to go 3.7 miles and then when I'm up there, I'm going to reset and I'm going to continue.

But that's all this is. It's knowing what your signposts are and setting them frequently enough that you can see the next one from where you are. Right. If you can't see that next one, if it's too far down the road, it's very easy to get distracted or to get off course. We want to see the next one. And this is what I'm calling the here's your sign part. Right? You need to know what your sign is. Now, some destinations, some directions come with very clear benchmarks, very clear signposts. If you're learning a piece, it could be, all right, well, now I'm going to learn this section, I'm going to learn this next page. I'm going to learn this hands together. I'm going to get to this particular tempo, I'm going to do this particular kind of practice in order to make it flow. Those are very clear benchmarks. Often when I talk about setting goals, I talk about time bound ones. We're going to take a 90 day goal. We're going to break it down into progress goals that happen every month. We'll break that down into weekly benchmarks. This is a slightly different way of looking at that. We're taking the time factor out of it. And we're just using those, those little waypoints, those signposts. Here's your sign. We're using those as, you know, jumping points, right? Like, okay, I just need to get to this next one, and then I can recalibrate. I can go, phew, okay, made it this far. Where's my next one? And that allows you to see progress, and that's powerful. Now, sometimes those benchmarks, those signposts are very clear, like I just talked about with the piece. Sometimes they're a little bit trickier. If your destination, if your direction includes something like better, like, I want to get better at sight reading, well, then you have to do a little bit of work to decide what better means. What does better look like for you? You're going to have to define it because otherwise you won't know when you've made progress. What does better look like? Well, if you want to get better at sight reading, you could consider that part of your getting better is going to be involved in the doing. So I'm going to read through two pieces every day for two weeks. And at the end of two weeks, I'm going to review one of those pieces. And my test, my marker is that I'm going to read all the way through that piece without stopping. And maybe you'll want to add other criteria. Like, I'm going to do it at the right tempo. I'm going to do it hands together. I'm going to do it with dynamics. But you set what that marker is. But give yourself a marker. Don't just say, well, I'm going to sight read every day in the hope that I will get better at it. Give yourself a way to see that you are better at it. And don't put it out more than a couple of weeks. Give yourself a fairly reachable goal in a pretty short time frame, and that's where progress will be for you. Maybe you want to get better at working with the metronome. Well, you could start using the metronome to help you count your scales, because that's a pretty easy way to start working with a metronome, learning to listen to it. And then maybe you'll move on to exercises or etudes with the metronome. And then maybe you'll play around with the note values. Have it click every note or every other note or every third note or every fourth note. Maybe then you'll do it with a piece. There's no particular order for these.

No particular. Absolutely. You have to follow this step, then this step, then this step. The steps can be particular to you, but when you've achieved the step, you know you've made progress. And that's the point. So the point is you need the plan, right? You need that direction. Where are you going? You need the desire. Why is it that this is important to you, at least for now? It doesn't have to be a big, hairy, all important kind of goal. Just, okay, I really want to get this done because if I get better at sight reading, if my sight reading is better, I can learn more music faster. Okay, that's a pretty good reason. All right, I like that. And then you need to do it. You need to put in the time, you need to put in, you know, put feet on that desire. You're going to actually do the work that you need to do to make that happen. It's really that simple. Progress is really that simple. So just a quick recap. You need the direction, the desire and the doing so that you can actually make progress. Then you need your signposts so you can see progress. Set them close enough together so you can see the next one from where you are. Be very specific about what those signposts are. And when you get there, do your happy dance. Check it off so you have some proof of progress. And lastly, remember that progress is going to show up in its own time and it's going to show up when you least expect it. Just focus on the direction and the doing and you don't have to worry about the timeline. It will show up, I promise. Next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about etudes and about two different approaches to an etude so that you can really get the most bang for your practice buck. But you'll be getting different kinds of value. A lot of people know that they should be doing etudes, but they don't quite know what to do with them. How to make them different from an exercise, how to make them different from a piece, but both of those things. But we're going to be bringing all the beautiful things that an etude can do for you into play and talking about them on the podcast next week. So you have some ideas of how to practice them and how to get the most benefit from them. So it's etudes on the podcast next week. Let me remind you that we have our new coaching program open. You can go to our coaching page at heartmastery. Com. You'll find it under Programs. You can go right there and read all about the features of the new lessons with a certified heart Mastery coach.

Program. And you can read about that and you can get started today. You just sign up for your planning call and we'll get you get you moving. Our seminar course for March, the variation on Bendemer's stream, is also available for you. You'll be able to find that on the homepage or in the app. And if you are not a My Heart Mastery member, if you are, you already signed up for that, of course. But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, this may be something you want check out and add to your learning that way. So until I talk to you next week, 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 is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to 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.