How Not Setting Goals May Save Your Harp Playing - PHH 137

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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.

Happy New Year and welcome to the show. It's the first morning of a new year and I am feeling, as I do every new year, that sense of excitement and possibility that inhabits those empty calendar pages. I can hardly wait to see what 2024 will bring. Now, since this podcast is going live on New Year's Day, I thought it was particularly appropriate to talk today about goals. We talk a lot about harp goals at heart mastery. But today I actually want to elevate our viewpoint and look at harp playing goals with a broader perspective. Now, smart goals. You might have heard about smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time based. That's one of the ways people describe them. But smart goals have been the gold standard of productivity experts for quite a while. And those five criteria combine in a way that makes success look almost like a mathematical certainty. They feel powerful because they are so concrete, so definite. But music isn't like that.

Music is about creativity. It's not about following rules. It's about choosing which ones you want to follow. It's not about creating cookie cutter results. It's about developing the experience and confidence you need to create the same piece of music over and over again, with each time feeling new and fresh. So when we try to create smart goals for our harp playing it it can feel like trying to fit that square peg in that round hole. Now, sometimes clear and well designed goals are helpful. We use them in our coaching programs to help keep the coach and the harpist she's working with stay on the same page when the expectations and desired outcomes are clearly stated and referenced regularly, there's more traction and progress comes more quickly. However, that kind of system is less helpful for most harpists working on their own. We have a tendency to over design our goals or resolutions to the point where they're restrictive and create a cycle of failure rather than of success. Just think about a daily habit you've tried to instill. Everything goes along well for a while, and then there's one day when you break your streak. Now, that first time you might get back on track pretty quickly, but when that next slip comes, you may be off track for a couple of days. That's when the guilt sets in and pretty soon you've all but given up. Now, giving up does not sound like harp happiness to me, which is why we are talking today about unsmart goals. Goals that aren't aimed at making you toe the line, but are created to give you freedom to pursue what you love. Playing the harp. Now that sounds like a guaranteed success plan for 2024 to me. As always, there are a couple resources for you in Today's show. Notes 1 is a link to a brand new challenge we have in the Harp Mastery Hub starting today, and it's called our 2024 harp happiness challenge. And I'll be telling you a little bit more about that at the end of this episode. And and this may be a really great way for you to follow up on what we're talking about today. There's also a link to a blog post I did a while ago called why Being a Better Harpist Isn't Good Enough. And if your goals are that unspecific, oh, I just want to get better at something. This might be something that you want to read. And we'll be talking about that concept that I mention in that blog post a little bit later on today as well. So there's a lot of meat there. So I encourage you to take a look at those show notes. If you can't find them in your podcast player, just hop over to harpmastery.com, look at the podcast page, click on today's episode, which is 1:37, and you'll see the show notes there with all the links for you. All right, so we'll be talking about those as we go along, but right now I really want to talk about the difference between sort of smart goals and what I'm calling unsmart goals. I'd like to sort of illustrate that point with an example. If you were watching television in the late 1960s in the United States, this will be familiar to you, but if you weren't, I'll fill in those details. Now, in the United States, we have a soda, a pop, if you live in some parts of the country called 7Up, and it's a lemon lime flavored soft drink. And the problem for 7Up was that everybody was used to drinking cola. Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, it was all about cola. And this was lemon lime. And although the soda had been around for a while, 7Up was sort of a historic kind of a soda. It was losing market share. And so the challenge for 7Up was how to differentiate itself from the cola market and yet still seem vibrant and interesting so that they could gain enough share in the marketplace to sustain their brand. And so this led to a marketing campaign where 7Up was labeled the UN Cola. Now, UnCola wasn't just the antithesis of a cola. It wasn't just, oh, look, these are these brown cola drinks and we have this beautiful clear lemon lime drink. It wasn't just that it was different, but it was a appealingly different. Now you might remember the Apple computer marketing campaigns where it was, you know, think different. Well, this was well before that. Computers hadn't even come into people's houses yet. So the UN Cola was cool. It was like, oh, wow, this isn't just not a cola. It's on purpose, an UN Cola. It was a disruptive sort of strategy. It just shook up the marketplace a little bit. It's all of a sudden, you know, look, not being a cola isn't a bad thing. Not being a cola is cool. So it was a unique choice. It was an alternative choice. It wasn't just about being different, it was about seeking the different and being unapologetically different. And so that campaign was what led seven up to an even bigger market share than they had expected.

Now, in our harp playing terms, this is. We're going to sort of pare this way down. But what I want you to think about is the difference between a goal that forces you into a particular thing. I should do this, I must do this. You know, all those sort of, okay, I should be playing this music, I should be working on these things, I should be doing this. That's sort of fitting in. I want to think about that sort of disruptive idea. And I want you to really just put those sorts of usual goals aside and I want you to think about your harp playing from a different perspective. We're going to look at it just a little bit differently. And so instead of creating one of those big, heavy kinds of goals, I want you to think in these three layers, we're going to talk about aspiration, ambition and action. Aspiration, aspirations, the fun one, right? That's what fuels our desire. And aspiration is important. Aspiration is thinking big. It's your vision, it's your dream.

Sometimes we get caught up in the practical and we think, well, if I, you know, all I. All I want to do is this, and if I do enough of those little things, I'll get better. And while that's true, I think if we don't have that big dream in front of us, we don't have enough necessity, enough urgency. We don't have really enough emotional commitment in what it is we're trying to do. So feel free to dream, feel free to have a vision, because that's what fuels your desire. And that brings us to ambition. Ambition stokes your energy. It's the let's do this mindset. It's okay, I'm going to get in there and I'm going to do this. And this is what it's going to be. And that's where our energy happens. Yes, it's pointing us to our aspiration, at least eventually. But that's where the energy for the action, our third step lives. It lives in our ambition. Action. Of course, that's where the dream happens, right? That's where we take that one step at a time and we move forward. Where I find it's easy to get these three sort of tangled up is when you mistake action and ambition. Ambition is often what we think of as action because that's where the action starts. It's the let's do this kind of idea. But the actions are small. The actions are so tiny that sometimes we skip over them. And because we skip, skip over those actions, our ambition loses the energy that we want it to create. So here are some examples. Here's an aspiration might be yours, might not. An aspiration might be to play a solo program. You know, you can just envision yourself, a beautiful dress, all dressed up in, on a beautiful stage, or maybe in a church or nursing home. Could be anything, right? But you, you see yourself and you're playing your harp and everybody loves it. That's your aspiration. Notice that your aspiration can be pretty unrealistic. It can be very glamorous. It can be totally dreamlike. Doesn't have to be bounded by reality. That's not what we're looking for. Go ahead and dream big. Might as well. If that's your aspiration, maybe your ambition would be to learn Some repertoire. Because you're going to need to play some pieces on this program. The action might be to decide on three pieces to start with. Look what a tiny action I picked. I didn't pick. Okay, I'm going to get in there, I'm going to practice, and I'm going to learn these pieces by this month. And I'm going to have this. No, just a tiny little thing. I'm going to decide on my first three pieces. That's where you need to start. Because once you've made that little decision, then you can start on the next one. The next one might be, here's the first one I'm going to learn. And then you could learn that one, and then you could start on the second one. So that you're going to do this in very small increments, but the increments are all pointing you in the right direction. Here's another example. What if your aspiration is to be able to sight read fluently? You can see yourself just being able to just pull up that music and read the pieces one after the other and just, oh, wouldn't that be great? Well, your ambition around that might be to practice your sight reading daily. Notice that's the ambition, not necessarily the action. What would your first action be? Possibly to buy a book of very easy pieces to read through.

Makes sense, right? But it's breaking it down into that tiny piece again. Here's a third example. What if your aspiration is to have flashy, speedy fingers, the kind of dazzling technique that just makes other harpists gasp? Well, perhaps your ambition would be to work on your technique. Sounds like a logical place to start. And really, if you, you know, every time this is one that excites me. I know perhaps I'm kind of a nerd, but just thinking about, ooh, those flashy fingers, that. Wouldn't that be great to have? And that's one of the things that certainly gives me enough energy to get in there and do my technique work. I don't know. As I said, I'm a little bit of a nerd that way, but that's okay. So if your ambition is to work on your technique, what might that first action be? Well, it could be to pull out your favorite exercise book. It could be all kinds of things, but it might be as simple as just putting new batteries in your metronome. And that kind of thing is the sort of thing that can stop us dead in our tracks if we're not thinking about those little actions. Like, oh, yeah, well, I can't really work on that tempo pyramid today because my metronome isn't working well. You probably have a metronome that you could use on your computer or on your phone, or maybe you have a wind up metronome. But if you need batteries for your metronome and that's what's stopping you from practicing your technique, that's what you need to do. Go get batteries for your metronome. That's your first action. It can be that simple. But it's those simple things that pave the way brick by brick for us to get further down our yellow brick road toward that aspiration, whether or not we ever get there. Whether or not you ever get that flashy, speedy technique or you can sight read like a wizard, or you're playing a solo program at Carnegie Hall. Whether or not your aspirations ever happen, your ambitions are likely to when you have those very small actions covered. Now I'm going to make this even easier for you. Hang on, how can I make this easier than just putting batteries in your metronome? I don't know. But seriously, there are really only two things that you need to do, only two types of actions that you need to take that are going to ensure that you reach your ambition, which is pointing you toward your aspiration. Whether or not you ever get there, it's a different story. But that ambition is what we want to serve. And the only two actions that you need to take that will serve that ambition, no matter what it is, at least, harp wise, are these two. You need to play and you need to practice. Now notice I've put them in that order, because I think playing is even more important than practicing playing. Whether it's just playing for yourself or whether you play for others. Just playing for your love of music playing. But to play and to enjoy your playing, that's so crucial. Granted, practicing is how we improve, how we make progress. It's how playing becomes more fun because we get better at all this harp stuff. But imagine how much fun it would be to just know that all you needed to do was to sit at the harp and to play. And that's going to keep that harp connection strong. It's going to feed your energy for playing the harp. Just playing. I know I make that point here on the podcast all the time, and I wonder how many of you are actually taking me up on that. I know that some of you are because I hear from you and you say, yes, I'm playing. And it's true. That's where my harp happiness comes from. That's where mine comes from. I love to play the harp. Do I always like to practice? No, not always. Practicing is fun because it helps me play better and I can enjoy the process. Practicing is how I get my playing to be as much fun as it is, but it's not the point. Playing is the point. And as long as you're playing, you're going in the right direction. Practicing is going to get you in that right direction faster. Practicing is important. We get that. We know that you're listening to this podcast, so I know you know that. That's nothing new to you. But remember to play. So if the only two actions that you take on a regular basis are to play and to practice, you're going to get closer to where you want to go. And that's really good news, I think. Now there's a third category. This is an optional category. I call it the mystery category. It could involve playing, it could involve practicing, but it's kind of like the off the board, the out of the box, the unplanned ideas, those serendipitous moments that just kind of come up like, oh, goodness, well, I hadn't expected to do this harp thing, to go to this harp circle meeting to do something. I hadn't expected that, but I did it. That's moving you toward your aspiration as well. So, you know, the mystery category is always kind of fun because it shows up when you're not expecting it. But playing and practicing, they're the keys. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned a couple of additional resources that you'll find in the show notes, and I just want to talk a little bit more about those right now. First is the blog post that I linked to, and it's called why Being a Better Harpist Isn't Good Enough. And this particular blog post sort of straddles that middle ground between the ideas that I've been talking about today and those more concrete kind of goals, the kinds of goals that people talk about as smart goals or maybe bhags, big, hairy, audacious goals. And this sort of straddles that middle ground. So if you're not quite comfortable being as loosey goosey, maybe as the sort of strategies around goals that I talked about today, then you might want to check out this blog post where I talk about Harp Happiness Upping Goals, which is a pretty cool acronym because it's hug with two Hs. So there you go. Harp Happiness Upping Goal. And the thing about those goals is that there are three criteria that I outline for those goals where it has to has to be in one of three areas, meet three specific criteria itself, and then have one important qualification. So you can read more about Harp Happiness upping goals in that blog post and it'll help you get a little bit more concrete if you really want some more direction like that. So I think that will be helpful for you. So the link for those is in the show notes or you can search the blog and look up, go to the search the blog page and look up Better Harpist and that blog post should come up for you. What's interesting to me about that blog post is that I wrote it in early January of 2020. So this was before the pandemic. And so it's an interesting kind of look at pre pandemic ideas, so might strike you that way too. The other resource that I mentioned is the new Harp Happiness Challenge that we have starting today in the Harp Mastery Hub. If you don't know what our hub is, it is our social media free social community. So it's ours, which means you don't have any ads, there's none of the social media weirdness, and it's totally free to sign up for. You can sign up for it@heartmastery.com or you can follow the link that I put in the show notes and that will take you to a page to sign up if you're not signed up or directly to the 2024 HARP Happiness Challenge. Now, this challenge is a four week challenge, but going along with the theme of today's podcast, it's pretty laid back. So on each week in January.

As you go through the week, you want to keep a list, just a simple list of some of the things that you do during that week to grow your harp happiness. Could be playing, it could be practicing, get a little specific.

But I think the playing and the practicing things are the big ones. But those mystery moments, right, those off the board kind of, ooh, I went to this concert or I read this book, they're okay too. So you can think about those things that you did during the week that were designed or designed to or accidentally created more Harp happiness for you. And then at the end of the week, you take a photo of your list and you post it on the challenge page right there and do that for all four weeks in January. And at the end of that time, we're going to draw a name at random from everybody's name who completes all four weeks. And some lucky winner will win a $25 gift certificate to something in The Harp Mastery Shop, whatever they like in our Harp Mastery Shop. Of course, just competing in that challenge anyway, and I'm making it sound much more formal than it is, but just participating in the challenge. There we go. Is going to make you a winner anyway because you're just increasing your harp happiness, so you certainly can't lose. It's going to be a lot of fun, so you might as well just get in there and do it. You will find it. Once you get in the hub, look at across the top for the challenges menu and just head into challenges and you'll see it right there. Right now. You'll see week one, 2020 harp happiness challenge, and you can participate easily. Just click that arrow and you'll be in there. And then when you're ready to submit your. Your photo for the week, go right ahead and do that and. And we'll pay attention. You don't have to have something for every day. Just what happened during the week. This is extremely low pressure and we don't give extra marks for, you know, the more things you do, it's just you participating your way. So no expectations here, just a lot of harp happiness. So I'd love to see you participate in that challenge. I will be participating myself so we can share our results as we go along. Next week on the podcast, we'll be talking about confidence and I'll be sharing specific ways that you can build, develop, grow, find more confidence. Remember that confidence is something that comes with experience. It's not something that just shows up by itself. It's not something that you can create all by itself. It's a result of a series of actions. And that's what we'll be talking about on next week's podcast. For now, I just want to wish you the happiest 2024. I hope it is filled with lots of happy moments and lots happy harping. As we go through the year and as we start, bear in mind 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. Happy New Year 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.