How to be Better than Perfect - PHH 180

Where perfection is fragile, excellence is enduring. Excellence allows for creativity of the moment. Excellence can allow for a flaw or two that doesn't detract from excellence.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Anne 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 now. Welcome to the show. The sinking of the unsinkable Titanic still fascinates us all. Over a hundred years after the disaster, it's the subject of all sorts of speculation and theories and there's one of those that is actually relevant to our topic today. The question is this. If the Titanic crew had performed all the safety drills they were supposed to, if there had been enough lifeboats, and if the passengers had been drilled in lifeboat procedures, would so many have perished when the ship went down? Some people have noted that a routine safety drill on that fateful Sunday morning was not held. And this has been attributed to several factors, including high winds and the morning church service on the ship. But even with that, there was only lifeboat accommodation for about half of the passengers and crew on board. Was the ship thought to be so well designed that safety preparedness could be relaxed? Well, probably not. But the safety regulations for passenger ships that we have today came in part out of the hard lessons of the sinking of the Titanic. In fact, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was established in 1914 following the disaster and mandated, among other things, that ships carry sufficient lifeboats for everyone on board. So what's relevant in this story for us? Well, if you've ever worked hard to make your piece bulletproof or crash proof or otherwise unsinkable, you may have been ignoring some of the important preparation to help not only prevent performance disaster, but to recover from it. When you're preparing to play a piece, expecting that mistakes will happen and learning to recover from them is the most important part of your practice, you can hope that you won't make any mistakes, but if you haven't prepared for how to meet them, if they happen, you're playing a dangerous game. The icebergs are there and you may or may not hit them. But just as some emergency preparedness may have saved lives aboard the Titanic, your HARP emergency preparedness could save your performance too. So on today's show, we'll explore the myths around mistakes, perfection, excellence, and safe performance preparation procedures. Oh, that's a lot to say, but there's a lot for you to learn in this episode too. So grab your cup of coffee and let's get started. And safety first, don't forget to buckle your seat belt. Now, if you want to do a little bit more work on the topic that we cover today, you can always look in the show notes for that related resource. And today I have linked to a blog post called Perfection, Productivity and Performance. And this will give you just a different look than the one we're looking at today at how to combine those things, how to perhaps re negotiate your desire for perfection in terms of a little bit more of a reality check. So the link to that blog post is in the show notes and and I've also linked there a link to Join our November Seminar series. Now this is the second month that we've done a seminar series and our October seminar series has finished up and November will be starting. Our topic for November is called On a Roll and this is a month long course on Rolling chords. Now remember, the seminar series is just a little subscription to the Monday Night calls that our My Heart Mastery members have access to. Now this is not a My Heart Mastery membership. Our members have access to a library of courses and they get to hang on to the replays forever. They've got extensive archives. There are other resources like the Scale of Success, but I realize that that's not for every harpist, at least not all the time, and not maybe today. So here's a way for you to keep learning on the topics that we explore in the My Heart Mastery membership by joining us on those Monday calls. Of course, if you can't be live on the calls, you have access to the replays of those calls as well, so you can watch them anytime. Those replays stay active for you for about a month after the course ends, so but you could download them and have them with you forever. Of course you also have access to the PDFs that go along with this because they're pretty hefty as well, with lots of exercises and drills and the concepts that we'll be going over on the calls. These calls are taught by me and by the certified coaches. So there's a lot of learning, lots of different takes on this material. And I can tell you that rolling cords is one of the most important topics I think that we harpists need to be addressing. It's important because it's so expressive. It's such an important part of our vocabulary. So if you have ever wanted to roll your cords better or learn how to fit them into your pieces a little bit better, this is the seminar series for you. And you can join us now using the link in the Show Notes. You can also just join us by clicking on the link right in the app if you have our iPhone app. So that's our November seminar series On a Roll, and I hope you can join us for that. I'd like to start by talking about the title that I chose for today's episode, how to Be Better Than Perfect. Okay, I get it. This could be a little bit provocative. Is there really better than perfect? Well, I think that there is, and here's my thought. I think perfection is very fragile. Perfection. If you could Achieve it in your playing would mean that it would be free of mistakes. It would be free from the possibility of improvement. And I think that that's something that's just unrealistic and perhaps even ignores the creative possibilities that are inherent in playing any piece of music. There are lots of quasi motivational sayings around perfection, like practice until you can't get it wrong. Well, I think that's wrong because things are always changing. Creating music is a living art. It's living in that moment, no other moment in time. We don't want it to be so static, so stamped in perfection, that it can't live and breathe. Perfection is fragile. All it takes is one little thing that's different and boom, perfection is gone. I don't think perfection is a goal. I know that it often seems like we hear perfect performances, but remember the performances that are put out on CDs or produced recordings like that, Perfection is artificially created. Granted, the performance might seem flawless when it starts, but the producer and the artist go in there and they can tweak and fix note by note to make sure that everything is as close to perfect as they can get it, so that the flaws are inaudible to most listeners. When you hear someone performing in a concert. We've all had this experience. We think it's a terrific, flawless performance. Wow, that was wonderful. And then we find out from the performer later that they didn't consider it flawless. So perfection is an ideal. Perhaps, but I think it's a misplaced ideal. What I'd like to substitute for that is the word excellence. Where perfection is fragile, excellence is enduring. Excellence allows for creativity of the moment. Excellence can allow for a flaw or two. That doesn't detract from excellence. So here's what I'd like to suggest. I would like you to never settle for perfection when excellence will do. Let me say that again. Never settle for perfection when excellence will do. Think about this. Now. I have to say I borrowed this from a character in a fiction book that I was reading, and I tweaked it a little bit so that it suited our purposes here. But I think it's so powerful. Perfection doesn't need to be our goal. It's an unrealistic goal. As I said, I think excellence works just fine. So never settle for perfection when excellence will do. Write that one down. Okay? Now what I'd like to do is talk about how to create that excellence in terms of three different things. We want to talk about the reality of it. We want to talk about recovery. What Happens when mistakes happen, how to recover and how to make your results, your playing, your performances repeatable. So we're talking about reality, recovery, and repeatability. Let's start with reality. Reality is both the easy part of this and the hard part of this. It's easy in that we know mistakes happen. We know mistakes are going to happen. It's hard because we practice all the time to prevent those mistakes, to practice out those mistakes, to get our music as correct as it possibly can be. So we're always working with two sides of this question here, of this performance dilemma that are essentially incompatible. We know mistakes are going to happen. We're practicing to prevent more of them from happening than really need to be. So that's the reality. We know that we don't want mistakes. We know we're practicing to get rid of them, but. But we also know they're going to happen. This is just a fact, and it's a fact everywhere. This is why we have fire drills, because we don't expect a fire, but we want to know that if there's a fire, we're prepared for it. This is why airlines have emergency safety cards. They don't expect an emergency, but they want to be prepared for it. And I think this is what. Where our practice fails us, we understand that mistakes happen. We know we're trying to fix mistakes, but we don't actively prepare for the reality of that. We don't have our safety cards. We don't have our fire drills. We say, oh, yes, play past your mistakes. And that's great. That's what we need to do. We need to play past the mistakes. But. But we don't really give ourselves, at least, I don't think we give ourselves enough drill, enough safety procedure, practice to truly allow us to recover from mistakes. So once we own the reality that mistakes are going to happen, we need to move to step two here, my step two, anyway. Recovery. We need to practice recovery. Now. Realize this is different than preventing the mistakes. Most of our practice is trying to get rid of those mistakes, right? So we try to prevent them. But once we truly acknowledge that mistakes are going to happen and we can't prevent all of them because they're mistakes, we don't know where they're going to be, then we understand that correct preparation allows for that, it's going to go beyond error prevention to error recovery. And that's what most of us don't practice. I mean, think about it this way, right? Going back to the fire drill. Fire drills have procedures that are practiced. If There's a fire. This is what we do. Bulletproof vests, Same kind of thing. And you know, bulletproof's an interesting word, right? Bulletproof, crash proof. We use these as words to describe our preparation so that our performances can be bulletproof or crash proof or whatever. I use those words too, Right. And they're fine. But remember that this doesn't mean that bad stuff isn't going to happen. A mistake can still happen. Think about a bulletproof vest. If you're wearing a bulletproof vest, at least this is what I understand from all the TV crime shows. If you're wearing a bulletproof vest and somebody shoots you in the vest, it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, but it's going to keep you from dying. And that's the kind of prevention that we need. I think we can do better than that. After all, we're not going to die. We're not talking about something that's lethal here. It's a mistake. We're playing the harp. This is all there is. It's not that big a deal. It's not life threatening. But we still need to have those protective procedures in place. And I think playing past our mistakes is not enough. So what could recovery practice, what could our own fire drill practice procedures actually look like? Well, here are a couple ideas. Let's start with the tried and true technique of playing past mistakes. I didn't want you to get the wrong idea. And think from what I said before that playing past mistakes is not a valuable technique. It's an important one because it's how we just keep going. Right? We just play past our mistakes. But this requires us to play to something. We're not just playing past the mistake. That's kind of a negative way to look at it. We need to play to something. So in order for our playing past mistakes to really blur over that mistake for a listener so that they don't notice it, we need to be responsible musically to something that keeps the music happening.

Whether we've made a mistake or not. And there are two things that you can use for this. One is to keep the flow of the melody going. If you're singing that melody in your head and you're tracking it, and you make the melody of the piece more important than your mistake, that will allow you to play past the mistake. Or if you make your counting and the steady beat the music more important than your mistake, you'll be able to play past it. But that's the missing piece. I think for a lot of people, when they're told to play past mistakes. They still let the mistake distract them from what ought to be their primary mission, their primary directive, which is going to be to keep the flow. And whether that's the flow of the melody or the flow of the rhythm, the tempo, the pulse, whichever kind of flow works for your piece or works for you at that moment, that's what you need to be practicing. So your practice here isn't just playing past your mistake. It's actually letting the mistake go as you are playing the flow of the melody or the flow of the beat. That's what we're doing. That's what we're talking about when we talk about playing past mistakes. And that's really what you should be practicing. Not worrying about just playing past the mistakes, but practicing keeping that flow as your primary objective when you're playing. We want to be thinking about playing the music so that the mistakes that we may make along the way. Don't interrupt that. So that's a more positive, helpful way I think, of looking at playing past mistakes. It's not just playing past the mistakes. It's playing the flow of the music and allowing the mistakes to just, you know, fall under the radar, if you will. So that's playing past mistakes. But there are some more emergency drill procedures that you could actually use, things that help you think about a more profound mistake and how to recover from it. For instance, you could practice creating a mistake. Try starting in the middle of your piece and start with your left hand on the wrong strings or your petals just kind of set randomly and see if you start with all with these things wrong, can you play your way out of it? It's an interesting experiment. It's not something I'd spend a lot of time doing, but it's going to give you a lot of confidence to think, wow, I started in the middle of my piece and I had all this stuff screwed up, and I just started and I. And while I played, I managed to fix everything. That's a pretty impressive fire drill. Something a little bit easier. You could practice playing through your piece and skipping a measure every once in a while. Whoa. What would happen if I just skip the next measure and jumped? This is sort of simulating losing your place when you play, right? Like, ah, I looked back at the music and I didn't know where I was. Well, practice skipping a measure every once in a while. Just sort of plan for it and say, okay, I'm going to skip the next measure. Jump, and see if you can keep playing. How seamless you can make that. It won't be completely seamless because the music is meant to have that measure in there. Or try skipping a line every once in a while. Just let yourself bloop, move to the next line, you know, not the next line, but the line after that. So that you're practicing skipping a line. Can you keep on going once again? These are sort of, you know, practicing the fire drill. If this is what happened, let me see if I can actually do it. But what I want you to think about here is that these mistakes are going to happen, and you have choices. For instance, if you get lost while you're playing, you could jump to another section, jump to another line, jump to a place that you know in the piece. This is why we number sections. It's why we think about our pieces in. In sections, so that we don't have to go back to the beginning and start over. If you screwed up your petal changes, you could stop and you could reset your petals and then go on. If you have a memory slip, you could jump to that next section, that next sort of home base place in the piece where you know where you are. But remember, you always have choices, and the choice is really yours, and none of them are are bad. You could play on through your mistake as if it never happened. You could jump to a place you know, you could actually stop and just start over, either at the beginning or right from where you were. None of those are deal breakers. I've done them all myself, of course, and I've watched master performers do these as well. Just play on past a mistake or jump to another section or just stop, say, boop, let me fix this. And they fix and they go on. This is about recovery. And recovery is in your control. If you decide to make it part of your plan, it doesn't have to be scary. It just has to be something that you've prepared for so that when that emergency happens, you know what to do. That's your recovery plan. Now, I hope that you can sense the strength in this system, the confidence that it can give you, knowing that you've actually prepared for what may happen. And once we realize and finally own to ourselves that mistakes are going to happen, and we allow ourselves to prepare to recover from those mistakes, you are in a much stronger place. You can perform or play anywhere you want to play, even play for yourself with much more confidence. And this goes back to what I said before about perfection being fragile. There is strength in excellence, excellence that allows for what may happen. Perfection doesn't Allow for that. So if we remove perfect from our ideal, if we remove the idea of being perfect from our playing and from the way we prepare to play, then we have something that's really interesting. We have the opportunity to create repeatability. And by that I mean knowing that you can produce a similar result, a similar performance every time, not identical. Because that might be perfection. And we're releasing the idea of perfection here. But we want to make our playing as consistent as possible, allowing for the differences that are likely to happen from one day to the next. We don't feel the same way every day. We don't have the same energy level, the same coordination. We're tired some days, right? Maybe we've had too much coffee on other days. Whatever it is, we don't approach every day at the harp the same way. So we're not looking for the same performance. We're not looking for that perfect playing every day. We're looking for something that we can call excellent or good enough for today. Because we don't always need to strive for excellence every day either. It's a long term pursuit. Excellence, right. Doesn't mean you have to have excellence in every practice session. But when we're looking for repeatability, we're not looking for note perfect. We're looking for a similarly excellent result. And how would we do that? First, you need to decide what is important. What is most important other than every note? When you stay focused on every note as being important, you're losing sight of the music, because the music is so much more than the accumulation of all those notes. And so you need to decide what you really want that piece of music to be. What's the most important thing you want to convey? And then practice that. Whether it's the music itself, whether it's the flow or the tone or the mood, or some other expressive thing, or maybe it's even the rhythm of a particular piece. Decide what is important. Just don't place the importance on every single note. The magic of this is that when you put your focus on the music, or the flow or the expression, that's what will be conveyed. When your focus is on every note, that's what a listener hears. And they'll hear every single wrong one, trust me. But when your focus is on a bigger picture item, something that's more related to the overall communication of the music, then that's what a listener will hear too. So this is an important focus shift and it's something that you should be doing in your practice as well. Yes, there's A time to drill every note. But there's a time to release the performance of every note and start thinking about playing the music. Step two in repeatability is practicing those emergency procedures we talked about when we talked about recovery. There's no substitute for being prepared. The beauty here is that when you are actually prepared and you've prepared on purpose for those emergencies that might come up, fewer of them come up because you're calmer about the things that actually happen, you know you can handle it. In my mind, this is like when I've been on very bumpy airplane flights. I don't start to worry as long as I see the flight attendants looking calm. When those flight attendants look calm, I know I don't have to worry. And this is not that different, because when you know you have your emergency procedures in place, you can be one of those calm flight attendants and those little bumps affect you less. Lastly, I would encourage you to not only allow those mistakes to happen in your practice, but to consider embracing them as moments of serendipity, moments of discovery. Not every mistake leads you to a bad place. And when you're just practicing, it can be sort of interesting to follow that mistake and see where it leads you. Did you push a couple wrong pedals? Well, you know, sometimes that can be interesting. I've had times when in my practice, I've pushed wrong pedals and thought, wow, that isn't what it's supposed to be. But it's sort of. Sort of an interesting sound. What if I continued playing that way? What would it sound like? And then I'll experiment with that a little bit and then go back and fix it. But this allows you to change the way you think about mistakes. They don't all have to be bad. They can be moments of discovery. They can be jumping off points for improvisation. They can be preparation for emergency procedures if that's what you want to turn them into. But they don't all have to be bad.

So let yourself discover the beauty in an error. And when you haven't made any errors, allow yourself to embrace the beauty of that, too. So never forget that music is all about enjoying the journey and the creation of it, and that every single moment is different, so you might as well enjoy every single one. So to wrap up our discussion here, I want to bring you back to that little saying I gave you earlier. Never settle for perfection when excellence will do. I hope I've given you a different look at perfection and excellence today and shown you how excellence can be better than perfection, how it can be a creative, exciting place that allows for the right notes and the wrong notes, all in service of a beautiful musical experience. So never settle for perfection when excellence will do. Now, next week on the podcast we're going to be talking about Rolled Chords and this will be a lovely introduction or a supplement to the Rolled Chords theme that we're doing in My Heart Mastery. And of course that you can access even if you're not a My Heart Mastery member. You can join us on those calls by purchasing our November seminar series. It's a four week live call series with the PDFs, all the instructional stuff. You'll find the way to access that right in the Show Notes link here on our homepage or right in the app. So if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you can still join us for that course On a Roll, all about rolling cords. So that's there and we'll be talking about that next week on the podcast until I talk to you next week. Remember, every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

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