How to Focus on Doing Less to Get More Done - PHH 183

There are only so many times that you can do something before your efforts don't yield you any result. And if they start frustrating you, then they are actually counterproductive. That's the truth of the law of diminishing returns. So if that's the situation where you find yourself, there's an easy fix for this.

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 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 get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Heart Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and 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 speed spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join Us just go to harpmastery.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Are you feeling a little bit scattered or unsettled at the moment? It's no wonder. Chaos is all around us in this crazy world, and there's precious little we can do to fix it. But the chaos in our own personal harp world is something completely different. If you're feeling any chaos or overwhelm about your harp playing, I have good news for you. This kind of chaos is something you can fix. Absolutely. Even in a year when we aren't bombarded on every side by messages of gloom and doom, these last few weeks of the year are hectic. In the midst of the holiday festive preparations and the holiday music preparation, we struggle to find focus. There have been times in the past when I have alternated between frantic practice sessions and times when I've tried to practice but ended up just sitting at the harp, unable to figure out what I should be practicing. There was so much I felt I should be doing that finding the focus to actually do any of it was nearly impossible. Those were frustrating and demoralizing times for sure. Of course, that too much to do and too little time to do it. Feeling isn't exclusive to the holidays. But today, as the holiday countdown is beginning, it seemed like a good day to sort out the harp overwhelm. So you can put these ideas for finding focus into action. Now we'll talk about the three kinds of overload. The overload we create, the overload we accept, and the overload we imagine. And I'll share how I deal with them. I also want to help you explore the most common focus fiends. The habits we think are helpful but are actually robbing us of our time, energy, and, yes, harp happiness. We'll banish the sneaky focus fiends, and we'll start hanging out with some new focus friends. But before we get started, I had a couple of focus opportunities that I wanted to be sure you knew about. One, of course, is our getaway retreat that is coming up in February. The dates are February 12th to 16th. It's going to be a fun time. And of course, this is an opportunity for you to get away. That's the word we use. But this is not an escape from something you. It's an escape to something. This is your chance to get away so that you can learn, so that you can accomplish, so that you can share, so that you can be with harp friends. So our getaway is an escape for sure, but it's a productive one and it's the perfect time to focus. Now, I want to let you know that this is the only retreat that we're going to be holding in 2025. We will not be doing a fall retreat this year or a summer retreat. So the only retreat we're holding is the one in February. It's the perfect time to be in Florida. It's beautiful weather. And of course the retreat is a great time to feel free to focus. So please check that out. There's a link in the show Notes to today's episode and of course you can find it under Upcoming events on the Heart Mastery homepage as well. And you'll find it in the iOS app. If you have the Heart Mastery app, you can click right through from your app and find out everything you need to know about the retreat.

Next, opportunity to focus I told you I had two and this is a fun one. Every year at this time we announce our 12 days of harp Happiness Extravaganza. Some years, like last year, I do 12 new arrangements and I share one every day so that you can actually get terrific new repertoire for Christmas or the holidays or any, any kind of time. But but this year we're doing this a similar thing to what we did two years ago. I have created one new arrangement and we're going to spend the 12 days of harp Happiness learning that arrangement in depth. So starting from December 1st and going to December 12th, there is either a video or a live call every day to help you learn this piece. Plus this year we are doing a lucky 13 live call on Friday the 13th. That call will be at noon Eastern time. So this is part of our My Harp Mastery membership. So if you're a My Harp Mastery member, you don't have to do anything. You will be getting the 12 days of harp Happiness just automatically showing up in your library. And those live calls on the two Mondays the first two weeks of December, they'll be your usual My Heart Mastery calls. And we'll be working through these arrangements on those. And of course you'll have access to all the other videos and the PDF of the arrangement as well as I'm not going to tell you today what the name of the arrangement is, but you can certainly find out when you when you click through and you'll look at it. If you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you can join us for just $12 and that will get you the same access as our My Heart Mastery members access to the arrangements, which are downloadable PDFs, to the videos and to all the live calls. So this is always a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to teaching you this new arrangement. I'm pretty excited about it. And there are actually three different levels. There's certainly an advanced level, there's an intermediate level, and I've been careful in that intermediate level not to put any pedal or lever changes so it's really accessible. And then there's a reduced version. If you want to learn something quickly and you want to learn something new, that reduced version will be the way for you to do that. So all that is coming up and you can once again, you'll find out by looking in the app you'll have. You can purchase it there if you're not a My Heart Mastery member. If you are, you don't have to do anything because it's just showing up in your library and you will see it there, too. So please know that if you go and purchase this today.

Not all the materials are there yet. The videos will be coming out day by day. And.

Next week I should have all the introductory materials and the PDFs up for you so you can get up and running even before December 1st. But it'll take us till, you know, probably next week to get those up for you. So feel free to join us for this. I certainly hope you do, my Heart Mastery members. I know I'm gonna look forward to seeing you on those calls and sharing those videos and arrangements with you. And if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, no worries. You can purchase this whole course for just $12. So that's the 12 days of harp happiness coming up very soon and starting, of course, in just a couple weeks, December 1st. Gosh, the time goes. So.

And that leads us right back to our topic, doesn't it? We need to figure out how to slow everything down and focus. Let's acknowledge right up front that practice is not like most things. You can't just do it and get it over with. It's not a once and done. It's not like cleaning a closet where once you've cleaned it, it's going to stay clean until you put something else into it, right? But it's not like a piece of art that you can just hang on the wall or a letter that once you've written, you can send it off and it's done. Practice is a habit. And what this means is that no matter how much time and effort you put into getting something exactly right, once you get it right, you still have to do it again. Now, this can translate into frustration when you think that, okay, well, I did it, but that doesn't mean it's going to be good tomorrow. All right. I know that this can sound sort of like Sisyphus. Do you remember Sisyphus? He was the guy who was sentenced. He was a tyrant, a tyrant king in ancient Greece. And he was sentenced after death by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain. And every time he rolled the boulder up the mountain, it rolled right back down and he had to start from the bottom and roll it up again. And that was his job for eternity. Okay, that's not our harp job for eternity, I promise. Practice is not a life sentence for us, but it really helps when it starts to feel that way to remember two important things. The first is what I call the 3T rule. Trust in small touches over time. Trust in small touches over time. Work in those little chunks and realize that if you do those little touches on something every day, over a number of days, it's going to become more reliable. It's going to work. That's where the habit part of practice comes in.

But if you're one of those, and I think sometimes we all are, but if you're one of those who is still tempted to believe that more work, more practice, today is going to get you where you want to go faster. I want to remind you about the law of diminishing returns. This is true. It's been true since they first started talking about it in the 18th century, and it's been true for before that, right? That there is a point in any process where doing more without changing anything else, where doing more produces less. This first showed up. They first applied this to agriculture, but it applies to just about everything. And for musicians, it translates into this. There's really only so much progress you can make in one day because you're going to get. You're going to have to do it again. Or you might look at it this way and say, okay, past a certain point in your practice, the more you try, the more you fail. I mean, we've all been there, right? That, you know, you do it again and it's not quite right, and you do it again and it's not quite right. And finally, you're just going down this wormhole and it's getting worse and worse instead of better.

I could tell you that that's the time to stop, but really the time to stop was before that. And that's where that 3T rule comes in. Trust in small touches over time.

But I want to go way further into this topic today than just those two basic principles. Now, you can take those two principles and make sure that you are applying them in your practice. And they'll help keep you on track and help keep you from feeling frustrated and feeling overwhelmed. But there's a lot more we can talk about, and I'd really like to start by digging into what overwhelm means. Okay, not what the word really means, we get that. But those three kinds of overwhelm or overload, things that just seem to pile on, once we start looking at what they are, we can start sorting them out, and we can get out from under the overload, and we can start to take charge. So the first kind kind of overwhelm, I think, is the obvious one, and that's overwhelm that we accept. These are things that we say yes to when perhaps we don't really have the bandwidth to say yes to them. And that could be everything from, you know, making all the cookies and cakes for a reception for something, to taking on additional responsibilities for something else, to just saying yes to one more concert, maybe, than we should have. So keeping that in mind, as we start accepting these things, you know, that's important, right? But once you've accepted them, then we have to either figure out how to ditch them responsibly or how to fulfill those obligations. But nevertheless, it's a real sense, a real aspect of overwhelm. Then there's overwhelm that's not so real overwhelm that we imagine, and particularly in our heart playing. This comes, I think, in light of things that we feel we should be doing. Like maybe you feel like you should be practicing everything every day, or, you know, be sure that you do all your technique work and you do all of this and all of that. Nobody has time for everything every day.

You can have time for everything some days, and you can have time for most things most days, but everything every day. Not realistic. There are other things like this. Imagining that we should have a perfect technique all the time, or that we should be able to do something when really, if we're having trouble with it, there's probably a reason that we have to still do some growing before we can get there. So taking the should out of our vocabulary, I think is very helpful. Anything that has that kind of an aspect that's overwhelmed, we don't need, and we can ditch it right away. It's not real. That's overwhelm we imagine. But here's the third kind of overwhelm or overload, and it's the hardest one, because it's the overwhelm that we create. My friend MJ Likes to say that all harpists are overachievers. And I think she probably is right. We harpists are gluttons for punishment. We are overachievers. And that can lead us into an overwhelming situation. So we need to be careful about that. We can be over committed. We can be over eager. Oh, I want to learn this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece. In essence, this is our impatience to play the music. We really want to do this. And so we take on more and more, and we create deadlines for ourselves. We create goals and benchmarks for ourselves that add to the overwhelm. And this is what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the things that we do every day that perhaps aren't really serving us in that they're creating more overwhelm than we need, and they're robbing us of our ability to focus and actually get the work done. These are going to be the focus fiends that I was talking about a moment ago. The first one of those I call the just once more syndrome. We've all been there, right? You're playing it and you're working really hard, and you're trying to get this one passage right. Maybe it's one measure, maybe it's an entire piece. And you think, okay, that was pretty good, but I'll do it just once more. And it was pretty good, but it still wasn't right. I'm going to do it once more, and I'm going to do it once more, and I'm going to do it once more. And then all of a sudden, you're in that wormhole. This is what I described a moment ago, right? This is that law of diminishing returns. There are only so many times that you can do something before your efforts don't yield you any result. And if they start frustrating you, then they are actually counterproductive. That's the truth of the law of diminishing returns. So if that's the situation where you find yourself, there's an easy fix for this. Just cap the number of repetitions you're going to do. So instead of saying, okay, I'm going to just do more repetitions, and I'm going to do it till I get it right. I mean, that's so noble. That sounds like you're being the perfect student, right? I would suggest that you cap the number of repetitions you're going to do and say, all right, I'm going to do just five repetitions on this measure. And then I'LL go on remembering to trust in time. Trust small touches over time. Let time do its work for you. Do those repetitions, put that effort in, but give yourself a cutoff. This is also really important, not just for repetitions in practice, but if you're trying to make a recording, either an audio recording or a video recording, you know, if you've ever done it, these are really so much harder than you would think. You feel like you've got the piece ready and it's ready to go. And then as soon as you hit that record button, all kinds of stuff starts happening and we feel very unsettled and it's. And it just doesn't go right. So we do it again and we do it again and we do it again and we do it again. Now, I know that you want a really good recording, but what you have to realize is that really good recording might not come in one day. So limit yourself to the number of takes that you're going to do in one day. And use your own energy level, your own tolerance for frustration, your own ability to stay calm and unflustered as the guide for how many. I know some people like to limit themselves to three. I will do five or seven before I just turn off the recording and say, nope, done, done for today. I'll come back to it another time. Remember also that once you get a good one, stop, just stop. You don't have to keep going for a perfect one. So try replacing that just once more, Focus Fiend, with a slightly more user friendly phrase like, okay, I can come back to this tomorrow. And you'll see there's an immediate difference in just a sense of relief. The overwhelming can go right away. You don't have to make it perfect today. All right, here's Focus Fiend 2. I called this one the Juggler syndrome. These are for the people that have too many pieces to practice. They have where they're trying to do too much in one practice session. This is truly overload. And you know, if your music stand has so much music on it that it starts to sink and it won't stay up at the right height anymore, you know, you're a victim of the juggler syndrome, so let's take some of those things away. I could probably also have called this the Coco Chanel syndrome. You know, the legendary fashion designer, and she was quoted as saying, before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off. Now, for those of you who like to research things, there's possibly no evidence that she really did Say this, or at least that she originated the saying, but it certainly fit with the fashion idea of somebody who, you know, imagined the little black dress as every woman's perfect wardrobe staple. But. So here's the idea for us. Before you sit down to practice, consider the music, and then take one piece away. Now, I'm asking you to consider the music, not to consider what you think you could get done or what you think you should do or what you think you ought to do. Consider the music that you're making. I want to work at this. I want this piece to turn into this. And so it's going to take some time. Now, I know I talked about those small touches. Yes, but if those touches are too small, they're not going to satisfy you, right? So you need to release the idea of trying to squish everything into one practice session, because, frankly, even if you try to squish it all in, you're not going to get to everything anyway. And if you do, the amount of time you're going to be able to spend is not going to be enough to make you feel like you're making any progress. So before you sit down to practice, think about the music that you want to make. Ah. And then take one piece off your music stand. You can take more if you want. That's okay, too. But this is a way to a calmness of attitude when you sit down to practice. This is how we can find our focus and free ourselves from all the frenzy, right? So just sit down, be realistic. Be more than realistic. Give yourself a break. Think about what you want to play, and take one piece away. By the way, this also works not just for numbers of pieces that might be on your stand, but for maybe things you think you ought to be, should be. Ooh, dangerous word again, including in your practice session, like, oh, well, I should be doing technique, and I should be doing sight reading, and I should be doing some theory work, and I should be doing some review work, and I should be doing some memorization. Give yourself a break. Take those things away, and you'll probably have to take more than one off your plate. You're not going to get everything done in one day, and so don't try. The last focus fiend is the one I call the overthinker. It's about having too many objectives at once or too many goals or trying to do too many things at once. Now, I would direct you back to the word priority.

Priority used to be a singular word, right? I don't know when it became a plural word. But truthfully, I mean, you know, I understand what we mean when we're talking about priorities, and I sometimes use the word that way, too. But I guess really, you can only have one most important thing at a time, right? You can have one priority. I don't know how you have multiple ones. And when you're playing music, there is only one priority, and that is the music. It's not your technique, it's not your fingering, it's not anything else. And you need to release all the rest of that until you're practicing for that specifically. Now, here's how this plays out, and here's why I think this is a focus fiend. I have worked with people who are trying to practice a section, and they're trying to get it right, and they're trying to control all these things at once. They're trying to have perfect technique, and they're trying to have every finger in the right place, and they're trying to have every other little detail in place every time they practice it. And that's too much. It's too much for a mere human being to do. So have a repetition where you concentrate on your technique, and then don't worry about your technique for the next repetition. And let's concentrate on flow. And you know, the fingering will come along. You can work on the fingering for a repetition. That's fine. And all these pieces will come together. This is a perfect example of where your small touches over time will come into play. You can have a limited number of repetitions, and you can devote one to technique and one to fingering and one to whatever else you want, and it'll all come together over time, and that's okay. True focus requires us to let things go, to let our practice work its magic over time, rather than trying to force a result with just one more repetition to practice one less piece in a practice session so that we can experience growth and satisfaction with the others. By the way, that saying of Coco Chanel's is often interpreted as a statement about balance, which seems really appropriate for our discussion today. True focus is focusing on one thing at a time, knowing that we don't have to do everything at once. And it's trusting the magic of time. So do a little bit less this week and see if you can get a little bit more done and be a little bit more relaxed at the same time. That's the kind of harp happiness that I would wish for you.

A quick reminder that we've got our 12 days of harp happiness. That extravaganza starts on December 1st, but we're making it available, or at least available to sign up for starting today. So you can find the link here in the show notes or on the app or on our website. So you'll be able to sign up for the 12 days of harp Happiness. And actually, next week's podcast is going to be a discussion that's related to that particular piece. We're going to be talking about the music of John Field and Frederic Chopin, and if you know their music at all, you know that they did not write for harp. These were pianists, but but we often play their music and I want to be talking about that next week on our podcast. So until then, I wish you a wonderful week and I want to remind you 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 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.