How To Improve Anything - Including Your Harp Playing - PHH 143

Foreign.

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. Welcome to the show. Today I am going to tell you how to improve anything. I know that sounds like a tall order, but we harpists are all about improvement. Every day, in every way, we want to get better and better. Many of us like this idea too. So slow and steady wins the race. Yes, but remember, tortoises live for a very long time. They can afford to take only the slow and steady approach. Some of us have a little shorter time frame in mind. I'm a fan of the author and productivity guru Brian Tracy. His book Eat that Frog is one of my favorites. When I need a little kick to conquer my procrastination. There's a quote from his book that I considered as a starting point for our discussion today. It's practice. The philosophy of continuous improvement get a little bit better every single day. But something about that left me a little unsatisfied. Yes, certainly the continuity of improvement, like practicing every day rather than once a week, is important for us harpists. However, that same philosophy is what seems to keep a lot of harpists from making bigger progress. When you seek improvement only in small stages, you get only small improvements. And I hear from harpists all the time who don't feel like they're getting anywhere and they're asking me to help.

And so I'm going to try today to shake up that slow and steady habit just enough to make the improvement that you're looking for actually visible to get where you're going faster. I've broken this down into three easy steps and one hard one. I realize that may not sound like the help you've been looking for, but I think it will be more encouraging than it might sound. Extra good News this is a system you already know and have been using, but perhaps you haven't thought of applying it to your harp. Playing it really will make everything just a little simpler and should help you identify what you need to do so that you can actually experience growth. Sometimes that tortoise strategy of slow and steady wins the race isn't what we're looking for. We secretly know that the hare was onto a good thing by sprinting ahead. He just didn't have the good sense to actually get to the end before he stopped. You're smarter than that, I assure you. A couple of things before we get set on the road to improvement here. One is a quick reminder that I've got that new webinar coming up tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 13th, and it's the webinar on Improvement on the magic of 1%. And we'll be talking not just about those small steps that compound and add up to big progress, but also how to speed up your progress. So it'll be a real expansion on the sort of thing that we're talking about here in the podcast today. So go ahead, hop over to heartmastery.com, register for the webinar. Or you can just use the link here in the Show Notes. As always, the link is there for you to register and if you feel like you are getting in a little too late and you missed the webinar, go ahead and click that link anyway and we'll see what we can do about getting the replay to you. So we'll keep that webinar open for a little bit. So that's the webinar. Remember, we also have a brand new Hub challenge going this month. Our challenge for the month of February is called Express Yourself and it's all about different ways to practice expression in your daily harp playing. The challenge is free. You just need to sign into the hub and you'll be able to participate that way. And just as we did in January, we'll be having a prize drawing for the winner from those who complete all four steps of the challenge. And the winner will receive a 25 gift certificate to anything in our Harp Mastery Shop. So that's our February Hub Challenge. And once again, the link for that is in the Show Notes. You got it. Okay. And you'll also find a link there to a blog post that will help give another little look at some of the things that we're talking about on the podcast today. So we have lots of avenues for improving your harp playing and the way you approach your heart playing here at Harp Mastery this week. So be sure to join us for as many of those as you can. And right now we'll talk about how to improve anything. Perhaps we better start out by defining exactly what improvement is. I mean, we know improvement is getting better, but better is not really a very helpful word. So when we're talking about improving something, improving anything, and particularly improving anything in your heart playing, we need to be a little bit more specific. Now, of course, there are different kinds of improvement too. There's short term improvement and there's long term improvement. Short term improvement would be similar to something like cramming for a test, right? You want to get all this information in really, really quickly. But short term improvement, think again about cramming for a test. We know that doesn't stick, right? And we can do cramming in our heart playing too. Like we could cram for a lesson or for a rehearsal or for a performance. You suddenly, you know, frantically practice because you know that deadline's coming up and then, you know, you manage to get through what you have to get through. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all that practice that you did that week absolves you from practicing again.

When you practice really hard for one week, it doesn't mean you've stored up practice and you don't have to practice the next week. Practice isn't like that. It's that continuous improvement that I referred to in the Brian Tracy quote. So we've got that idea. Short term is not what we're looking for. We're looking for long term improvement. That's where our playing really starts to make progress. And when we're thinking about improving anything, it's a long term kind of prospect. It doesn't mean it has to be a long, drawn out process though. And that's what we're going to talk about too. So long term improvement starts with a regular connection, right? You've got to do that sort of daily kind of work, even if it's minimal. Like 15 minutes of language study a day helps ingrain not only some of the vocabulary and grammar, but it helps to create your comfort level and even better, your confidence level with that language. Same thing with harp playing. Of course. It's that continuous connection that helps. I mean, you know what it's like if you life gets busy and you leave your harp for a couple of weeks and you come back and oh gosh, it's so out of Tune and it's really hard to start and get back into it. And that little bit every day just makes everything so much easier. So the regular connection is a part of building long term improvement. And then of course, there's always a skill set that goes with improvement. And those skills kind of build upward and you are working on them a little bit like a, like a spiral staircase where you're going up and building and building and building. But in real life.

Skill building isn't quite that steady. Often you get noticeable growth in one of those areas while the others are just sort of simmering along on the back burner. And that can be a really good plan because you can develop a rotation plan that helps you progress and improve. Sometimes progress hits plateaus, which of course can be very frustrating, but, but they're also necessary. Those plateaus are the time that our brain needs to absorb and assimilate. Everything that we've been doing creates new information systems, new patterns for learning. But what's key here is that while improvement is getting better, it's getting better in a way that builds up over time through regular connection with whatever it is we want to improve and through the development of a certain skill set that is necessary to improve. So our first step in improving anything is going to be to figure out exactly what it is we want to improve and what the skills are going to be that are going to be required to improve that. So in just about any area of endeavor, there's usually a triad of skills. Okay, so there are three skills. But you know, I'm a musician, I like thinking of it in terms of a triad. I mean, think about foreign language. When you're learning a foreign language, there are essentially three things that are key. Vocabulary, the words you're going to learn, grammar, how you're going to put those words together, and conversation, being able to put those elements of the language together in a way that allows you to communicate. If you were talking about physical fitness, you'd be talking about building strength and building flexibility and building stamina or endurance. When it comes to heart playing those three key skills, I'll bet you could decide what they are. Those three key skills are really our technique, everything that we need to do to physically play the harp, our musicianship, everything that is about the craft of music, everything from expression to music theory, all that stuff, and then a repertoire, the music that we actually play. Now those are big topics, aren't they? Technique seems big enough itself. But then musicianship is a huge category with lots of different skills. Everything it could Include sight reading. It could include memorization or improvisation or just about anything. And then repertoire. We all know how much music there is in the world, right? And it's not just learning it, it's also playing it. So no wonder harp playing is hard. There's a lot to do here, and there could be a lot of things that you want to improve. So the first step in improving anything is to decide exactly what it is you want to improve. Improving your harp playing in general is a little too big a project to embark on. You need to do it one step at a time. So think about your skills, things you want to improve in terms of those three categories, in terms of technique or musicianship or repertoire. So perhaps in technique, maybe you want to improve your speed, or maybe your scales, or maybe your downward arpeggios. In musicianship, maybe you would want to improve your sight reading, or you want to improve your tone, or you'd want to improve your musical flow. Or maybe when it comes to repertoire, you have a piece that you particularly want to learn, or maybe you want to improve your performing skills. That's part of repertoire, right? Playing your music for others. So deciding on one of them is what you need to do. So you can't improve everything at once. You have to improve things one, maybe two, if you're lucky, at a time. The nice thing is that, like that spiral staircase of skills I referred to a moment ago, improving one thing is going to help you improve other things as well. It's going to, you know, have an impact across your heart playing. So that's the good thing. But you need to focus on one thing. So step one, decide what you want to improve. I know they all sound good, but trust me, pick one. So now we're on to step two, and that's this. You need to plan a measure. You need to know how you're going to measure that improvement. Otherwise, how will you know if you've done it or not? When we're in school, our improvement is measured through tests or quizzes or some kind of thing that gets a grade. Our harp line doesn't usually get a grade, at least not on an everyday kind of basis. So it can be very hard to figure out what a good standard is, what a good measurement is, so we'll know we've improved and improving. Once again, that's kind of hard. That's that word better. So we need to decide what that standard is, and we are the ones who get to set that. You know, say, okay, if I want to improve my technique, if I want to improve my scales.

Do I measure it based on my ability to play a particular exercise or a particular etude? Maybe to play it hands separately or hands together, Maybe to be able to play it at a certain tempo. Set that measurement for yourself. And there's not necessarily a right or wrong when it comes to this, you know, when it comes to that skill that we're talking about that you want to improve, you know where you are now, decide what that improvement is going to look like. And you don't have to set a way far improvement. I mean, if your scales, your hands together scales are 60 to the eighth note right now. You don't have to make them 120 to the quarter note or something. You don't have to set a huge goal for yourself. Just set a standard a step or two up above where you are right now and figure out what improvement is going to look like. How will you know when you get there? Technique might be an easy one to do because you can set a tempo marking for it. Something like some of the musicianship skills. Those can be harder. For instance, how do you know you've improved in music theory? Well, maybe when you get to the end of a theory workbook, there you go. That's one way to do it. Or what about your sight reading? How will you know if your sight reading is improving? Well, you're going to have to figure out how to set a goal for that. It could be when you can sight read something. Hands together at tempo with dynamics. Okay, we might need to pick a particular piece or a particular book or something to work through that. How about memorizing? How will you know you're improving your memorization? Well, what if you set an action that was memorizing one piece a week and that by the end of 12 weeks you would have, oh, give yourself a little bit of leeway. Ten pieces memorized. Wow, that's a lot. Be short pieces. If it was me, I'd be doing short pieces. But give yourself a measurement, one that's appropriate for you. Nobody else's standard counts here.

If you're looking to improve something in your repertoire, maybe you're going to learn a certain number of new pieces in a certain time frame or create a repertoire list and have, you know, a set of a certain duration, 30 minutes worth of music that you can play, or maybe it's a particular piece and you want to, you know, I'm going to play that piece and you're going to perform it and that's going to be your measurement. That's how you're measuring your progress. There are lots of different ways to do this. And the nice thing is that you get to set the measurement yourself. You don't have to measure up to anybody else's standard. You get to set the standard. Now, that's also the hard part because you have to figure it out. But don't be shy about it and don't worry that you're setting your standard too low or too high. You're going to set it in a way that works for you. That's the point. It's your improvement. Okay, there's step two. Step three is a fun one for a lot of people. Step three is creating your plan.

Lots of people love to plan. They love to write it out on paper. They love to say, okay, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this. And of course, planning can be tricky because sometimes improvement, particularly in heart playing, doesn't come on the same time frame we expect. But in any case, a plan is a good idea and in fact, it's sort of essential. This is one of the major components of the Spark practice journal that I developed. It's a major component of our coaching program because if you know where you want to go, that was our step one, that was our destination, right? And you think about what you want to improve and you get really clear on how you're going to measure it. You know where the end is, you know where you're going and how you're going to know when you get there. So now we just need to plan the route easy enough. We're looking for those benchmarks along the way. Particularly if this is a project that seems like it's going to be long enough, we might want some sub goals. Right? We're going to divide that journey into waypoints. For instance, if your objective, if the thing you want to improve is you want to learn to play faster, well, you're going to have to probably pick the vehicle for that. Is it going to be an exercise that you work with a particular piece, a particular etude, and then maybe you want to establish tempo levels. Okay, I'm at 60 now and I want to get it to 120. And so I'm not going to just wait till I get to 120 to measure my progress. I'm going to see what happens when I get to 80 and then when I get to 100. So you're setting those waypoints along the way, or perhaps you're Working on a particular skill. And you want your benchmarks, your waypoints to be like this. You could say, okay, I'm going to work on this particular skill. Maybe it's an arpeggio thing, I don't know. And I'm going to work on it in this exercise, and then I'm going to work on it in this etude. And then finally, I'm going to measure my progress. My ultimate destination is to have those arpeggios work in this piece. So that's a great way to sort of set out a plan. Say, okay, this is where I want to go. I want to get my arpeggios, you know, in shape for this particular piece. And I'm going to start with this etude or this exercise, Then I'm going to get to this etude, then I'll get to the piece. So you've measured that progress all along the way. And it's easier to create a plan when you have those halfway points. Or for a sight reading goal, you might decide that, okay, I'm going to start by doing weekly sight reading. And I'm going to make my sight reading hands separately. And then I'm going to move up to sight reading hands together. And then I'm going to be sight reading hands together with dynamics, and then sight reading hands together at tempo. Whew. There is ambitious. And to measure my progress at the very end, I have these three pieces that I'm going to salt away somewhere so I don't look at them. And I'm going to sight read through them as my little. My test at the end to give myself my little grade. And you know, where you're working, you know what you're working toward, where you want to go, and so you can set out the plan for getting there. If you're doing a set list for a repertoire goal, well, a set list starts with a single piece, so you can plan your waypoints that way. Now, you may discover along the way, while you're thinking about this plan, that there are sort of sub skills that are essential to what you want to do, and you may encounter them along the way. We've all had this experience with pieces we've tried, you know, that we've been trying to learn, and we work on the piece, and then all of a sudden it's like, wow, I didn't realize that my left hand was going to have to play this intricate pattern, and I'm going to have to get my left hand in shape a little bit more. So you might find those Kinds of things that slow your progress and maybe change your plan a little bit. But even there, you're still finding growth and you're still finding improvement, because that's something you would have had to address anyway. So those are our three big steps, the three easy ones. As far as I'm concerned. We're going to decide what it is you want to improve, how you're going to measure your improvement, how you're going to know when you get there, and then setting out the plan to get there. It's pretty logical, right? All these things are the necessary steps. It's a little bit like planning a car trip. You need to have that destination because that shows you the direction that you need to go. And it's helpful to plan for the things that you're going to need as you go and the waypoints that are going to help you measure the journey and help you sort of stretch your legs along the way. But all of these things are a little theoretical. None of them are, are the action steps. And improvement requires action. After all, the key to improving anything lies in identifying what you want to do and doing it. You can't learn to play football just by playing a video game or watching a game on tv. You have to actually play it. And you can't learn to play football by just going to the practice squad sessions either. You have to play in the games. You can't learn to play a piece just by practicing parts of it. You have to practice playing it. You can't learn to play faster scales without practicing playing faster. So here's the big takeaway. And it's going to lead us to the most difficult step in this four step process. It sounds really easy, but it really is the hardest thing. The most important step is that you have to do the one thing you know you need to do in order to improve. If you want to play a piece, play it. If you want to improve your sight reading, you have to sight read. If you want to improve your hands together playing, you have to play hands together. Unfortunately, it really is that simple. I know lots of us are looking for the, the magic steps that will add up to that, right? Oh, well, I want to improve my sight reading, so what do I do to improve my sight reading? You actually have to sight read. You have to try it. Now you can try it in steps the way I described a moment ago. You can start by sight reading hands separately and then you can move up to sight reading hands together. But you actually have to sight read. And if you want to get Better at playing hands together. Well, you need to do a lot more hands together playing. So it starts there. Now, this isn't about learning to suffer through the hard spots, right? To embrace failure. Like, okay, well, if I want to play faster, I'm going to have to play faster. And it's going to sound really messy. Well, sometimes that is it. But that's not what this step is really about. It's about owning what you want to do and then doing it. If you want to play for other people and you've been hesitant about starting to do it, well, you actually have to get out there and do it. Decide. So that if you want to improve your playing for others, if that's the improvement that you want to make, then what we're going to do is we're going to find a place to play and a date to play and we're going to put it on the calendar and that's how you're going to measure your improvement right there. I know it's hard, but it's about deciding if it's worth it to you to do it. It has to be important to you. It has to be your goal and your desire and not else's. That's what's key here. So I know it doesn't seem like I gave you enough answers. I know you would like me to have said, well, all you need to do is this, this, this, this. We laid out those steps for starting the process. Deciding what you want to improve, deciding what it was going to look like when you had made the improvement, when you got there, what your destination was, what the measurement was. And then we set out a plan for you to be able to get there. You see the power's in the plan, right? At some point in our step four here, you have to get in there and do it and you have to work your plan. But if you've created your plan, then you've identified the steps you have to take. And as long as you remember that whatever it is you want to do, part of that plan has to be actually doing it along the way. That's how you test where you are. It's how you know where you are. It's how you develop those skills. Going back to some of the examples we talked about before, like a foreign language, if you're learning a foreign language, you don't just learn the vocabulary and the grammar and then all of a sudden think you're going to be a good conversationalist. You have to be practicing that all along if you want to be able to converse fluently in a language. You have to be doing it all the time. Even if that means that all you can say is, hello, how are you? For a little bit, right? You have to get in there and start doing it. So if you want to improve your memorization, well, start memorizing little bits of things. Give yourself a plan.

But that's the real secret to improving. Improving is a series of steps. And when you know the direction you want to take, then you can order the steps to get there. That's all it is. It's not an oversimplification. It's just that the doing of it is so much harder than just laying out the plan. By the way, that's the part that we're going to be covering on the webinar, which is coming out Tuesday night. On that webinar, we won't be just talking about improving and making progress in those little small steps, but we'll talk about the two big things that are the biggest obstacles to progress and how you can turn those around so that they actually help power your progress forward. We'll be talking about working with the plan, but resisting the temptation to make your plan just a little bit too detailed so that you can't actually act on it. We're going to just enable you to take those steps, to start putting the basic plan into action and doing that magical fourth step, doing what you need to do to make the improvement start. And of course, I'll be talking about removing the speed limits, because progress doesn't have to be slow, improvement doesn't have to be slow. We can speed it up. I said that, you know, the improvement is in your control and so is the speed at which you improve. So we can talk about that, and I'll show you the ways that I think you can build progress and build improvement even faster. So that's on that magic of 1% webinar that's happening Tuesday. Tomorrow, if you're listening on the day when this podcast comes out, and if you listen to this a little later, think you've missed the webinar, Go ahead and check the link in the show notes anyway and see if we've made that replay still available for you. I'm hoping to be able to leave the replay up for a while, so if you've missed it, you still have a chance to get in and hear it. I'd like to close today with another quote, just something to think about, because I think that we tend to compartmentalize the practice that we do and the playing that we do. And, and when I was working on this particular episode, I came across this wonderful quote from the soccer great Pele. And the quote is, everything is practice. Isn't that a wonderful quote? Think about what that might mean to you. It just rang all kinds of bells for me, and I really enjoyed that. So think about that as you go through your week. Everything is practice. So quick reminders for the webinar for our February Hub Challenge next week here on the podcast. We're talking about technique. We are talking about technique beyond the basics. Yeah, you know, your scales, arpeggios, and chords. But we're going to be talking about those other things that you really want to be developing to keep your technique moving forward. More improvement. Look at that. What do you know? Okay, so I look forward to talking to you next week here, right back here on the podcast. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to the world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for being here 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.