How to Prioritize Your Creativity and Still Get Ahead - PHH 156

So what if we decided that we didn't need to plan, we didn't need to think of our practice as being necessarily productive, we didn't need to think of it as directed toward progress. And we certainly don't want to put the pressure on or think of it as being perfect. So how can we substitute what can we substitute for those words that would make us feel a little bit more positive and a little bit more energized about our practice?

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp 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 and 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.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Are you a free spirit? A rebel? Or maybe you just hate being told what to do? I have to admit that sometimes one or more of those labels fits me. Most of the time, I toe the line, but there are moments when I just don't want to do the thing I know I should do. Now, I'm not talking about anything illegal, immoral or dangerous. It's more like sometimes I just don't feel like practicing. Or maybe I'd rather play the new piece of music I just bought instead of slogging through those four measures that are giving me so much grief. Going over and over those four measures doesn't feel like making beautiful music. It doesn't feel creative. And even though it may make me feel a little virtuous when I'm finished, it doesn't always bring me joy in the moment. Because playing the harp is not only as important to me as breathing, but because it's my job. I know I need to buckle down and do the important work, and so I do. But. But that doesn't mean that I have to shut my more creative side in a box somewhere. It does mean finding ways to nurture my more artistic side to feed those creative impulses and get my work done too. I've worked with students who struggle with trying to tame their own free creative spirits, and most of the time trying to tame it doesn't work. Creativity shouldn't be and truly isn't a force that hinders your practice. It can fuel your practice, helping you make progress faster at the same time that you're enjoying it more. So if you're one of those free spirits who resists having a practice plan or just has trouble sticking to one, I'm here to help. I want to help you get a new perspective on what your practice could be like if it didn't feel so much like homework and not like making music. This is also going to help those of you who battle shiny object syndrome and have stacks of music you've bought because you heard it and wanted to play it now. Actually, I have to admit, I fit into this category myself. And if you are on the other side of the fence and the practice plan is no problem for you, but you're not sure how to feel more creative, you're going to find some interesting ideas in this show, too. And while we're talking about having fun, I want to invite you again to our unveiling party for the new My Harp Mastery website. Everybody is invited. You don't have to be a My Harp Mastery member to attend the unveiling party, but I certainly hope that you will consider joining us. And I think when you see what we've got going, it's going to be so inspiring. So please join us. It is this coming Friday, May 17th at 11:00am Eastern. And you can join us either in the Harp Mastery Hub, which is our free.

Social community. It's our little social platform, but, you know, social without the. The pictures of food. Right. So it's. It's the Harp Mastery Hub. You can join us there or you can join us live on our YouTube channel. You'll find direct links to both of those in today's show notes, or you can just hop into the hub and you'll find it in the meetups tab or under the live.

Section of the YouTube channel. So that's this coming Friday, May 17th at 11am Eastern. I've got so much to show you. Our new Heart Mastery site looks beautiful and we've got two extremely cool things to tell you about. One is just totally going to blow you away. So join us for the party and I get to share all that with you on Friday.

That will be fun. And so will our topic for today. So let's get back to that. Whether or not it is your opinion that practice is fun, we still build a lot of shoulds around our practice. And I'd like to start by getting rid of that. After all, the more weight we put on our practice, the harder it is to get to it, the harder it is to feel like we can enjoy it. And when we think about practice, we put all these words into it that carry a lot of burden with them or could carry a lot of burden. They can be motivating, they can be inspiring. But sometimes if we don't feel like we're living up to them, they can induce a little bit of guilt. And the ones I've identified are all words that start with a P, so you might be able to remember them. The first one is planned. We often talk about planning practice, and planning practice is a great thing. But planning practice isn't necessary to do good practice, to do good work, and to play the harp. So planning practice, yes, a good thing, but not necessary. If you don't like to plan, that's okay. The next P word I want to throw at you is productivity. Yes, we want our practice to be productive. I realize that I use these words all the time when I'm Talking to you, or I'm talking to my students. These are words I talk about planning, productivity, and the next couple that we'll talk about too. But that doesn't mean that they're the rules we need to live by. So when it comes to productivity, what do I mean? Generally? I mean, well, we want our practice to get results, but when we start talking about getting results, all of a sudden we're putting the pressure on. Oh, great, another P word. We're putting the pressure on to see results. And that brings us to our next P word. Progress. We don't always see progress. Sometimes we're just up too close to it, and we can't see that we are actually getting better at the thing we want to get better at. Sometimes it's just because the work that we're putting in takes a while to sink in. It's got to germinate. So it's like a seed that's growing. A lot of that growth might be happening underground, and we might not see it yet, and then suddenly progress will burst forth. But if we're looking for progress, we may be creating expectations that maybe they're unrealistic, maybe they're realistic, but they may create an artificial time frame or expectation in our minds that just isn't serving us well, not keeping us in the right frame of mind to enjoy what we're doing. So we've talked about planning, we've talked about productivity, we've talked about progress, We've talked about pressure. The last P word is the one that we know is a bad word. The other words sort of masquerade as good words. But this is the P word we try to avoid, and that's perfection. Perfection is not achievable. It's not even a desirable goal. We're not, after turning out the same piece of music the same way over and over and over again. Particularly not if we're a creative. We want room to express our artistic side and, oh, it might be this way today, and it might sound this way tomorrow. Yes. We want a certain amount of reliability in the way we play a particular piece. Oh, great, more P words again. Right. We want a certain amount of reliability and predictability in the way we play, but we're not looking for perfection. And I don't think perfection is a good goal for any of us, whether we're creatives or not. So what if we decided that we didn't need to plan? We didn't need to think of our practice as being necessarily productive? We didn't need to think Think of it as directed toward progress. And we certainly don't want to put the pressure on or think of it as being perfect. So how can we substitute. What can we substitute for those words that would make us feel a little bit more positive and a little bit more energized about our practice? We know that practice is important. There's no question about that. We get it. But usually we think about our practice in terms of a way that we make progress, that we need to practice or we won't improve, we won't get better, we won't be able to play the music we want. When we think of it that way, we end up loading it down with those expectations that I just talked about and with the possibility of failure. What if our practice doesn't work?

But let's look at what practice can really or maybe should really be for us. And at a deeper level. Our practice is important because we love playing the harp. When we think of it this way, our practice isn't a chore. It's not something we have to do. It's just a daily habit that we choose. The same way we choose to read or to knit or to garden. We do it because we like it. We enjoy it. This is about the visceral connection that we have with the harp and with music. That importance, that reason for practice is crucial to acknowledge and to honor. We practice because we love playing, and so it's something that we do. That's all. It's not about better. It's not about the time we put in or the plan that we have. It's just about playing. Ooh, radical thought. Right about now, you might be saying to yourself, well, this is great. I'd love my practice to be that relaxed and that much about playing. But there's stuff that I'm supposed to be doing in my practice, and every time I think about that, it just, you know, gives me the hives. So I'd like to talk about a few of the common things that we think about when we think about practice and see how we can turn those around. So the first thing I think when we think about practice, we think about a plan. We think about the structure. A lot of people love to structure their practice. They're the ones who say, well, I always do this, then I do this, then I do this, then I do this. And for some of the free spirits in the world, that kind of always system doesn't feel like a good plan. It's not the kind of plan that they like. I mean, system is comfort. Yes, but not necessarily to a creative. A creative person instinctively pursues variety, not a plan.

A quick aside here. I just heard what I said. I said a creative person. Please take it for granted, as I do, that if you're playing the harp, no matter what your personality type, you are a creative person. I don't mean to say that if you're not a free spirit, you're not creative. That's not at all what I mean. So I want to just take this moment to clarify that we're talking about people who operate more from that free spirit mindset that doesn't want to be held to a particular system, a particular plan. So just keep that in mind as I continue my conversation with you. Because I'm not trying to say that you're not creative. I think you are or you wouldn't be playing the harp, I'm sure of it. So that's not the kind of creativity that we're talking about. So let's get back to this structure idea. This sort of free spirit person will often rebel against a structure, particularly the kind of structure that other people might find comfortable. That regularity that I always, always, always ah, they can relax and fall into that system beautifully. For some free spirit types, that structure just makes their skin crawl.

The second thing that is one of these things that's just you can't get away without it in practice can be very difficult for a free spirit type, and that is repetition. After all, you've got to repeat your pieces, repeat sections, repeat fingerings, all that kind of stuff to get it to be reliable so that you can play it fairly consistently. But repetition can feel like a rut. Those free spirit types, free spirit types like me, like things to feel new, to feel different. We like mixing it up, we like moving on, not staying in the same place. So repetition can be a little bit mind numbing to some of those free spirit types. It can make progress difficult unless you have some, some workarounds, which we'll be getting to momentarily. And the third thing that's so important about practice is consistency. Yeah, because you can't cram practice. How many times have you heard that? Right? You can't not practice for two weeks and then practice for four hours the day before your lesson and expect to have a good lesson. If you do, it's probably a fluke. It's certainly not a pattern that we want to rely on. So, you know, consistency of practice, practicing every day or nearly every day or a certain amount of days a week, that consistency is going to give you Better results. We know that, we understand it, and we even get to the idea that keeping to a schedule sounds really great, but. But some of us just can't do it. We can think of a million reasons to do it differently, to change our minds, oh, here's a better way to do it. Or oh, I'd like to keep track of my schedule on this thing. You know, whether it's a whiteboard or a Google calendar or you know, we're going to use a new kind of planner, a new system, we'll just go to that next new thing because, oh, this is a better way. Or maybe we just feel bored with a consistent schedule or, you know, any number of reasons, but we find that keeping to a schedule really difficult. And it's easy to quote that famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But we have to remember that the quotation truly is a foolish Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Consistency itself is not a bad thing. It's just that we find it so difficult. A consistent practice schedule may be a really smooth path to progress, but we still rebel. So creatives, free spirits everywhere. It's time to prioritize our creativity because we're stuck with it. So let's prioritize it, but let's use it to come up with some creative ways to approach the practice we know we need to do. We want to do it, we really do. But let's figure out how we can make it work and be satisfying for ourselves. And for those of you who don't identify yourself as the free spirit type, for those of you for whom system is comfort and you're great practice planners and you love the idea of repetition and consistency, boy, I admire you. But even better than that, I. I want you to keep listening because you're going to find some interesting things that you may try, or at least consider trying in your practice to help just, oh, I don't know, mix things up a little bit. Not too much, not enough to destroy your comfort, but you might find some creative ideas you'd like to try. Among these things we're going to talk about next too. And we're going to start with a brand new rule. Or maybe it's just a maxim or a motto, or maybe it's just an idea, but it's about guilt free harping. And here it is. You don't have to practice to make progress. You just have to play. Okay, think about that for a moment. I'll say it again. You don't have to practice to make progress, you just have to play.

Now the teacher within me is saying, well, yes, practice and playing are definitely different. And practice we think of as working on skills and working on details and all those things that do contribute to progress that you don't work on in the same way when you're just playing through a piece. However, just playing and enjoying what you're playing is way better than not playing the harp because you don't feel like practicing.

So if I needed to extract a promise from you, I would ask you to promise me this, that even if you don't feel like practicing, you still go over to the harp and you play it.

That's how you keep the connection and without the connection between you and your harp. And that's when your heart playing starts to fall apart. That's when you start to lose progress, you lose momentum and you, you know, you go to go to the bad heart place, we don't want to go there. That doesn't feel good. So playing is definitely better than not playing. And while that kind of focused practice on specifics will help you develop and strengthen your skills, playing isn't bad for you. It works at your reading, it works at your repertoire, it works at all kinds of things and it feeds you. It will inspire you, it will perhaps motivate you to do some of the trickier work you need to do to get ahead a little bit faster. But if all you do is play, I'm good with that. You don't have to practice to make progress, you just have to play.

That being said, let's talk about what you can do to create a structure that doesn't feel like structure. Rather than creating a full blown practice plan with I'm going to do five minutes of this and 10 minutes of this and I'm going to, you know, all that kind of thing. How can you plan your practice with a non plan? Well, here are some thoughts. The first thing to try is to create a minimal plan for yourself. Okay, I know that I want to learn this piece, so therefore I really do need to play it. If not practice it more regularly. So that one is going to be something I do every time I come to the harp. That's my bare minimum, or maybe you have a bare minimum, but piece that you always want to play through because you're keeping it in your repertoire, that's fine. But set 1, 2 or 3 at the most must do's. These are things that I promise myself that I will do every time I sit down and it doesn't have to take more than 10 or 15 minutes tops to do those three things. We're not talking about planning out even a half an hour of practice. And in fact we, for something like this, less can be more. But so plan out those three things that you are promising yourself to do. Then after you've done that, do what you love. Read through new music, play through pieces that you really like, mess around, improvise, compose whatever it is you want to do, but stick to that minimal. I'm going to do these, you know, these are my minimum daily requirements, if you will. So that's one way to look at structure from a non structural point. Another thing that requires even less work is if you have a bunch of things that you know you ought to get through, put them in a stack on your music stand and just play the one that's at the front. Then when you're done, put it at the back of the pile and next time you come, you'll look at the next one. Is it ideal? Is it going to, you know, move the needle quickly on all of these things? Probably not. Is it going to keep you moving? Yes. Is it going to keep things working and you know, yes, it's going to be fine. So you know, the music stand rotation is another way to do that. And you'll come up with something that you love, something that feels like it works for you, at least for a while. Feel free to create and recreate your structure. Just don't over engineer it because the more complicated you make it, the more, the less likely you are to be able to stick to it. So keep it easy, keep it simple and don't ask things of yourself that you know you're not going to really do. I think this is the hardest thing for us creatives. We, we get the, get the beauty of a wonderful and, and thought, well thought out plan.

When it comes to the execution, well, that's where we fall down. So you know, don't make promises to yourself that you don't think you really want to keep because once again that, that doesn't feel good. So create something that is within your grasp and that's your structure and that's enough. When it comes to repetition, there's no really great way around it. If you want something to improve, you need to do it a lot over a period of time. So it's going to take repetition. That's the hallmark of musical progress and improvement. You've got to do it over. Do it over. In fact, I like to tell the story that one summer, when I was teaching some Chinese students at the University of Delaware, there were two students. One of them knew a little bit of English. The other one didn't know much at all. And so I said to the one who knew a little bit of English, because they were taking their lessons, they were in the room at the same time because I needed an interpreter. And so I said to the one who knew a little bit of English, I said, so I need you to teach me one word. And that word is again. And she laughed, but the funny. But she taught it to me. And so they would be in their lessons and I would ask them to play something again, and they would just crack up because it was so funny. Probably my pronunciation was funny. However, that was the word we needed. We needed again. Repetition is key, but we can make it interesting. Consider a variety of practice techniques. I outline dozens in my Kaleidoscope practice book and in my Kaleidoscope Practice Playbook, tons of different techniques that can be interesting and fun and give you a way to make every repetition of those pesky four measures, every repetition different and interesting, and, dare I say, creative. Remember also that the more different approaches you use to solve a problem, the faster you will find a solution to that problem. We're going to look at it from all different kinds of angles, and that's what those different practice techniques and strategies will do for you. So, yes, you need to do the repetition. Don't do more than you can stand and make them all different. And remember that five repetitions of something where you're really focused on what you're doing and using that variety of practice ideas, five repetitions can be way more effective than 25 repetitions where you're kind of just letting yourself do it by rote. The power of the repetition is in the focus that you bring to it. So fewer repetitions with more focus are better than loads of repetitions with less focus. So just bring some variety to your repetition, and you should enjoy it a whole lot more. Which brings us to consistency. Consistency comes back to scheduling again. It can feel unnatural to free spirit to try to put that block of time in that same place every day. It can feel restrictive to think that I can't go for a walk right now because this is when I said I would practice now. Sure, there are lots of ways of dealing with that. Well, you could practice later and walk now, right? So there are plenty of ways to deal with that. But sometimes the energy for practice can be dissipated if you don't stick to your schedule.

But that being said, I have to admit that I do not have a regular practice schedule. I have a lot of responsibilities in my week, as you can imagine, because I'm sure you do too. And my practice fits around them. As those responsibilities shift, my practice time has to shift. But here's what empowers me to be sure that I practice. Because I have discovered the hard way that when I practice in a day, everything goes right when I'm practicing regularly. And for me that might be every day. I might, you know, have to miss a day during the week. But when I'm practicing regularly, everything is better, everything is easier. All the other responsibilities are easier because I'm practicing. Now. It may not work the same for you, but for me, just the knowledge that everything's going to go better if I practice is enough to make sure that I get to the harp. And if there's a day when I can't, because I'm teaching non stop all through the day, or I have meetings all day or whatever it may be, it gives me the ability to not worry on those days because I've been consistent so much of the rest of the time. So that may be something very powerful for you to consider because when we practice, when we play the harp, everything feels better. So you can try that. It might be an extremely powerful motivator. Doesn't mean you have to schedule, it doesn't mean you have to have the same time you do it every day. Although that in itself is a powerful habit. And so is just tacking it onto something else that you enjoy and do regularly. For instance, if you have a particular time of day when you like to read and it's like, ah, this is my reading time, well, consider putting your practice time on the front end of that or on the back end of that so that you've got two things that you love and do regularly, just back to back. They, they go hand in glove, as it were. And that may be something that's very helpful for you as well. So those are some suggestions for those creative free spirit types to, to help them help remove the roadblocks that keep them from doing their practice. We can rethink the structure, we can rethink repetition, we can rethink what consistency looks like. We can reframe practice so that it's not about those things, that it's not about doing something over and over again until you get it right, but that at its core it's about playing, it's about your connection to the harp, and it's about you doing something that you love to do. When you can approach your practice that way, you can bring all the freedom that you want to it and you can exercise all your creativity and you can really enjoy it. And if schedule and repetition and consistency aren't a problem for you, you might want to try some of these things as well, just to add some extra little spark or some excitement or adventure to your already working very well practice plan. I certainly hope that all of you give some of these a try next week. Here on the podcast we're talking about thumbs all thumbs all the time. We're talking about 10 things you need to know about your thumb, and I look forward to going through all of those with you. In the meantime, remember, 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. Not practice. Just 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 every so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.