Learning How to Do One Thing at a Time - PHH 093

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show.

To paraphrase the 17th century English poet Andrew Marvel, had we but world enough and time this scattered practice were no crime.

Now, Andrew Marvel was referring to his coy mistress, but we might well apply these lines to the kind of practice we so often, often find ourselves engaged in. It's not that we don't have goals or that we lack the ambition to improve and grow. It's just that there is so much wonderful music in the world and we want to play it all. It's a big feasting table and our eyes are way bigger than our stomachs. Or in this case, our collection of music we want to learn far exceeds our available time to learn it now. It wasn't quite so difficult back in the dark ages when we had no YouTube, no Instagram, and no TikTok to bombard us with videos that make us musically hungry. Right? Instant sheet music downloads are a threat to our practice capacity as well. When we had to leaf through a paper catalog of music and order an expensive book that may take days to arrive, we gave the purchase a little more consideration. Now everything is just a click away. We watch our pile of music we want to play burgeon at the same time that our available practice time shrinks. Quite the dilemma for those of us who don't have world enough and time. So if you are one of those harpists and who isn't really who finds it challenging to finish pieces and make the progress you want because there are so many pieces you want to play play and not enough time to play them all, then today's podcast is one you need to hear. I promise you this won't be a lecture on delayed gratification. It's not A diet plan for us music gluttons. It's a little more like an eat your cake and have it too strategy. There are three keys to practice success and I'm sure you know what they are, right? Consistency, time and focus. The most important of the three is of course, consistency. Simply playing something every day is where harp happiness starts. If you're not in touch with the harp, you're not in touch with the harp. So if you put more time into this, naturally you're going to be able to make more progress. And if you focus your work during that time, that's where you start actually seeing results. But when your time is limited and your focus is using the panoramic lens rather than the super close up focus, your progress will slow considerably unless you learn some strategies for prioritizing your practice. And that is our laser focus today.

Now we're going to be talking about what I really mean by prioritizing your practice in a way that's going to let you do what you want to do and still make progress on the things that you want to make progress on. And I'd like to offer you another way after you listen to this show, another way to follow through on this. In our brand new Harp Mastery hub, we have posted a new challenge and it's a challenge for practice success. Actually, it will be going up, oh, in just two days, it'll be going up on March 1st. And it's about practice prioritization. But there's going to be one little fun, tiny, I promise, totally bite sized action step that you can take each week to complete this challenge and it will help you learn to put first things first. Now if you haven't experienced our hub yet, it is our private on online community, not a social media network. No photos of food or your very furry adorable friends. No cat videos. It's just harp stuff. And it's a great group and it's a growing group and a very, very fascinating community. Lots of great harp stuff happening there and we have challenges that you can take. There's no must, no fuss, it's totally free. And I have put the link for you to sign up for the hub in our show notes today. You'll find it also at heartmastery. Com. Join us in the hub and you can join this little challenge for helping you prioritize your practice. And it's these are fun little tips that anybody can use it. You don't have to be a master harpist. It's certainly not just for beginners. This is for all of Us fun little things that you can do to help you find a little bit more focus in your practice. So please come over, join us in the hub, and you'll be able to participate that way. But for right now, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about what I mean today when we're talking about prioritizing your practice. I was reading something the other day and it stated a fact, a very obvious fact, but one that was so outside of the way I had been thinking that it just caught me up short. I had to stop reading and give it quite a bit of thought. And it was. It's such an easy thing. And it's this. Priority used to be a singular word.

Think about that for a moment, right? We talk all the time about priorities, our priorities. What are your priorities? Well, when the word priority came into place, it was because one thing had priority over everything else. It was one most important thing.

And now it's common for us to think that we can have many most important things going on all at the same time.

What's your set of priorities? Like you, you know, like they're a boxed set or something. Right. Well, that's fine. We're not going to go back and try to, you know, turn the clock back and make priority a single word, except in this one area.

What if priority, a single priority, was the focus of our daily practice?

I know you can already tell where I'm going, right? I mean, when you have lots of things that you want to do or lots of things that you feel that you must do in your practice time, then we start parceling out that practice time, don't we? It would be different if we had unlimited practice time and could just spend as much time as we wanted playing the harp and playing anything and everything we wanted.

But we don't. So we have that hour or half hour that we have carved out of a very busy day and we have this long list of things we want to do and we start saying, well, let's see, I can allot five minutes for this and 10 minutes for that and 15 minutes for that.

And really, that's not a bad idea. It gets you through a bunch of things, but it can leave you feeling very unsatisfied because you haven't really gotten to dive into anything.

And it can also slow down your progress because your steps forward in each one of those things are so small. We take one little baby step forward on our technique and one little baby step forward on this piece, and one little baby step forward on this piece. We wish we had more time and our progress slows down.

So if you look at those three practice factors, consistency, time, and focus, we can choose to be more consistent in that we get to the harp most days during the week. Most of us don't do seven days a week. I mean, that would be kind of nice. I don't. I generally miss at least one day a week. But five days a week, you know, you're gonna. You're gonna still make progress there, right? So we can be consistent.

And we can actually try to focus our work. The one thing we can't create is more time. We can create. We can find some time that we can use for our practice and block it off and schedule it and all those good things that we do with our time.

But we can't create more of it than we actually have. And so our focus needs to adapt to that amount of time.

Well, that makes sense, right? Nothing new there. But I think if we really start to look at choosing a priority for our practice time, it means that we can eliminate so much.

Granted, we're going to be eliminating some things that we think we'd like to play, but you're also going to be eliminating that sense of frustration that you don't have enough time to put into any one thing. Or at least we're going to reduce that sense of frustration. You're not going to feel so overwhelmed, you're not going to feel so confused about where to start. Not going to need maybe such elaborate practice plans.

We're going to get into the details of this idea in a second. But for a moment, just sit back and consider. If you only had to practice one thing today. No, I didn't say if you only wanted to practice one thing. But if you only had time, perhaps, or you only chose to practice one thing today, what would it be and why?

I think the why is just as important as the what here, and we'll get into that in a second as well.

But what this would force us to do is to choose one big thing as the focus for our practice.

Now, it doesn't mean that we don't get to play anything else. I don't think that's healthy. I think that our heart playing is something we do for ourselves. And while we want that sense of accomplishment.

That sense of progress, we want to feel like we're growing and achieving and improving and doing all those good things. We also want to enjoy the music. Because if we're not, we're missing the whole point. At least that's what I Think.

But choosing a single priority for a day's practice is an unbeatable path to accomplishment, to getting something done.

And what we're going to talk about right now is finding that single objective that you can have for your practice, putting it in a limited time frame.

And working on it with focus so you can see results.

All right? Now, if you've bought in at least that far to the idea that, well, yeah, if I could focus on one thing, I could get farther in that one thing, I could make more progress. If you've bought into that idea, then we're ready to go on. If you're still of the idea that you can do lots and lots of things in your practice and make progress at all of them, I want you to consider this. You likely know the story of the big rocks. This is the story that Dr. Stephen Covey tells in his book First Things First. And the story is this. One day an expert was speaking to a group of business students. And to drive home a point, he used this illustration. He stood in front of the group, you know, high powered achievers type, right? And he said, all right, so here's the quiz. He pulled out a one gallon wide mouthed mason jar. Setting it on the table, he brought out a bunch of fist sized rocks and put them one at a time in the jar. And when he had all those rocks in the jar and the jar was filled to the top, he asked the students if the jar was full. And they said, yep. And he said, really? So he reached under the table and he pulled out a bucket of gravel, little stones, dumped some gravel in and shook the jar so that the gravel filled a bunch of those spaces in between the rocks. And he put in more and more gravel until the gravel got up to the top. And he asked the group again if the jar was full. And they said, oh, well, you know.

Maybe not. They were, you know, they were kind of getting to the point, right? And so of course he reached under there again, pulled out some sand, and he used the sand to fill in the gaps between the gravel. And so he asked the students what the point of that illustration was. And of course one person raised their hand and said, well, the point is that, you know, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can fit some more things into it.

No, no, no, that was not the point. The speaker said, the truth of the illustration is this, if you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all.

Right? And of course, Stephen Covey in the book goes on to, you know, to talk about the big rocks of life. And so what are those big rocks for us? What are those big rocks of. Of practice? It was interesting. I read a commentary on this story once where the, the writer, I don't remember who it was, said, well, you know, that story's all wrong because it's filling up the jar and you won't have any spaces left and you won't have any, have any room for the stuff that really matters, like creating space and time and relationships and stuff in your life.

And I disagreed with that premise because I think that those things are big rocks.

Now, in our harp music practice terms, I think the big rocks are the things we really want to do. And that includes the pieces we want to really accomplish, the skills we want to truly develop, and the music we just want to play around and mess with. It's not just one big rock in the jar, it's a number of big rocks.

But the problem is that with those big rocks, we can only fit so many in the jar. And our practice jars, the time we have to practice are pretty small. So if we take that one big rock and put that in our practice jar, we still have space around it. We still have space for the gravelly sized things we want to do and the sand sized things that we want to do. We can still have room for other things. It's just that we've got a smaller jar so we have fewer bigger rocks. Does that make sense? I hope so. So let's take a look at choosing that big rock to start with. My thought is that in choosing your 1 priority, your 1 big rock, you want to think about something that you want to accomplish. Now, I'm not talking about a long term goal here, but I'm talking about that next step in whatever it is. Maybe you're working on a piece and you, you know, you really want to get that piece together. Maybe it's polishing it for performance. Maybe it's learning all the notes, whatever that next level is for that piece, not that next first step, but that next level of accomplishment. Maybe it's really getting into some, some technique, refurbishing. Maybe it's.

Practicing sight reading or improvisation.

Any of those things, all of those things could be good big rocks. And you might have your own big rock, but you can only work on one at a time. You can. Well, I'll expand that. You can only work on as many big rocks as will fit in your jar. And if your jar is your practice time, you have to decide how many big rocks you can fit in.

And if.

Your current number of big rocks doesn't seem to be fitting into your current practice jar, then this is the technique to use. Choose one.

And here's how to do that. You're going to choose whatever one you like, and I want you to make that your post it note practice plan.

This is your practice plan on a single sticky note, because it's going to be the one thing that you are going to practice.

Now, because you're doing that one thing doesn't mean you can't do any other things because we've got room for gravel and sand in that little practice jar.

But it does mean that this is the thing you will do. Anything else is a bonus. Anything else doesn't get your first attention. Anything else doesn't get your best and deepest focus or the biggest space of time that you have available. The biggest chunk of time you have available, your biggest practice energy is going to go to that one thing and you're going to put it on a on a sticky note and you're going to put it right on your music stand. So perhaps you really want to get this one piece learned. That's your sticky note practice plan. Put it right on your music stand and it's going to say, the minstrels are jeer Boom.

And maybe you have specific things you want to do with that. That's terrific. But that's what you're going to work on. Now, I'm guessing that you probably have a hundred more things on your music stand. You've got these exercises and these etudes, and you've got these pieces you want to work through. And you've got these things that would be fun to look at and read and you've got this big pile.

But they're not going to be planned out the way your sticky note practice plan is, because you can only have one priority, one big rock. So once you've made that your sticky note practice plan, here's the rule. Don't let yourself practice anything else first. I mean, you can warm up first, but be sure to set a timer so that you don't get so involved in your warm up and so distracted that you forget to get to your sticky note.

So that if you have a half an hour to practice, all right, take your couple of minutes for warm up and then work on what did we say? The Minstrels Adieu. Then you're going to work on that.

And you're going to work on that for the rest of your practice time. Or maybe you'll save five minutes of practice time at the end for whatever else you want to do.

But if you need, if you decide that you need 20 minutes a day on the menstruals, adieu. And you've got a half an hour to practice it. So you'll do a little bit of warm up, you'll do your menstrual Zodia for 20 minutes and then you've got 10 minutes or so left for anything else you want. That's your gravel and your sand. But you've practiced your priority. Instead of letting yourself wander through other things first and not getting to that, and you've done it. Instead of carving up that half hour into five minute chunks so that the minstrel, poor thing, never really makes much progress going forward because you only have five minutes to spend on it.

We've just, what, quadrupled the amount of time that you have to spend on it.

Now what I like to suggest is that you make that one thing, that priority, its own practice time. If you wanted 20 minutes on the menstrual, then set yourself a 20 minute block of time maybe right before you go to work or right after your morning coffee, or right before or after lunch or right after dinner, whatever time works. But make that its own practice time.

So that you know you've done your priority. And then if you have another chunk of practice time, another 20 minutes, another half an hour, you get to work on whatever you want. You get to work on those that you know, go to the banquet, go to the smorgasbord, look at all that music that you want to play through and do it. But you will have done, you will have prioritized your priority. Ooh, what a novel idea, prioritizing your priority.

Then the next thing you're going to do is set a time frame for how long you're going to do that. And by this I mean, all right, your sticky note priority, it's there. I'm working on the minstrels odieu and I'm going to make that my priority for one week or I'm going to make that my priority for two weeks, or I'm going to make that my priority until Wednesday.

So you can put that right on your sticky note, by the way. Okay, the minstrel's idea completion date, meaning just not the date you might have it finished, but the date you're going to change your priority, right? Change priority on, boom, this day.

That time frame is going to do a few things for you. First of all, it's going to be the light at the end of your tunnel. So that if you're a person who doesn't like to be confined by schedules or by what you have to do, and because of that you're not making the progress that you want, then this is going to show you exactly, you know, it's. It's a countdown, like the countdown to Christmas. Oh, three days left. Okay, great. Santa's almost here. So it's going to do that for you. It's all going to also going to create a little bit of a sense of urgency. It will propel you to do more focused work on your priority because time is running out. You only have a few more days that you're going to focus on it. It might stay in your practice rotation, but it's going to turn into gravel or sand. It's not going to be a big rock. Now you can choose to keep it a priority longer if you want. This is your practice, you get to choose.

But if you give it an ending date, then at least you have a date on which you have to decide if it's going to continue to be a priority for the meantime or if it's going to, you know, downgrade from a big rock to a gravel.

Right. Okay, so let's look at that again by when you choose your priority, you're going to put it on a post it note and set a separate practice time for it if you can.

Don't let yourself practice anything else first. Okay. Except for a warm up if you must. Right? Yeah. Okay. But nothing else first.

And then be sure to set a time frame for how long you're going to keep that as your priority. Now I can already hear some of the buts, right? Some of the but. But what about this but what about this but? My teacher expects me to do this and this and this and this.

Well, would your teacher love progress? Absolutely. So if you showed up at your lesson and said, okay, I got to those things, sort of, but I spent a lot of time on this.

And because of spending a lot of time on this, you actually made progress. Your teacher's going to be happy. Of course you could take the smarter way out and get their buy in on this system first and say, well, okay, Mr. Teacher.

If I can only focus on one thing this week, would you help me choose it? And your teacher could help you choose your priority and that would be your priority until your next lesson, at which point you get to readjust so you have a big rock and then the gravel and sand stuff is all below the line in Another kind of a metaphor, right? It's not as important, and you're going to get your priority done first.

So here's another but. But. But I also have to learn this and this and this and this. Well, my question to you is, what does have to mean? Is it something that you are committed to doing because somebody else is relying on you? Like it's a. A piece for church or for a rehearsal or for, you know, an ensemble rehearsal or performance? What's your level of obligation? Or is it just something that you'd like to do? Because if it's something that you have to do, that's an obligation with a definite due date, that may need to be your priority. You might not get to choose what you might like, right? If all other things were equal, that may be your priority. But I would suggest that if it's something that you have to play, hopefully you like to play it too. You could reframe that too, right? It's not that I have to play at church. I get to play at church, whatever that happens to be.

The next. But. But I want to play this and this and this and this. Can't I do that? I want to play these things. Yes, you may. You may play all those things after you've done your big rock practice.

Sounds kind of like, yes, you may have dessert after you eat your vegetables. But, you know the. But your priority practice is practicing something you want to do. So, you know, even if it's a vegetable, it's one you. Please remember that this is not punishment. This is helping you do what you want to do.

Here's another one. But won't this slow me down? No, this will speed you up. This will speed you up like you never guessed. If you're the sort who's been parceling out your practice, right, I'll do five minutes on this and seven minutes on this. And. And I talk about that too. And I can help you do that if that's the way you want to work. But if you really to, you know, propel your playing here and get some extra power behind your practice and really see progress.

Then you need some really concentrated time. It would be one thing if you had two or three hours a day to practice, where you could spend an hour a day on each piece you wanted to do. Doesn't that sound like luxury? Right? You'd make progress on all of them, and you'd have the time to make progress on all of them. But if you're trying to put in a half an hour of practice after you've had a busy day at work that's going to be really hard. And trying to do three things.

May mean that you're not going to end up making very much progress on any of them. So a priority practice session will speed you up, not slow you down. And if you're getting home from work and you're tired and it's late, do your priority practice first when you're freshest. And then you'll feel so good, so virtuous at having done what you really wanted to do, what you had promised yourself you would do, that you'll have the energy to play all those other pieces that you want to play and work on those a little bit too.

It's such a simple concept, isn't it? And it's kind of funny to be teaching on this just because it's so common sense, sensical, I guess. So it's just common sense. There you go. Common sense. To do what you want, what is most meaningful, what is most impactful for you first to get that done. And if you can do your priority practice early in the day when you're still fresh, then even if your day falls apart and you don't get to the rest of your practice later, you haven't lost a day of practice on the thing that was most important to you to accomplish.

So give it its own practice time and make that little bit of practice time really inviolate. Right? Really, really. Just there it is in my schedule in stone. I never miss that time, whether it's 10 minutes or 15 minutes or a half an hour.

That's the time that you've set aside to do that one thing, that thing you put on your post it note.

You will find that it feels great. You will find that the progress you get from it feels great. And you'll really be able to enjoy playing anything you want in that huge stack of music that you downloaded from Harp column music. You'll be able to enjoy everything that's there and just play through it and look at it and you'll bring new energy to that. And the sense of accomplishment that you've already gotten from doing the work that mattered to you first, putting in those big rocks first. So, and that's what came of my thinking about priority as a singular noun changed my thinking up. And I hope it changed yours a little bit too. So if you want some small steps to help you follow through on this, do take our little challenge in the Harp Mastery Hub. You know, it's a very low stakes kind of challenge. Everything's free. And it's just a little bit of little bit of something. So you'll get to the Heart Mastery hub. Be sure you click on Challenges and then you'll see the see the challenge right there and you'll be able to click on it and join the challenge. And when you join the challenge, it you'll probably need to click on the button that says complete and that will let you enter your results, your homework for that part of the challenge. And there will be a new part coming up every week in March, so new little ways to help you.

Find that priority in your practice and act on it now. Also, all through the month of March, we're going to be focusing on skills, technical and musicianship skills. It's all skills month, and we'll be starting off with a podcast, talking about the seven skills that mark your growth, those key skills that take you from one level of your harp playing to the next. We'll be talking about the skills, specifically showing you how to work on each one of them. And that's going to be kicking off our March series on skill development. So there you go. Be sure to tune in next week for that podcast. In the meantime, remember 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.