Mistakes as Milestones: A New Mindset for Growth - PHH 221

We need to take the emotional charge, the goodness and the badness out of our mistakes and out of our days and just accept what happens. Doesn't mean we're not going to try. Doesn't mean we're not going to practice harder. Doesn't mean we're not going to try to fix those mistakes that crop up to make sure they don't happen next time. But what it does mean is that we won't. We certainly don't have to, and we shouldn't. We won't berate ourselves for having made those mistakes. And even more importantly, we can grow into perceiving those mistakes as signs of growth.

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' 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. Not all mistakes are created equal. Sure, some need to be addressed and fixed, but others, well, they're signs of progress. They tell you that your ears are sharper, your awareness is expanding, your technique is evolving, you're learning your piece better. So let's put this in context. We live in a world that's constantly trying to correct us. Type an email and Autocorrect will instantly jump in. Google underlines a word in red and we assume it's wrong just because it looks unfamiliar. But Autocorrect doesn't always get it right, and neither does your inner critic. Just because something feels like a mistake doesn't automatically mean it is. In harp practice, this same principle applies. That little stumble in a piece might not be a sign of backsliding. It could mean you're playing at a higher level and noticing subtleties you didn't even hear before.

Consider I was deadheading flowers in the garden the other day. At first, I only saw a few to snip. But as I trimmed those, more and more faded blooms seemed to appear. I hadn't missed them before. I just hadn't noticed them. My attention had shifted and I was seeing more clearly. Not because the garden got worse, but because I was more tuned in. This is exactly what happens in heart practice. The more you refine your skills, the more aware you become of tiny imperfections. And that's not failure. That's progress. But here's the tricky part. This increased awareness can lead you down a rabbit hole of endless correction. And that's where momentum can stall. I mean, if you're constantly fixing, reworking, and over analyzing, it can feel like you're never getting anywhere. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to change your outlook so you can recognize the difference between real issues and natural growing pains. We'll explore how to use mistakes as guideposts, not roadblocks, and how to keep yourself out of the pit of perfectionism. Most importantly, you'll learn how to keep your progress moving forward, even when your practice feels messy. Just remember, all mistakes are not created equal. Not every mistake is a problem that needs to be addressed. Some mistakes are actually signs of growth and momentum.

It's hard to believe we're in the middle of August already, but that means some special things here at Heart Mastery. We are in the final week of our Hub Summer Challenge. So in if you still want to get in there and be sure that you have done all your weekly challenges so you can be entered in the drawing for our little bundle of Harp goodies, then please get in there and get it done. The link to join that is right in the Hub. Of course, you can go into the Hub and go to the Challenges page and there it is. Or you can use the link in the Show Notes to direct you. But easy enough to find and lots of fun to do. We've had a lot of people working on this all the way through and it's going to be fun to finish up. So also while you're in the Hub, I hope that you are getting there through the Harp Mastery app, because the Harp Mastery app has just gotten way better even in the last few weeks. We now have a New Learn section that has all kinds of courses. Many of them are free, a couple of them are paid. But there are courses. There are courses to help you grow, there are courses to help you solve problems, and there are some recent classes that we have had hosted by the Harp Mastery Certified coaches and me. And you'll find all of those in the app on our New Learn section. So be sure you check that out as well. And if you're a Harp teacher, I hope you are considering coming to our October Teachers retreat. We've got a nice group coming and I would love to have you join us. So please check out the link. You'll find it in the show notes here. You'll find it under Upcoming Events on the Harp Mastery homepage. Check that out. And as I said, we'd love to have you join us. It's going to be be a great time. So that's everything going on at Harp Mastery at the moment. And now we need to start reframing our outlook around our mistakes. Now understand first, this isn't about perfection or about being a perfectionist, which often, although not always, may have its roots in being afraid to make a mistake. This is about a slightly different aspect of making mistakes. This is about putting the mistakes that you made in the proper perspective and understanding that they're not fatal flaws, they're not signs of a personal failing. They're just slips that you can choose to fix and you can choose to fix them for next time. Mistakes happen. And I know that you get that. We all understand that. But at some level inside us somewhere, there's the idea that mistakes should stop happening after a while. And they don't. They just don't. Mistakes will continue to happen, but they change over time. Look at it this way. Mistakes in music are not truly fixable. They're not eradicable. They're going to be there because every time we play a piece of music, it's a new time. It doesn't matter how many times we've played it or how many times it's been perfect. Every time we play it, it's a new time to play it. And there are new opportunities for all the wonderful, expressive, beautiful things that can happen. And there are opportunities for new things that can sort of go off the rails in smaller or bigger ways. Think about it. You've seen Olympic athletes miss their mark or mess up a performance. And you know they've done that performance perfectly hundreds or even thousands of times. If they hadn't, they wouldn't be Olympic athletes. Even for them, every day is a different day. And it's got a new, unrehearsed, unexpected, brand new set of conditions. You're in a different mood or the light is different. You had more sleep, you had less sleep. You've had too much coffee, you've had not enough coffee. The conditions are never going to be exactly the same. We don't play music in a laboratory. So your playing is going to be different every day, too. Some days it's going to be better than we expect. Some days it's going to be not as good as we will expect. We're going to have one of those bad days. And we tend to believe that the good days are permanent when we have one. Oh, look, we've made progress. We're moving forward. And that makes the next bad day harder to accept. Now, realize I'm putting these words in air quotes. Good and bad. That's sort of the very basic level, the visceral level at which we measure them. And we know that that's not really accurate either. There are more mistake days. There are fewer mistake days. There are days when things flow, days when things don't. And calling them good and bad, that sort of easy. But please, don't. Let's not overload those words, right? We need to take the emotional charge, the goodness and the badness out of our mistakes and out of our days and just accept what happens. Doesn't mean we're not going to try. Doesn't mean we're not going to practice harder. Doesn't mean we're not going to try to fix those mistakes. That crop up to make sure they don't happen next time. But what it does mean is that we won't, we certainly don't have to, and we shouldn't. We won't berate ourselves for having made those mistakes. And even more importantly, we can grow into perceiving those mistakes as signs of growth. When we look at mistakes as things that work against our progress or that are counting against us instead of just part of the process of progress. And we really are doing ourselves a disservice because mistakes are going to happen whether we're making progress or not, Whether we have a piece completely finished and ready to perform or not. Just like those Olympic athletes, right? Mistakes are going to happen. So keep these three things in mind about progress as we go forward. These are things we all know and things we often tend not to take into account because we think for some reason we ought to be above these things. We somehow know that they're true, but they don't always help us accept what is happening in our practice. We're just not that patient. And sometimes we're not that kind to ourselves either. So here are the three things I want you to remember. Progress isn't a straight line. It doesn't start at zero and then work its way steadily up to 100. It doesn't work that way. It's going to go up, it's going to go down, it's going to go way up, it's going to go down and down and down and then it's going to go up again. It's not a straight line. It just doesn't work that way. And we might as well get used to it. Second, progress shows up in its own time. We keep practicing and the growth happens. You've heard me use this metaphor before, but it's just like putting a seed in the ground. We give it the right light, we give it the right water. Something's happening underneath that dirt. We don't see it until all of a sudden it, you know, that little sprout shows above the dirt. We don't see when progress is happening. It shows up in its own time. All we can do is do the things we know how to do to keep ourselves on the path of progress.

And thirdly, progress is about familiarity. We just have to let the music soak into our bones. We have to learn it in that sort of old fashioned phrase by heart. Doesn't mean we have to have it memorized. That's not what I mean. But it has to get that deeply inside us and that's a process that happens over time and not just two days or two weeks. It takes a lot of time to get to the point that you can play a piece and be reasonably secure in the knowledge that you might have a little blip, but it's not going to be a real mistake. So obviously we grade our mistakes right. This is a crash and burn mistake. This is just a wrong note that nobody but you noticed and everything in between. So the familiarity that we develop over time eliminates, for the most part, those the possibility of crash and burn and makes our mistakes a little bit smaller. You can always have an off day. It happens. But your practice makes those off days less off and less often. Now, I've seen lots of harpists who actually stop making progress because they're working on this one piece and it just won't come right. They're still making mistakes. Now, mistakes come in lots of different categories, but I think there are two big, broad ones. One is mistakes that you are making repeatedly, the same mistakes over and over again. First of all, when you're making the same mistake over and over again, it's helpful if you notice that, right? It takes a certain level of observation and detachment in your practice to realize that, oh, you know what I'm stopping here and trying to fix. Every single time I play this piece. For me as a teacher, I get clued into those kinds of mistakes. When a student says, oh, that always happens there. I always do that. Well, if you are tempted to say to yourself, ah, I always do that. I did that again, then this is the kind of mistake we need to get in there and we need to fix. We need to. Even more importantly, we need to see how to fix it. Because it's not just about playing it correctly. Okay, I played it wrong, I stopped. I'm fixing it, I'm playing it correctly. But it is worth a little bit of investigation to see what you either need to do or what you need to notice. Observe and what you need to know so that you can prevent it from recurring. Sometimes it's, oh, all right. I'm always stumbling here because I'm not putting my third finger on the note before. Or sometimes it's. I have to remember that's an A7 chord. All right? Sometimes it's something, you know, sometimes it's something that you see. Ah, it goes into bass clef there. Let me remember that. And mark it. Don't just remember it, mark it. So sometimes there are things that you need to investigate that will help you from making a mistake over and over and over again, those are the mistakes we need to get in there and fix. But I want to talk about mistakes that keep moving around, making different mistakes, because those are a sign that things are changing. Your understanding of the piece is changing. Your competency with the piece is changing. Your comfort level with the piece is changing. And the mistake isn't a sign that any of those levels is going down, but it's actually a sign that something in there is shifting. As you learn some things better, other things are shifting around, and we need to readjust a little bit. You can think of them as growing pains. You're, you know, you're passing one stage going into another, and it might not be one of the big stages of music learning, which I'm going to talk about in just a moment, but it might just be, oh, okay, you got that one section down, and now the end of the measure before that section is a little bit rocky because you haven't anchored the transition yet. So that's the kind of mistake that all of a sudden pops up when you think, gosh, I never played that measure wrong before. Well, there might be a very good reason for it, a very good reason, meaning that you've made progress on what's come after, and now you need to readjust a little bit to hook those two sections together. That's the kind of mistake that I think we often, in our desire to make everything right and feel like we're moving forward all the time, we often make a mistake in judgment, judging that error. Right. It's. Oh, okay. Well, that was something wrong. I can't believe I made another mistake. Well, why? What happened? That's where the investigation here is so helpful. It gives us an opportunity to be a little bit more neutral about what just happened. Okay, so this didn't go the way I wanted it to. My finger fell off the string right there. Why? What is it? Can I see it? Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can't figure out exactly what went wrong. And if you just sort of take it a little slower for a couple times, that might smooth it out. And we don't know how progress happens. We don't always know why wrong notes happen either. We just need to be patient with them. I know. That's the hard part. Right? Well, let's take a look at the ways in which mistakes can actually chart your progress. I want to remove from our discussion for the moment certain kinds of mistakes. Mistakes that aren't necessarily wrong, but are things that we feel we could have done better. Something could have been a little more. Even the dynamics could have been a little bit more contrasting sort of. Those musical judgments, I want to take those out of the mistake category for a second because those are fine tuning points. And I don't think they're the kind of mistake that caused the frustration that I'm really trying, trying to eliminate today. So we're going to talk about the really basic kinds of mistakes. And there aren't so many when you think about it. There are mistakes of wrong fingers or missed notes, wrong rhythms, messing up pedals or levers, stumbles or hesitations, and maybe missing markings or directions that are in the music, like, oh, I forgot to do the retard or I didn't take the fermata into account. Those are sort of in that in between category. They're, you know, not sort of in the same boat as a wrong note, but they're not. They're a little bit more substantial than just, oh, I think my tone could have been better or I could have made that a little more legato. Do you understand my distinction? I hope you do. So we're going to talk about those really concrete mistakes. I played the wrong fingers, the wrong notes, the wrong rhythms. I missed my pedals. I am still stumbling or hesitating there. Those kinds of mistakes, those are the things that happen. We do them all the time. And they're going to show up more or less to some degree in every stage of learning. I'm referring now to the stages of learning that I identify and have outlined in some of my writings. The first sight, where it's not just necessarily sight reading a piece, but it's that very first stage of acquaintance with a piece where you're really starting to learn it. That's first sight. Then followed by a much longer stage of learning called the messy middle. And then an even longer, and one could argue, never ending stage, called the finish stage. So in the first sight stage, you're just barely getting acquainted with the piece, the messy middle. You're really working on getting everything together and trying to get the notes and the fingers and all that stuff to line up. And you're really working to get it to a level of proficiency that's probably around 80%, maybe. And then after that, we start the finish stage, where we're backing off and looking at that big or bigger picture and turning it into the piece of music that it has always wanted to be and that you want it to be. So those are the three stages in sort of brief descriptions. And let's look at those Categories of mistakes and how they show up differently in those different stages. Obviously, the first sight stage is going to have the vast majority of the mistakes because everything is new. We're trying to find the right strings with the right fingers and play them at the right time. We're trying to figure out everything that's going on. And so there are going to be a lot of mistakes here. Everything is new, obviously. And I want to point out that if you're learning your piece in stages, you know, okay, I'm going to work on the first page, then I'm going to work on the second page. Just because you know the first page doesn't mean you know anything on the second page. The second page could be very similar. It could be very different. So when you start the second page, even if you've been playing the first page for a while, the second page is now in the first sight stage. So you have to make allowances for that there. And sometimes making allowances isn't something we're very good at. So take that into account, please. So in that first sight stage, you're going to be making a ton of mistakes. And I think this is the easiest stage for us to accept them because we know they're going to get better. And in fact, they do get better very quickly, because. All right, well, you know, now we know what's in those two measures, and so we can practice them and learn them. And if they're still a little rough, that doesn't bother us because we can see that they get better to a point very, very quickly. And that's when we move into that messy middle stage. And then that's where many of us get stuck, and probably all of us get stuck there at one time or another. That's what's so important about learning how to keep the right perspective when you're there. In that messy middle stage, we're trying to start putting things together. We're working in bigger sections, we're looking at longer parts of the piece, and we're trying to increase the tempo. We're trying to eliminate those hesitations. And so this is a stage of big growth. This is where we ask the most of ourselves, and we expect the most from our practice. And we begin to get very impatient when things don't come together as quickly as we'd like. I know. Been there, done that all the time. So the messy middle stage, you're working at picking up tempo, you're adding dynamics, you're working at putting sections together. Maybe you're doing more hands together playing than you were in the first sight section. So you're doing a lot of new things and you're asking a lot of new demands of your fingers. And you're. At the same time, the faster you go, the more things you put together, right? The hands, the dynamics, the, oh, blah, blah, blah, the more things you try to incorporate and add in, the less you can control what's going on. At the first sight stage, we are going slowly enough and we're picking things apart enough to try to figure it out that we can tell our fingers, okay, there's the third finger, there's this. Now you do that.

But after the first sight stage, the further we get in the piece, the less conscious control we can exercise over what's going on, which is what we're trying to get. That's the point we're trying to get to. We want to be able to release ourselves from controlling what's going on in the piece so that our fingers can do it by themselves and we can think about the lofty musicality that we want to incorporate in our playing. When you remember that the point of your practice is to not think about what your fingers need to do most of the time, but to think about the music, and it can help elevate your understanding of what is really happening and what these mistakes, why these mistakes are showing up, mistakes that show up. In the messy middle part, you say, well, gosh, I used to know this. Yes, but you used to be able to play it perfectly at the first sight stage, when you were playing it slower or when you were playing it hands separately, or when you were playing it as a separate and discrete section. And you weren't trying to combine it with the sections on either side. You weren't trying to add so much of the dynamics. You had fewer things to think about. Mistakes in the messy middle stage happen because you're working bigger, because you're working toward the music, and because you are relinquishing control, you are stepping back from that managerial role just a little bit. And you're not saying, okay, now, fourth finger, and you close. And now this has to happen, and now this has to happen. Because we can't do that. We can't process the things that we need to think about fast enough, which is why we practice, why we do things over and over again, so that they become more automatic in the action part of them, and we can control them like the grand puppet master from above, not down at that nitty gritty level. So right there in the messy middle, those Big changes are happening. You can think of it as your teenage years, if you want. Remember, they're not necessarily pleasant, but lots of growth and lots of change. This is the kind of thing that's happening in the messy middle. What I want you to remember is that those mistakes are happening not because you didn't learn them right the first time, but because you're asking new things of your fingers and new things of your feet. Perhaps it's all new at this stage, even though you've learned it at first sight. Remember that this new perspective is going to create mistakes that never happened before. What you need to do beyond accepting that is to remember that your job here is to let those mistakes happen. Fix them. Yes, let them happen. And get out of the micromanaging thing as quickly as you can. You want to keep removing your conscious thought, your. Your direction. I don't want you to go on autopilot. That's not at all what I mean. But I want you to let your fingers do what you are training them to do. Let that happen and bring your mind to the music that you want them to make. That's your job. And the sooner you do that, and the less you go back and refocus on that one thing that just won't come right, the sooner those mistakes will start to even themselves out. Your fingers will do what you ask them to do if you don't just say, oh, remember to play that note. If you let them understand that that note is part of a musical line. I realize it may seem a little silly to talk about your fingers as if they were little people, but sometimes they work that way. And really what does happen is that when you release your focus from those mistakes and you replace it on a higher level, those mistakes will start to iron themselves out. I don't want you to get stuck in the messy middle when you could be moving on to the finish stage just because some of those mistakes are happening. And remember, these are the mistakes that are moving around. Right? If there's a mistake that happens all the time, you need to get in there and fix it. Because once you get into the finished stage, the mistakes are a little bit different. They're the same kind. You're going to miss a finger, you're going to miss a note, you're going to miss a pedal or a lever, you're going to stumble, hesitate, forget what you're doing. Any of those things still happen. They will happen in more random places, which is why I often call them potholes. But they are happening because your Focus is shifting to the big picture finally. It's finally shifted to the musical picture. And that's what you're playing. And so you'll find places where, oh, I'm going to need to pay a little bit more conscious attention here to make sure that happens. Or you'll find places where, oh, I didn't realize that was happening. But now that I'm working on the musical picture, I want to change my dynamics a little bit. And therefore my fingers aren't quite used to what they're doing. So I'm going to have to drill that a little bit. So the finish mistakes are the same kinds of mistakes, but they're happening for a totally different reason. And that's what's key about thinking about your mistakes at every level of your playing, every stage of your playing. Those first sight mistakes, they're the easy ones. They're happening because we have no clue what we're supposed to do yet. They're training mistakes. We're teaching ourselves how to play the piece. The messy middle mistakes happen because we're trying to make the piece grow. And so they're mistakes that actually push us forward. They're the mistakes that are getting us to the next level. Don't get frustrated by them more than you can help them, and don't let them hold you back. Don't keep regressing saying, okay, well, I can't move forward. I can't push that tempo that fast right now because I've made those mistakes and I've got to go slow again. No, keep working at where you want to go. Let those mistakes be part of the process. Forward, not holding you back. And then in the finish stage, those mistakes are quite likely smaller and they're going to move around and they're going to totally surprise you. But that's the right thing to have happen because your focus is more away from your fingers than ever. Your focus is on that big picture, and that's why those mistakes show up. If I had to sum up my message to you today in just a few words in one thought, it would be that thought that I don't want your mistakes to hold you back. Keep moving forward. Let the mistakes take care of themselves. You take care of the ones that are definitely the I'm doing this every time kind of mistake. But the others will move around. Fix them lightly, but keep moving forward. Don't let them hold you back. Mistakes can mean progress as long as you keep making the progress happen. One quick quote to close out here, and it's a quote from John C. Maxwell, the American author and speaker and pastor. I believe, and the quote is, the greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one. I just love that. And it points out the circular way we think about mistakes, right? The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one. We don't need to do that. And I hope I've encouraged you not to do that. Today on next week's show, we're going to be talking about the music of Suzanne MacDonald. Suzanne MacDonald, the legendary harpist just died recently, and I was reading the Harp column article remembering her, and it just reminded me of all the wonderful music that she played and created. And I'd like to talk about that with you on next week's podcast and I hope you join me for that. Remember, we've got all kinds of things happening. The Hub Challenge, finishing up the new courses that you can take right in our app, and of course, our October teachers retreat. All of those things happening at Harp Mastery too, as we start to finish up the summer here. Until I talk with you next week, 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. 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.