Play Your Way to Progress: How NOT to Practice This Summer - PHH 110

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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. What are your plans for your harp playing this summer? Do you have pieces you want to learn? Maybe Christmas music you want to get a head start on? Do you have a few exercise or etude books that you plan to get through so your fingers will finally do what you want? Are you thinking summer is a great time to learn your key signatures or chords, or improve your note reading? Or maybe learn to improvise? Or maybe all of the above. If your summer harp list looks anything like this, let me hear you say Amen. Most of us start out the summer with big plans, and not just for our harp playing. We have this imaginary idea that summer is endless and less busy and we'll have time to get to all those things we can't manage in the other three seasons. That's a classic example of wishful thinking. Life doesn't really slow down just because the days are longer and warmer. What usually does slow down is our drive to achieve, and that's actually a healthy thing. Continually pushing ourselves to achieve and accomplish drains our emotional gas tank. If we don't take the time we need to refuel, we're eventually going to be running on fumes. So balancing this with our desire to keep making progress and our fear that if we don't keep practicing, we will lose everything we've worked so hard to achieve is the real crux of the problem and what we will be talking about today. I don't want you to lose the ground you've gained this year by taking time off, but I absolutely believe that switching up the way you practice or maybe not even actually practicing at all is essential to keeping your connection to your harp healthy and vibrant. Now, you know me. I love setting goals and working toward them. You can achieve great things with dedication and passion. However, it's important to be aware of the hidden traps that might sabotage your efforts, the very real costs, and of staying focused all the time. I also want to share with you what you can do instead. We're not going to give up on progress just because we're not goal focused. Instead, I'll show you how you can actually move your playing ahead without really practicing. I promise. It's not a trick. It's real progress. And it's almost laughably easy.

My apologies to my those of my listeners in the Southern hemisphere, where it isn't summer right now, but by listening to this podcast now, you're going to be able to plan your next summer the right way ahead of time. Not a bad idea, right? So let's get on with our discussion about how you can indulge your desire to slow the pace this summer and stick still feel like you're moving the needle with your harp playing.

Let's take a moment to acknowledge that there are different levels of learning. Everyone likes their learning delivered at a different pace and of course, different paces at different times. And harpists are no different as a group. Now, there are plenty of casual resources that we love to use. You know, videos, online resources. At Harp Mastery, we have our Harp Mastery hub, which is our online community. It's a free community. It's social media free. And we do challenges, we do live videos. Uh, I just hosted a live free workshop on Clair de Lune for all our hub members and, and we have our live warmups there every Monday. So you can come and join me as I lead the group in a warmup and exercise kind of time on Monday mornings. So there lots of free resources and they're all wonderful. Oh, by the way, if you want to join the hub, I have put the link to join in the show notes for this episode. It's really easy to sign up and it's totally free and as I said, it's social media free, so you don't have to worry about, you know, ads or all that kind of stuff. It's. It's just harpists and it's just us. It's our private, controlled Heart mastery community. So that's our hub. And you're, you're more than welcome. You're encouraged, invited to join us. Consider this your personal invitation.

But I think that beyond those casual Resources. Most of us harpists tend to be really dedicated kind of learners. We seem to crave that focused learning. My friend MJ d' Arville always says that we harpists are definitely overachievers, and maybe there's something to that. I mean, after all, the harp is a challenging instrument, and it takes a lot of dedication to, you know, to track down the harp and the teacher and the resources that you need and to start learning and to practice and stick with it. We know it's not an easy instrument, and those of us who are in it for the long haul, maybe we do qualify as overachievers. And I know that to honor and support those different levels of learning, we have those resources at Heart Mastery as well. Right? We've got the Hub, which is our free community. We've got My Heart Mastery, which is our special membership online experience where, you know, we've got in person learning virtually, obviously, but, you know, we've got these group calls every single week on different topics and. And we've got our coaches teaching in there. We have a coaching program. We have the Gold Circle program, which is the program that I, my, myself teach in. So we honor those levels of learners, too. But the fact is that I think a lot of us as harpists really do want that focused learning. It's not the sort of instrument that you just, you know, pick up and play. I don't have to tell you that. You already know. So to persist and to make progress, it takes some dedication. I'm all about goals. I'm all about focus. And I love learning as much as any other harpist. But there's a time to ease up. There's a time to just let go of the reins a little bit, because that kind of over focusing has some very real costs. When I'm talking about the costs of over focus, I'm not just referring to burnout. We all understand burnout, and we know that that's something we want. And we know that it happens, particularly at times of stress and when we've got a lot of extra things on our plate, whether they're musical or not. But I'm talking about some of the hidden costs, things you might not have considered. So that when you're drilling down on those goals and you're working really hard on something and you feel like you must be doing good work, you must be making progress, sometimes you're actually getting in your own way. And. And those are the costs I'm talking about. So specifically, when we're working that way, working too Long, too hard on one specific goal or just, you know, burrowing down into the work. We can end up with tunnel vision. We end up with this lack of perspective. We lose sight of what it is we're really trying to do. We've all gone down that black hole, that one that. Where I've got these two measures and they're not right, and they're not right, and they're not right. And meanwhile, there's an entire piece around those two measures that we think we can't finish because we can't get those two measures done. That's not the most productive way to look at it. That endless practicing of those pesky two measures is mind numbing. It's energy depleting, and it doesn't get the music finished. So I'm talking about that kind of tunnel vision for really sabotaging the progress that we're making toward any goal that we might want.

Over. Focusing on a goal can result in sort of a very narrow sphere of development, both musically and technically. You all know I have the Etude a day challenge, right? And that Etude a day, well, okay, you don't have to just spend one day on an etude. But that challenge was born because I saw so many people trying to get one etude perfect before they moved on to the next one. That is also extremely limiting. When you're just trying to get one thing right, you're losing what I call experience points. From a technical standpoint, your fingers need to play lots of different things. They need lots of different experiences, lots of different looks at those, those combinations of fingers and strings and all that good stuff. They need as wide a repertoire as possible, because if your fingers can't play something, you're not going to be able to play it right. So we want your fingers to have a wide range of techniques and combinations that they feel comfortable with.

So that's why Aid to Today was started, so that I kept my students running through those different things. You don't have to have it perfect. We just want to try the next one. We can always go back and work harder on one particular skill, but let's get all these things working, find out what's there. And when you focus too long on one thing, that's all you're good at. The same thing applies to music, to a particular piece as well, not just technically. When you focus on one thing for too long, that one piece becomes not only the only piece that you can play, but it's more likely that it becomes the piece that you can't play because you still don't. And this is in air quotes here, you still don't have it, right? Yes. You're trying to fix this and fix this and fix this, and you work your way through the minutiae, those tiny little details, without ever getting to play the music. There's a reason that we often work on a piece up to a particular point and then put it away. Put it not hopefully in a drawer where it just gathers dust, but put it in a. In a pile of pieces we review on a regular schedule so that we don't completely lose it, but it has time to simmer. It has time to just kind of be on that back burner while we learn some other things. Because things we learn from other pieces are going to help us finish that one. So you don't want to just get that one piece right. We want to get a lot of pieces pretty good so that we can finally finish that one piece and get it exactly the way we want. That's a cost of over focus. And then beyond that, we just miss opportunities. When we're working so hard on that goal, focusing our energies toward one particular thing, there are other things that we're missing. We've put on those blinders and we've missed the stuff that's all happening all around us. The blinders are very helpful if we want to achieve one thing, but when we leave them on for too long, we really are missing a lot of things. Right. That. That's one of those things they call opportunity cost. If you're going for one particular opportunity, what are those opportunities that are on the outside? That one focused goal, that one focused opportunity, what is it costing you? Well, it might be costing you in terms of what we were just talking about a second ago, opportunities for growth. Right. If we're focused so hard on a 2 to 14 that we never find out what's happening in a 2, 15, 16, and 17. So just pick some random numbers. Then we're missing those opportunities to get our fingers working in other ways that are going to help us. With our friend Etude. 14.

Things that we learn from other musical genres, styles that we don't usually play, can help inform the things that we do usually play. And if we're always focused on one particular goal, we actually might never get to the fun part. We never actually get to playing. We spend our time practicing and let's face it, playing is our ultimate goal. I don't know of anybody who started to study a musical instrument because all they wanted to do was practice. At some point they want to play. Whether it's playing for other people or just playing for themselves, we all want to play. We want to make the music, not just dig in and try to fix the music. So here's the question that I want to talk about right now. What would happen if we dropped the over focus and we stopped practicing and started playing? It's an intriguing question. I'm going to give you just a second to think about that, and then we're going to dive in.

Imagine for just a moment that you didn't have to practice, that you could just sit down and play, and that that was all you had to do, just sit down and play the harp. And of course you had music to play, and you could play it well and you could enjoy just playing the harp. Imagine it. I know it may feel very different from some of the harp time that you've spent lately, but think how great it would be to have music to play and to play it.

Well. So here's the question. What would happen if you actually did that? If you actually just played the harp?

Now, for those of you who are of that overachiever mindset, I can sort of hear those objections already. Well, what would happen? I'd, you know, I get all. I don't know. My fingers would get bad, my technique would get bad. I wouldn't learn anything. There would be all these kinds of mistakes. It just. It wouldn't be right.

Well, let's talk about the things that might be right if you just focused on playing instead of practicing.

One of the things that you would learn how to create in your practice. One of these things that I hear from my students all the time. You would learn how to create flow. You would learn how to play past those mistakes. You would learn how to actually get from the beginning to the end of a piece and have it sound like one. One cohesive whole.

That's one of those things that so many harpists really struggle with. And one of the reasons we do is because we spend too much time practicing and not enough time practicing playing.

So learning to create flow is something you can only learn if you play.

What a radical idea, right?

Here's something else that you can really only learn from playing, and that's developing your sight reading. Sight reading. Sitting down to play something, okay, you may have already looked at it. It may not be your first look at this piece, but to sit down and play through it, mistakes, warts and all, but to keep to that tempo and play through it and have it sound kind of, you Know, okay, reasonable. That's something you can only work at when you play. Practicing in little chunks doesn't improve your sight reading playing does.

Another thing that's wonderful to work at and will develop the more you play versus the more you practice is your hands together playing. When you ask your hands to play together and you do it all the time, they get better at it. So if hands together playing is still something that you put off working on because it's difficult, and you learn the right hand, then you learn the left hand and then you try to put it hands together doing more hands together playing, more hands together playing versus just practicing going to really, really make a difference here.

That's a win right there, isn't it? I know some of you are saying, well, I don't quite believe it, but it sounds really good. There's one more thing, and this is a little bit more obvious, and this is something that you get once again from playing versus practicing. And it goes along with the sight reading kind of thing and the flow kind of thing a little bit. But you get to try out new repertoire. If you're just playing and you don't have to practice anything, you can pull out all those pieces of music you have in those big piles. You know, those things, those pieces you mean to get to someday. Well, what if someday were today and you just started playing through them? All of that goodness, learning about flow. We're practicing your sight reading through playing. All of those things would come together.

Eventually. Now, there's a flip side here, right? It's really great to think about just playing and not practicing. And we know that eventually we're going to need to practice. But if we only practice, we aren't practicing playing necessarily. And that's what I'd like to encourage you to do. I'd like you to think of playing music as an important part of your practice. And I'm guessing that that's a part of your practice that you don't spend much time doing. So I need to encourage you to do that. I feel like I need to give you that extra little bit of permission to spend some time this summer just playing instead of practicing. So perhaps you're asking, what would this look like? Well, let me give you some ideas.

So what would it look like if you just played instead of practiced? As you're thinking about it, it might feel a little formless, a little unfocused. Well, that's part of the point. But it doesn't have to feel haphazard and it doesn't have to feel totally aimless. We want to keep you energized. In fact, we want to increase your energy for your heart playing, not just sort of fritter it away. So here's what I would suggest. The first thing I'd like you to do is to go back to those piles of music that you have. And if you're like me, you probably have a pile of music maybe it's a drawer, maybe it's a box. Maybe it's an entire closet, I don't know, of music that you want to play someday.

Take a handful of out of that drawer, out of that box, whatever, blow the dust off it, and let's take a look at that. So put that in one pile, music that you thought you'd like to look at someday. Then I want you to go back to pieces that you've played either recently or maybe even long ago that you would like to review, but you haven't had the time to review. Or maybe they're pieces that you don't feel like you finished or when you last worked on them, but maybe you could finish them now. We're not going to practice them, but we are going to take them a long way toward that finish point. Because remember, just playing can be extremely effective practice. I know I'm telling you this, and you might not be convinced yet, but. But just stay with me for a little bit. So you've pulled out two piles. That pile of music that you want to play someday and a pile of music that you want to review.

Then I'd like you to pick a couple from each pile and put them on your music stand.

Then when you come to the harp tomorrow.

I want you to start with whatever warm up you like, whatever warm up is most comfortable and most reassuring for you. You do the warm up that you're used to, whatever that is, that's fine. But be careful that you don't spend all your time on your warmup. Don't use that as a delaying tactic, because your job is to play. And surprisingly, at least. You know, it surprises me.

Sometimes it's very difficult to think about just playing.

It's much easier to say, I'm going to get in there and I'm going to fix this part. And because we have a very clear focus, we have a very clear outcome, and working on that little part is manageable. We get it, we understand it, we know we can do it. But sometimes playing through a whole piece seems kind of daunting.

Well, that's part of the point of doing this kind of Work?

Yeah. Think about it, right? What if just picking up a piece and playing it didn't feel daunting, but felt like something you knew you could do, Something you felt confident about? Oh, okay. So. So you've got some someday pieces and some review pieces. They're on your music stand and you're going to start with your warm up. Then just open that first piece of music that's on your music stand and play it. There's nothing more to it than that. Don't stop and work on it. I mean, if you have to, you know, get your bearings and, you know, stop for a second and realign and fix those pedals or levers or try to figure out what really is on the page, that's okay. But don't let yourself get trapped into practicing. And perhaps after you've looked at just a couple of those spots, when you've read through the piece, maybe you go back and play through it once more.

Without practicing. Be very firm with yourself on that point. Don't practice, just play through and then turn to the next one and do the same thing. Play through it. Now there's another sort of an approach to this if you want. When you open a piece, particularly if it's a piece that you know you've worked on, if there's a little spot that has been a trouble spot, play it through that spot. Just play that spot through two or three times, no more, before you do your whole playthrough of the piece. Once again, don't let yourself get sucked into that black hole of practicing. This is not the time for that. We're trying to play all the way through. Remember what you're working on. You're working on your, your capacity to flow, your stamina for getting from the beginning to the end of the piece and resisting the urge to stop and fix. You're learning how to sustain the musicality of a piece beginning to end. You're working on your hands together, playing your sight reading skills. All of this is good. And besides, you need to learn how to play, not just practice. And this is how you do it. You just play. So you've done your warmup. You've worked on the, worked on. No, you haven't worked on. You have played that first piece on your music stand and the second piece and however many pieces you have time for that day. When you are done with your at the harp time, I'm trying not to call it practice time. When you're done with your at the harp time for today, choose another couple of pieces for tomorrow, get them on your music stand before you leave the harp so that you know what you're going to be doing tomorrow. It makes it so much easier to start your practice. Okay, I just called it practice to start your harp time. So pull those pieces out ahead of time, put them on your music stand, and, you know, if you had time for three pieces today, then get yourself three pieces tomorrow. If you have extra time, then just take the next one off the top of one of your piles and put it on your music stand.

Now you can do those different pieces for an entire week. And then maybe the following week you have a completely new set of pieces. Or maybe you do that same set of pieces again, or maybe you do your review pieces again, but pull out new ones to sight, read through.

But imagine spending a few weeks this summer doing nothing but playing music that you feel like playing and learning how to play it instead of just practicing it. But I get it. There are some possible objections that are running through your mind. Like, well, I'm used to doing dedicated technique work in my practice time, and if I just play, won't that really hurt my technique? Because I'm not doing my technique work now. You might be asking the question that way. More likely, you're asking the question, well, can I still do my exercises and drills and all my regular technique work? And I'm going to suggest that you don't. When you're done your, you know, three weeks, four weeks, summer whatever of this playing plan, you'll get back to your exercises. Now, you can check your basic mechanics, your basic finger skills in your warmup. But then when you are playing those pieces, you are giving your fingers the chance to use the skills that you have drilled into them. You've done all this exercise work and it's been fabulous. So use that skill. Put it to the test in your playing. That's why you play. That's what this is for. Your fingers are there to help you. So put that to the test. You will be extremely glad you did. So it won't hurt your technique. It's going to give it the chance to show itself off and just. You'll find what you're still going to need to work on. Just resist the urge to work on it for a little bit.

Another question you might be asking, well, won't I lose the progress that I've made on my other pieces?

Well, no, because you know what, you can play them too. If you have pieces that are on your music stand now.

You can put them in this rotation. They could be pieces, even that you play every day, but don't practice them, just play them. They're going to make more progress than you can imagine. You will be absolutely amazing amazed what happens. You'll develop this big picture view of these pieces. You'll be working on the flow and the context for these pieces. You'll learn things about them that you never would have learned if you're still practicing, practicing them in little chunks.

All right, so here's the the other question, and I know some of you are asking this one or you're itching to raise your hand, except that you know that I can't see you over the podcast. You want to know, well, could you do this terrific kind of playing stuff and practice too?

Well, my friend, I understand your need to do this, but you know what? That's not the point right now. For right now, the point is to give yourself a break from that practice routine. Even if you don't think you need it, it's a really healthy thing to do. So give yourself a break from that practice routine. Let yourself enjoy playing. It's fun. Plus, you know, remember, there are skills you don't learn any other way. You need to play. Now let's jump ahead into the future. We just jumped ahead into the future and, and now we're done with the summertime routine and we're ready to really get into some nitty gritty practice work again. We feel refreshed, we feel focused, we feel really ready to surge ahead with a new goal.

Then absolutely, I want you to do practice, your regular practice kind of practice. But I would hope that the experiment that you're going to do with playing this summer will encourage you to do do playing as a regular part of your practice. I don't want your practice ever to be just hard work. I want your practice to be rewarding. And the best reward for any of us is to be able to play music we love, even if it's just for ourselves, even if it's not perfect.

But it can be fun and it should be fun. And practice can have fun stuff in it, too, so why shouldn't it have playing? So I'm hoping that if you give this experiment a try this summer, you'll be able to come back to your practice in the fall and keep some of that playing energy that you have. I hope you will have found it valuable, as I really know you will, and you will have found that this is how you can keep your pieces in your fingers, have music to play. You'll have a repertoire you'll be able to learn new music faster because guess what? Your hands will be working better together, your sight reading will be better, and you'll understand more about the flow, the continuity that you need to develop in a piece of music. And that's a big, beautiful thing.

I hope these ideas have intrigued you. I hope they have made you think about your harp practice and playing in a new way and given you some ideas for fun ways to connect with your harp and stay connected to your harp over the summer, no matter what it is that you're trying to do. I also want to renew my invitation for you to join us in the Harp Mastery Hub. It would be a terrific way. If you've got questions or comments about this podcast, it'll be a terrific way to keep that conversation going. You can post in the Hub. We have challenges that happen there. We've got workshops that happen from time to time. What we do have every Monday or almost every Monday over the summer, because I take a couple Mondays off here and there, so. But what we have on almost every Monday is a live warmup, and you're more than welcome to join us for that. I lead you through a very well, sometimes they're simple. Sometimes they're just kind of fun. Warm up. And there's. There's no cost. There's no cost at all. First of all, there's no money because the Heart Mastery Hub is free. Second of all, we don't see you on camera. You only see me. So nobody's going to be looking at you. Nobody's going to be seeing if you're actually playing. We have some regular warmup participants who sometimes watch the warmup when they're at work, not when they're supposed to be actually doing their jobs, but when they're at work so that they can keep up with what's going on. And they'll have the live experience and ask a question if they like. But they'll be able to come back to the replays, which are also posted in the Hub, and watch them later. So you're able to do that right from the Hub. And it's easy, it's fun, and we always have a good time. So I would encourage you to join us. As I said, the link to sign up for the Hub is posted in the Show Notes. You'll also find it sort of all over the Heart Mastery site, and we'd love to have you there. I'd love to have a chance to get to know you better. So join us in the Hub, um, next week on the podcast. It's a metronome discussion. I'm going to be talking about how to use your metronome to create time. I know we think about metronomes as the things that make us speed up and hurry and get breathless. But you can use your metronome to create time. Time to fix what's wrong. Time to get your hands where you need them to be. Time to remember what comes next. Time to calm your nerves. Time to add expression. Your metronome can do all those things for you. You just have to make friends with it. So that's what we' talking about on the podcast next week. 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. Thanks so much for listening, my friend, and I will 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.