Podcast

That when you sit down at the harp every day, it's not to fix things. You're not there to try to fix something. You're not there to judge yourself or count your mistakes or even fill in the little squares on your practice chart. You are there because you're a harpist. And this is what harpists do. They play the harp.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm hi, 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 beau, 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 My Harp 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 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.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Here's a question we've probably all wondered about at some point. Am I practicing enough? As a teacher, I can tell you that my experience has demonstrated that if a harpist, and this includes me, has to ask the question, the answer is probably no, you're not practicing enough. But of course the real answer is likely a little more complicated. It depends on what you're trying to do. Now, on the light end of the practice spectrum, if you're just trying to keep the rust off either your fingers or your pieces, you probably only need a few minutes each day. On the other end, if your ambition is to learn a piece, or stretch your technique or develop a skill, you're going to need more time. Now, I know it would be helpful to know exactly how much time you're going to need, but coming up with a number would just be guessing. Even so, that doesn't mean that there aren't some factors that can guide you that will keep you from overworking yourself or underutilizing your time. Simply put, your goal is to practice enough to make progress, but not so much that you actually sabotage your efforts. Today, I'll tell you what this means and how I think you can find the right amount of practice time for you. Now, I know I've talked about practice time with you before. On the podcast in the first show of this year, 2025, I shared an acronym to help you remember what to include in your practice. That acronym spelled the word practice and the letters stood for Play, Review, Aspire, Create, Technique, I, as in me, Connect and enjoy. That's episode 190 and I will link to it in today's show notes so that you can find it easily. Now, in episode 148, I taught you about practice bursts, those short 15 minute chunks of time that you can use to keep on track when your schedule won't allow you a longer practice session. And I'll link to that episode in the show notes too. But today we're taking a different approach. We're going to look at why we practice, how our practice can help us maintain the status quo, or help us achieve a goal, or help us stretch our skills and grow. We'll talk about time and how we need to manage it, and how to truly enjoy the time we spend at the harp. Because that's what Harp happiness is all about.

Of course, part of Harp happiness is learning the skills that you need in order to make your playing what you want it to be. And this is why I want to tell you that we have now opened registration for our April 2 seminar course. As you remember, this is the course that our My Heart Mastery members will be taking for April. And we open just the course portion, not the rest of the website, not the rest of the My Heart Mastery goodies. But we open these four calls and the instructional materials that go along with them to anybody who would like to join us for a cost of just $12. So April's course is called Rhythm Make. And we're going to be working with the tools and the things you need to know in order to be able to decipher rhythms, to practice them, to know how to practice them, to correct them, to ultimately, of course, automatically recognize them so that reading rhythms are faster. We're going to be talking about practice techniques. We're going to be talking about how to use all the terminology, how to count with different meters, how to work with the counting with the metronome. We're going to be finally dealing with mixed meters, you know, where the time signature changes in the middle of a piece and some other tricky things like that. So we've got lots going on in this, and I hope that this will help answer a lot of the questions that we never seem to really get to when we talk about rhythm. It's all about, oh, how do I make this rhythm? Right. Right now in our piece, which is kind of what our practice does if we don't plan it properly, right. It's about fixing that. That thing right now. But what we really want is bigger growth over the longer term. And so these courses that we do in My Heart Mastery and that we offer as part of the seminar series, so those courses are designed to do that, to help do a deeper dive so that you can have a stronger foundation and build the skills you need to really play what you want to play. So once again, we have opened registration for April's seminar course, Rhythm Makeover. And you will find the link in the show notes, as always, and you will also find the link@heartmastery.com or you can register directly from the Harp Mastery app, all those ways to register for the course. And I certainly hope that if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you give this seminar course a try. And of course, we love it when new members join our community. And I'd be thrilled to welcome you into My Heart Mastery as well. Let me begin with my own practice time story. Now, you've probably heard me talk about this before, but maybe not quite from this angle. You have heard me say that I was the world's worst practicer. As a kid, I really hated to practice. I didn't understand the point of it. My piano teacher, when I was very young, used to give me very specific things. Do this three times, do this five times. It wasn't about practice time. It was about what I did in my practice, which, looking back, was a wonderful way to think about practice. Not so much in the three times, five times, whatever, but in the idea that practice wasn't about setting a timer and staying there, which my parents tried when I was not doing real well. It wasn't about the time. It was about the steps that I needed to take to create the results I was looking for. Now, when I was 5 and 6, my. My teacher wasn't telling me that. She was saying, do this three times, do this five times, and if I followed the directions, I was going to come out okay. As I became an older student, it should have been a process of learning how to take that responsibility for myself and not being told, okay, three times or five times, but what do you need to do in order to achieve this? And that was sort of a missing piece for me. And it was something I always have tried to work with my own students on. I don't teach students of that age anymore. But when I was working with younger students, it was all about, here you are at this one point, and we've done these kinds of real, specific practice directions for you. But as you grow, as the student gets to middle school age and beyond, it's a process of giving them increasing responsibility for their own practice, for learning how to do what they need to do in order to achieve the result that we're looking for. It's not that different from schoolwork, where schoolwork for young children is very structured. And then the further you go in your education, the less structured the assignments are. It's pretty much, well, this is what you need to do. You figure out how to do it. Practice is very much the same way. And for those of us who haven't learned anything beyond the do this three times, do this five times rule, we don't know what to do when. It's just, well, get this one done and, you know, come back next time and have it finished. So the first time I encountered that was when I did my couple of summers of study in Camden, Maine, and my teacher warned me right up front that I was going to be expected to practice at least four hours a day, which I did. And that was remarkable for me because I went from sort of four minutes to Four hours. And that's really not much of an exaggeration. So that was a new experience for me. And trying to figure out, you know, at first what to do in those four hours was tricky. But what helped me at that point was that I was having two lessons a week. So I really did have to get a lot done in between time. And so I was old enough, you know, 16 and 17, I was old enough to figure that out. So my practice habit at that point was born just of necessity mixed with, I don't know, a little desperation. Once I started studying at Curtis, though, that same expectation was there. That expectation that even though I had other classes and other things to do, I still would be putting in that length of practice time. Now, it might seem contradictory to be talking about practice time as just practice time without particular goals in mind. You know, in some ways that do this three times, do this five times thing isn't that different, right? Because when you're talking about four hours, well, what do you do to fill those four hours? And that, of course, is the problem, or it was for me at that point when I was in Maine, those four hours weren't a problem because I had two lessons a week. But with only one lesson a week at Curtis and with so much else to do, it was very easy for me to just sort of not do my four hours or not make that time focused and useful because you can do a lot of sitting around and messing around in that four hours, or you can do focused practice, obviously. And so I just wasn't as good at that four hour times chunk as I should have been. And it showed up. This was one of those things that I knew I was going to have to fix if I was going to keep pursuing the harp. And so I did. And of course, you know, it's easy for me to fill up four hours now. And unfortunately, I rarely get four hours in a day where I can practice. I do practice nearly every day, and I'll talk to you about that too. But four hours is usually out of the question. But here's what I've learned about practice time. I call these the two practice time truths. And I think that you probably will be able to agree with them based on your own experience. But maybe there's going to be some new light we can shed on this. The first practice time. Truth is, your practice will always take more time than you have available. This is what I was talking about just a moment before.

I could practice for four hours if I had four hours to do it. However, probably if I had four hours, I could still wish for that next hour. I didn't get this done yet. It's a little bit like closet space. You always need a little bit more. Your practice is always going to take more time than you have available. There just isn't enough time to get everything done. And part of the reason for this is that we don't get something done in practice. Music is a living art. You hear me tell you this all the time. Music is a living art. And every single time we play something, it is different. It may have mistakes, it may not. The mistakes may move around, they may be invisible mistakes to everybody except for us. It might just not be exactly the same the way we want it it today. So because it's different every time, we don't get to put a oop. This is it. This is done. This is the last time I have to play this piece. Look, it's polished, it's finished. It's like a, you know, dinner. I can put it on the table and it's done. Music doesn't work that way. There's always, oh, let me just try that one more time. You know, if you're a person who likes to use practice beads or something like that, you've probably had that experience, right? You get through that last practice bead and it's like, oh, let me try it one more, more time. Let me try it one more time. It's so hard to put a limit on what we want to do, because if we just had a little more time, we could make it that much better. This is why a plan is so important. When you know what you want to do, you can move on from that first thing that you're trying to get right to the next thing that you know you want to accomplish. You can set a plan that has time limits if you know that you're working within a really compressed period of time. Or you can just make sure that you're rotating what you're working on. It doesn't mean that you have to leave something in the middle if it's. If you're making really good progress on it and you want to keep working on it. But you do have to have a plan for getting the other things that you want to do done right. So a practice journal helps with this, or a practice chart, or just leaving yourself a post it note to remind yourself what you wanted to practice tomorrow so that when you come back to that stand tomorrow, you'll know what it is you want to do. Because that way you can Build on whatever you've done today in your practice with intention and with purpose, so that it keeps your practice from being random or from being so overloaded on one piece, for instance, that you never get to anything else. You won't spend all your time on your technique work and realize you only have 10 minutes left for all the pieces that you wanted to learn and the pieces you wanted to review. So it will help keep your practice time in check. It's a time management kind of thing. And once you accept that you will never have enough time to get everything done, then you can see why it makes sense to plan out your practice time just a little bit. So even for me, who is not by nature that kind of tight sort of scheduler, I'm very aware when I practice of how much time I can spend on something before I need to move along, whether it's done or not. If I wanted to get through all three movements of a piece, and I've spent all my time for that piece on the first movement, then I make my plan to do the second and third movements the next day and maybe just review the first movement. But I'm pretty firm with myself about how much time I can spend on any given element of my practice so that I can get them all in. Okay, that was practice time. Truth one. Here's practice time. Truth two, and this one goes against the grain just a little bit. Here it is. More time does not equal more progress. Or maybe I should say it this More practice time does not necessarily equal more progress. And this is because beyond a certain point, your absorption of the material that you're practicing begins to lessen. You get to a point of diminishing returns. Think about how difficult practice is when you're focused and you're really working at something. Yes, it's absorbing and it's energizing and it feels really good, but it's also wearing. I'm sure you've had the experience where you get up after a good practice session and you feel like you just finished your workout at the Y, right? It was exhausting. It feels good, just like that workout at the Y, and you don't end up with sore muscles afterward. At least you better not, because you need to be practicing carefully and taking care of those muscles and tendons and fingers and all those things. But the fact is that practice is hard, and it takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus, and we can only focus for so long at that level before we just can't do it anymore. And it's not even that we can't put our nose to the grindstone and keep on practicing and get work, quote unquote done. I think those air quotes are important not only because things don't get done, as I said a second ago, but because.

I don't think the work is productive beyond a certain point. We need time between our practice sessions to let all that work that we've done, to let all that information we've fed into our brains and our fingers, to let all that soak in, to let it settle, to let our amazing brains absorb all of that stuff. It needs time to just marinate. Now, it does not need days, but it certainly does need hours. Now you can do multiple practice sessions in a day. That can be fine. You know, if you want to do an hour or so at one point and do another hour or so later in the day, that works out fine and that can actually accelerate your learning if you can manage that. But you know, a four hour practice session when your brain starts to frazzle after the second hour is not useful. More time does not necessarily equal more progress. One of the dangers in what I'm going to call over practicing, practicing for too long at a stretch is that it can really lead you to frustration because it builds our expectations. Oh, look at me, I'm doing all this really good practice and I'm not seeing progress from it. What is wrong, what is wrong with me? So I think that's a danger point. Remember, please, progress has its own timeline. We do the work and we need to push ourselves, we need to push toward the result that we're looking for in our practice. But the progress is going to show up when it shows up and we can't speed that up other than doing the best work we can as consistently as we can. And there, of course, is the big X factor in practice, consistency. Practice isn't a project that you can take out when you feel like it and then put away and then at some later date resume it and expect that you can pick up where you left off. You know this, I know you know it. But sometimes we need reminding, right? The real power in practice comes from doing practice every day, or nearly every day. Five days a week is fine, but. But that consistency is going to provide the results that you're looking for. If you look at it this way, the very basic use of our practice time, the things that we really need to do every day are very few. What we need to do is we need to reconnect with the music. In other words, play some things Right. Reconnect with the music and keep our skills fresh. Now, keeping our skills fresh goes beyond finger drills, I think, I think it includes everything like rhythm and expression and note reading, our pedals or lever skills, our hands together coordination. Right. So there are a lot of skills that go into harp playing. And by playing, we keep those skills fresh. We're not going to make a lot of growth if this is all that we do with our practice time, play music and just, you know, keep our fingers on the strings. But, but it does eventually provide a little bit of growth over the very long term. It can do that. And what it does, of course, is keep us connected to the harp, which is what we want. So that's sort of a basic practice thing. And this is what I talked about at the very beginning of the podcast where I talked about sort of keeping the rust off your fingers. This is the, you know, the minimum that we need to do. And so if you don't feel like practicing or have no time, you can just start here. And of course that there's that, you know, do this three times kind of practice. Right. That's also not especially growth oriented because it doesn't focus on a particular result, it just focuses on the means. Right. I'm going to do this this many times, but it can help us create focus or it can help us continue to make progress when we' really distracted. You know, there's a lot going on in our mind. We can't bring our mind to the task at hand. And if we just say, okay, I just need to do this five times, okay, you know, it's going to get us moving forward. This can also give us a way to keep practicing when we don't know what else to do. Right. Just what am I going to do? Well, I'll do this five times. So it can work when your time is very short. So, you know, if you don't have a lot of time, you don't know what to do, you can say, all right, I'm going to do this three times, five times, 10 times, whatever it is. And hopefully that'll just keep things moving along and you'll find a more powerful focus on another day very soon. Because if we're looking to really accomplish something or really learn something, we need more time used with a little more or maybe a lot more intention. And intention is the key to our practice time when we know what we want to do. And I suggest one focus thing. Not that you can't work on different pieces and things in your practice time, but if you're working on this one passage or this one piece, what is it you want to do with it? Have one focus. We're not going to focus on dynamics and fingering and notes. If it needs to get up to tempo, let's work at getting it up to tempo today. So that when you have that power of the single intention and you practice for that, the time you need for that is going to be obvious. Now, the difference from practicing your three times, five times sort of method is that here we're not taking these little baby steps, just working at the same thing over and over again. We're pushing toward the result we want now, going as far as we can go today and starting from there tomorrow so that we're not waiting for something to happen. We're creating progress. Ultimately. This is why we can't answer the question about practicing enough or how much time you need to practice. The point is that you're practicing for a specific result. And when you practice with that result in mind and you're practicing toward it in a vigorous, purposeful kind of way, instead of, well, I'm going to just do this again, and I'll do it again, and I'll do it again, and eventually it'll get better. When you're practicing with that purpose, your practice is powerful. And you're going to get so much more done in your practice time. In fact, you may not be able to practice as much because it's going to be more difficult to maintain that focus. So that if you're used to doing a couple hours practice, you might find that you get least as much done in half the time when you can practice with that kind of focus. I want to get this result. I want to speed up my piece. Okay, well, don't inch up the metronome. Work that tempo pyramid and push it, push it faster. I want to play my piece with flow, but I have a lot of wrong notes. Well, practice for flow. Let the wrong notes go. We'll do another kind of practice for that. But let the peace flow, make it flow. Create the results that you want, and that's how you're going to find how much practice time you need. That's where the answer to the question, are you practicing enough? Lives. It lives in the intention you have for your practice. Now, I realize we came to this point through sort of a long and circuitous route, talking about how not to practice and talking about things that were less than effective. A lot of repetition without focus, for instance, not so effective. But really working with focus, that's where the power is. Knowing what you want to achieve and pushing toward it actively. That's the kind of practice that works. But I want to share one more thing with you that may also help you rethink your practice time just a little bit. I was in a group the other day in a little group discussion, and someone asked me if I played the harp every day. I said, well, yes, I have to. And it brought up a lot of things that I thought I should share with you because practicing every day isn't easy. And I probably practice six out of seven days because there's always one day when I can't practice. And one of those days, I usually just kind of play for fun. So six out of the seven days is kind of my usual practice. But I find that if I don't schedule my practice time, I do other things instead of practicing. It's got to be on my calendar. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that I love doing the practice labs that we do in the hub. We usually do them twice a week. And you just show up and practice. Other people are there practicing, too. And that's the. It's a little bit of accountability. I know that when those practice labs are on my schedule, I'm going to show up and I'm going to have that hour and a half to practice. It's so important to practice because it's what we do as harpists. And ultimately, practice isn't about fixing things. It's not about repeating things. It's not about goals. It's not about practice journals. It's just about a habit. In the same way that doing yoga every morning or cleaning the house on Saturdays might be a habit if you play the harp every day. That's what practice is. Practice is a habit. Practice is playing the harp. In fact, I'd go a little bit further, and I'd say there's really only one requirement to be a harpist, and that's to play the harp. Your practice of playing the harp is what makes you a harpist. Now, I offer this because I want you to think about your practice in that way that when you sit down at the harp every day, it's not to fix things. You're not there to try to fix something. You're not there to judge yourself or count your mistakes or even fill in the little squares on your practice chart. You are there because you're a harpist. And this is what harpists do. They play the harp. If this gives you a slightly different feeling when you approach the harp bench every day, then I have certainly done my job.

That kind of changeover was important for me to make in my own harp life, and maybe it's important for you, too. So let's talk about what you can take away from today's show. First of all, let's remember that there's never going to be enough time to practice and that doing too much practice doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to make progress. Right. More practice does not necessarily mean more progress because we can overwork. But then we also talked about the fact that practice requires a focus, more of a focus than just doing something over and over again and waiting for results. It requires creating the results that you want. That's not easy to do, but it's much more engaging, involving and interesting than just doing something over and over again. So I hope that you can look at that and try that in your own practice. And remember, your practice is what makes you a harpist. That's who we are. We are people who play the harp. And isn't that a great thing? I think it's a wonderful thing, and I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to be a harpist with you. So I hope you find the same joy that I do in playing every day. Now, next week on the podcast, we're talking about rhythm. We're talking about big beats and little beats and how to how to make them line up. I know there's a lot to talk about with this, and so we'll get started on that on the podcast next week. Remember that this will go nicely with our April seminar Rhythm Makeover. And so if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, because our members get this automatically, then check out this seminar course and you can register for it. You'll find the link everywhere on the Heart Mastery app or on our website or in the link in the show notes here. So I certainly hope that you join me next week for that discussion. 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 and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to 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.