Practice Positivity: How to Combat Your Worst Critic - PHH 150

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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. This podcast goes live on April Fool's Day, and I probably couldn't have picked a more appropriate day to release it. I didn't do it on purpose, but today's topic lines up very nicely with April Fools. It's about the fool's game of self criticism. I think the most dangerous pitfall for harpists, or for any musician for that matter, doesn't have to do with performance nerves or losing your place, or not having a strong technique or not being able to sight read. I think it is being overly or inappropriately critical of our own efforts. Now, before you say that you are skilled at keeping your perspective and you don't let your drive to achieve lead to frustration, I want you to really stop and think. I run across harpists every day, every time I teach a webinar or an intensive who describe themselves as perfectionists. Most of these harpists know that their perfectionism is slowing them down, possibly even preventing them from enjoying their playing or sharing it with others. Maybe that sounds familiar to you. Other harpists get caught up in the shoulds. I should be playing this piece or I should be working on these skills. Maybe that much is true. But when they start telling themselves they should be better than they are, by now they've started down the slippery slope. Even if this kind of negativity isn't a regular part of your harp life, it still may show up from time to time and cause you to doubt your skills, your musicality, or or even if you should keep playing the harp at all. Obviously, that's not a good thing I want you to understand that it's also normal. This kind of negativity hits all of us to one degree or another at one time or another over different parts of our harp journey. It's okay, but we don't want to live there. So today I'm going to discuss self criticism, how it shows up in our practice and our playing no more fool's game, playing around with criticism and calling it constructive. We're going to reframe the way you talk to yourself so you can keep the negativity at bay. Plus I will give you some strategies that will help you combat it so you can keep your outlook growth oriented and positive even when things aren't going the way you want. As always, let me take a minute to catch you up on what's going on in the bigger Harp Mastery world. We have a new Hub challenge starting today called Every Day's a Play Day and we're going to be focusing on just ways you can incorporate more playing, more enjoyment, just playing for yourself, not necessarily playing for anybody else at all. Just put more playing in your everyday harping. So we have some fun ways to think about that. And that challenge starts today. So join us in the hub for that. You can find the Hub easily if you are not already a member. Just go to the My Harp or go to the Harp Mastery homepage and you'll see it right there and you can join us. It's free, it's easy. The Hub is our social media free social channel. It's just Harp Mastery fans in there, nothing else. So, so it's a good, good way to be part of a community and join the fun. As always, there's a blog post there from the archives that you might find helpful. This one is called Healthy Practice for Harpists. Nourish your body, mind and music. And that blog post has a couple things related to what we're talking about today that might help amplify your learning from today's podcast. As always, if you have feedback about the podcast or you want to let me know that something was particularly relevant for you, or you have an idea for a topic that you'd like me to explore, please feel free to email me. You can send that to me directly@podcastarpmastery.com so with those things out of the way, it's time to start bringing those positive vibes to our heart practice and we'll start right now. I was listening to a podcast the other day and the host talked about positive and negative emotions and he was saying that he had Received an email from somebody another time, he was talking about the same topic, and this was somebody who objected to his using the word negative. You know, you've got to stay on the positive side of things. And his point was, you know, some things just aren't positive. So while we all want to live in that happy, sunshiny world, the fact is that negativity creeps in. We all have negative emotions, we all have negative feelings, and we all even have negative feelings about our heart playing. And what that means is that we need to acknowledge them, we need to call them out, and yes, we need to figure out what we need to do to work around that, to get out of that mindset, to not live there. Here are a couple of short little practice scenarios, some of which might feel or sound familiar to you. Here's this practice scenario one. Our imaginary harpist is practicing and working really hard, but having a bad day. She grunts, SHE GROANS she grrr. Why can't I do this? It's still not right. And I've done all this kind of stuff and it's just a practice session of frustration or this practice scenario. Scenario number two, our imaginary harpist, number two, she's having a good day, she fixes things, things are going well, and yet she comes back the next day and everything falls apart. What's wrong with me? I don't know how to practice. I worked really hard yesterday and I still can't get it. It's not at a. Once again, the frustration's building up. Now, my guess is that probably both of those, if not just one of them, probably both of them feel familiar to you. You've been there at some point, as I'm telling you, we all have been there. And a bad practice session or one that doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere, it is frustrating. And acknowledging that is important. But turning the tables for yourself is even more important, because the harpists who manage to get past that frustration find the road to harp happiness and to success, whatever that looks like for them. Let's take a look at what we're supposed to do in our practice. Our practice is about refining. It's about learning, it's about looking for things that we can improve, things that we can do better. That's the whole point of practice, isn't it? We spend all our practice time looking for what we are doing wrong or not as well as we would like to and trying to make that better. And while that's how the growth is going to happen, that's how our Music is going to sound more musical, more expressive, more joyous, more whatever it happens to be. Right? Our music's going to sound the way we want it to sound through the kind of practice that we do. And one of the first things that we learn is that unfocused practice doesn't give us those results. Right. We could just play something through 10 times, but if we're not paying attention to what we're doing, then we're not going to get the kind of results that we want. We know that when we go to a lesson, our teacher picks things apart and our teacher helps us find those things that we need to fix, those things that we could do better and tells us how to do that. And then of course, we're expected to go home and put that into daily practice. So there's the system, right? We play, we judge, we critique, we observe, we try to fix all of those things and then we try to do it better. That's a recipe for frustration. As soon as we start talking about, okay, I have to practice, I have to fix things, I have to look for things that are wrong and then fix them, is it any wonder that we start becoming overly self critical? It's what we're supposed to do. The obvious solution here would be to be able to be very objective. Objective in the same way that our teacher is objective. Right. She's not feeling the pain because we made a mistake. We feel the pain because we made a mistake. But she's just able to say, okay, well, you know, do this. She's not saying, you're a bad person, do it over. Yet somehow we manage to say that to ourselves. So we're going to talk about that. Reframe that reset. Finding some objectivity, yes, but also managing the two important parts to our practice and thinking about them differently. Okay, I'm not talking about the main job in our practice, which we were talking about a moment ago. That main job, I'm going to stay away from the word fix here. That main job, that thing that we're trying to do, is to observe what we play and to refine what we play. So there's our main practice task, right? To observe and to refine. But there are two other components that color what we do and how we do it, how we do that job of observing and refining. And those two components are our expectations and our reactions. Oh, yeah, you get it now, right? Okay. So that if our job is to observe and refine our expectations around what we think we will play or what we think we should be able to play and then our reactions to what actually happens. That's where the attitude part comes in. That's where the positive or negative part comes in. When we can manage our expectations and our reactions, we will be able to get more results, the kind of results we want from our practice and stay on that positive, emotional side and out of the abyss of frustration. Most of the discussion that I have heard or read about managing your reactions is about managing self talk, about watching how you talk to yourself. And that's important. And we're going to deal with that a little bit too. But I want you to understand that managing your reactions alone, managing your self talk, the way you talk to yourself, the way you think about what you're doing, is really only a bandaid because your reactions are, will be guided by your expectations and your understanding of what you're trying to do in a practice session. So managing your self talk alone is not going to do it. And if you've tried, if you're the sort who has said, okay, well, I'm going to give myself all this positive reinforcement and I'm going to watch that. I'm not using bad language and I'm not berating myself for the mistakes I'm making. And you've discovered that that doesn't work very well. This is why you're not addressing the expectation end of this. So we'll talk about reactions for just a moment and then we're going to spend quite a bit of time talking about the expectations and how those can help your reactions. So when we have one of those reactions in our practice, it's usually a result of a mistake. We're keeping score. We're looking at, I missed that note. I missed that note again. I misplaced my fingers again. My fingers still aren't doing this. Maybe we've missed a goal. Maybe we've just not done what we've wanted to do. Our memorization didn't work. We're having mistakes that we never had before. Whatever it happens to be, we're reacting to what doesn't work. And if you don't believe me, how many times have you reacted to stuff that went really well? You might say, oh, that went really well this time, but what about next time? Right. We don't tend to celebrate our wins as much as we notice and berate ourselves for what we don't do well. And that sets up a little cycle of disappointment. It becomes habit at this point that we're keeping score. We're looking for all the things we're doing. Wrong. And we're internalizing that so that when you want to change your self talk, it feels very superficial because you're still keeping score. And that's why I think just managing your reactions, you know, not using bad language, not calling yourself an idiot, all those things that we tend to do, those things are important. We don't want to use that kind of talk on ourselves. We wouldn't, you know, talk to our child that way or our dog. We don't want our teacher to talk that way to us either. So that kind of talk is inappropriate. But we need to go back to the source. We need to go to expectations. Our basic expectation is that practice will bring improvement. I mean, we know that this is true. If we do consistent, focused practice, over time, we will get better. We will become better harpists, our music will sound better, things will improve. And while that is most certainly true, I think it leads us down a dangerous path because we want to see results. We are human beings. We are impatient, and we create timelines in our head for our improvement that are not necessarily realistic. So let me start by clearing up a few false ideas, false expectations that we may be harboring and what we might choose to think of instead. So here's our first false expectation. That is that a piece improves in a straight line a little bit better day by day. If you've been playing for any length of time, you know that that isn't true, right? What is true is that a piece improves in growth spurts. It kind of goes along for a little while, and then all of a sudden it's at the next level and it's better.

So what's difficult about this? A couple of things. One is that we have to wait for that growth spurt to happen, and we have to be, you know, practicing patiently while we're waiting for that to show up. It's a little bit like planting the seed in the ground, and then you give it the right amount of sunlight and water and eventually something's going to happen. We can't always see what's happening because those roots are coming out underground. We don't see anything until that first little sprout sticks up. But growth has been happening that whole time while we're waiting for the seed to germinate and sprout. This is the same thing. We have to keep practicing while we're waiting for that to happen. Patience, right? Comes back to patience. But then what happens is that the piece does improve, and we think, oh, wow, this is really, really good, and it'll go along that way for a short space of time, and then all of a sudden everything's going to be bad again and we feel like we have regressed. No, you're just at a different growth level. It took you a while to get past the first growth level and get on to the next one. Here's the next level of that. Now, this could be something to do with, you know, adding. Adding hands together, right? Like, it's great. Hands separately. And then you try to put it. Hands together, and it's like you've never seen it before. It's another growth stage, or moving up the tempo of something puts you in different growth stages at different times. So it's going to feel like it's getting better, getting better, and then you change the parameters and it's going to be worse. It doesn't move forward in a straight line. We ourselves improve in growth spurts, right? Where our technique will be just kind of doing its thing for a while, and then it's going to get all sort of awkward and we need to move it ahead. You know, it's like stepping up a level. You can think of it the same way. So we go along for a while and then we realize we need to improve and we have to move forward. And when we do that, things get messy again. It's that awkward phase. You've probably tried to forget that from when you were a teenager, right? When your arms and legs are the wrong length and you trip over things and your ears grow or your nose grows or something in a weird way. Well, pieces go through awkward phases all the time, and we need the courage and the patience to survive them. So that's false expectation, number one. And what we can do instead. Think about growth spurts, number two, Another false expectation. Is that the spot that was so tricky for you that you conquered today is going to be great again tomorrow because you've conquered it. No, doesn't work that way. I can practically see you nodding your head. Yeah, I know, I know. It doesn't work that way. The spot that you conquered today might be fine tomorrow. But the truth is that habits, and that's what we're developing in our practice, habits take a long time to settle in now because you conquered it in your practice today. When you get to it again tomorrow, it will probably take less time to settle in again. It'll take less time to get it back on track and get it really, you know, up to speed again. And maybe the next day it will take even fewer repetitions to get it going. But there are going to be regressions along the way when it's going to be like, well, I've been playing this really well for a week, and now all of a sudden it won't work again. And there are going to be big leaps forward where it's like, wow, I didn't think this was going to improve yet. And then, look, it's really working now. That's part of that growth spurt idea we talked about a moment ago. That sort of straight line progression of, you know, of progress isn't part of music study. Doesn't work that way. So the spot that you conquered today might be good tomorrow, but you don't need to expect it because it's equally likely and probably more so, that it's still going to be a little bit messy and you're going to have to clean it up again and again and again. Patience, my friend. Okay, False expectation number three. This is one I hear.

Fairly often from harpists who email me or that I'm in conversation with. They'll say, I've been playing for such a long time. This should be easy for me. Well, there's that trigger word again, right? Should. When you talk about shoulds, you know, you're getting into the. Into the danger zone. It doesn't matter how long you've been playing. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy for you. Because the truth is that if it's not easy for you now, there's something about it you haven't learned yet. Can't necessarily tell you what it is. It could be just a slightly different coordination with your fingers or between your hands. Could be a new rhythm. Could be just that this isn't comfortable for you yet. You know, sort of like, you know, there's always that thing that the instruction book doesn't tell you. You know, it doesn't tell you that you need to do this first. There's going to be that missing thing, and you can't necessarily decide yourself what that missing thing is. Could be a technical adjustment, could be a rhythm thing. Could be a pattern you haven't seen yet. This really goes back to the idea that all of us are always students, we are always growing. There are always things that we're going to need to learn or relearn. It's just part of the process.

One little quote of Carlos Salzado's that I think is always sort of amusing, and yet there's some truth there, too, is his saying this. There is nothing difficult, only the unaccustomed. I think there are no difficult things, only unaccustomed things. I think the trick here is that we don't always know exactly what's unaccustomed for us. You know, you look at a piece of music and it looks like, oh, wow, okay, there's going to be a piece of cake to put together. And then you find out that there's something about it that's just tricky. And you can't possibly, you know, maybe you can't identify what it is, but, you know, it's just not coming together, right? What you have to do is take that expectation of this should be easy for me. Take it out of there and realize that it just isn't. And so we're going to practice it, and we're going to make it easy for you. So change, growth, progress, they happen on in this, you know, mysterious time frame. And that's because the neural pathways take time to form. Right when you're practicing, when you're creating those habits, that's what you're doing. You're creating this whole mysterious system of processes between your fingers, your eyes, your ears, your brain, the whole thing. Now, we can hasten this whole process with consistent, as in daily practice, and by focusing on the next growth phase for a piece, we can hasten the process by anticipating the end result, playing as if, you know, playing through the whole piece, even when it's not ready, sort of trying it on for size. But the time frame itself is still out of our control. It's that mysterious combination of processes and coordinations, and we can only do what we can. The process happens all by itself. The good news is that when you grow this time, you will grow faster next time. Growth begets faster growth. The more we grow, the faster future growth will come. And that's the wonderful part of being a musician. You can see growth come faster.

Now I know that we're all about goals and accomplishing and getting things done. And this can make our expectations a little bit more ambitious. It can create a sense of impatience and urgency that may or may not really be necessary. What if instead we adopted the idea of the perpetual student, the idea of practice as discovery? If we allowed ourselves to take the pressure off, remove the expectations that aren't appropriate, and let the growth happen instead of being impatient with it. The first good thing that would happen is that it would get us out of our own way. It would unblock the roadblocks that we're putting up. When we are impatient, we practice differently. Our mind is closed to some things that we don't want to close it to. We stop listening to what's really happening and we start focusing on what isn't happening the way we want it to.

We're not holistic listeners, we're not impartial observers, which is where we need to be.

If we can get ourselves out of our own way in this case and just be open to what's happening as we practice.

Then we can stop being quite so self critical, at least not in the same way. And think now how that change in our own attitude is going to change the way we react to what happens. Or at least how it will serve as a different kind of foundation for the way we talk to ourselves and the way we judge ourselves in our practice. Now, when it comes to turning around your self talk, I'm not going to give you a lot of extra positive, affirming sort of language here. I want you to find that for yourself. And it's going to come out of those changed expectations. But I am going to give you some ideas that will perhaps guide you as you create a new method of self talk and encouragement for yourself. First of all, I'd like you to consider being your own teacher. Talk to yourself the way your teacher would and talk to yourself in the third person. Maybe I'm crazy, but I do this for myself all the time. It keeps me from internalizing the blame for a mistake. I know I shouldn't be blaming myself for a mistake, and I don't because I'm talking to myself in the third person and I'm reminding myself of how I would talk to a student. I am a student, so I talk to myself that way. Nicely, respectfully, considerately. Remember, you are there to be the ultimate observer, not the New York Times music critic. You're not there to count up the errors. You're there to do it over and see what you can do this time. That's all it is. Remember that mistakes themselves are a sign of growth. How about that? If you're not making mistakes, you're not practicing hard enough. That's a famous quote that's been attributed to any number of musicians. But you know, if mistakes are what happen, that's what we do. And mistakes can be for a finished product, sort of that little flaw that's sort of kind of amusing. They're not amusing when we practice. I know that. But they're not black marks on your permanent record either. So don't lay blame, don't, you know, give yourself that demerit for making a mistake. They happen. We're just going to do it again. That's all.

Thirdly, here, think about it this way. If it's not right yet, it will get there, but it's going to take as long as as it takes. You're going to do everything you need to do to make it right, but it's going to take as long as it takes. So you can either settle in and enjoy it. I mean, if the notes won't come up to tempo, well, let them sit at a slower tempo for a while and work on the dynamics. You know, it's going to take as long as it takes.

Something else. It might be interesting for you to record your practice and listen to what you say to yourself. Even if you are only having the recorder on and you're not going to go back and listen to it, that little voice recorder right there is sort of like a little monitor. And it's going to remind you to talk kindly to yourself.

Could be worth a shot, depending on how badly you think you talk to yourself.

Something more positive here. Connect to your beginner mindset. When everything was fresh and new, when you first started the harp, I'll bet you you weren't filling your practice sessions with frustration and disappointment and discouragement. It was going to be fun. You knew you were a beginner and you knew you had a lot to learn. Well, guess what? We're all still beginners. At some point, some part in some way of this harp journey, it's going to be a piece you haven't played before, a coordination you haven't played before. There's always a beginner aspect to what we're doing. So connect to that mindset and enjoy it.

And lastly, don't invest emotional energy in what you're doing wrong. You want to turn that energy into creative expression, into musicality, into enjoying the growth.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to enjoy your practice, no matter how rough it seemed, because you knew that it was part of growing as a better harpist and a better musician. All of that stuff that happens is happening because you're growing, because you're improving, because you're asking yourself to do something that's challenging.

You're growing. You're getting better. That's why it's happening. And it doesn't deserve your negative energy. That process needs all the positive energy you can bring to it. Oh, and one more thing. Let's get rid of the shoulds. I should be better. I should be able to do this. I should be farther along. I should be whatever. What you are is a student. What you are is a harpist. What you are is a musician. And we all are at every level of playing, playing any kind of music. What you are is learning, growing, improving your skills, your musicianship, growing your repertoire, learning new music. You are a harpist. Own it. I want to leave you today with just a couple more thoughts, things for you to consider that might be powerful for you as you start thinking about your expectations and your reactions, what happens in your practice, the mistakes you make. It's never your fault. It's something you haven't learned yet. It's a process. It's a technique. It's. It's not you.

It's not your fault ever.

It's just something you haven't learned yet.

And second, every moment in your practice is a moment you get to create contentment. You get to enjoy playing the harp. You get to start digging into that new piece of music. You get get to experience the feel of your fingers on the strings. You get to hear that beautiful sound of your harp. In every moment we create our contentment.

Just something to think about. A quick reminder that you can hop into the Harp Mastery Hub and start our April playing challenge, which should be lots of fun. That's all about harp happiness in there too. Next week on the podcast.

I have a semi rant for you. This is a topic that I have been talking about recently to a couple of people and I mentioned it actually recently on a on a Monday warm up and it's something that I am feeling increasingly strongly about. How's that? So next week on the podcast we're going to be talking about playing with three fingers versus playing with four fingers and I'll try not to make it too emotional a rant. But this is something I feel really strongly about and so I hope you join me for that episode next week because.

It could just turn your playing around and I certainly hope that it has has an impact on you and gives you at least something to think about. So that's next week on the podcast. But in the meantime, remember, every day is a day 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.