Practice Prescription: What to Do When Nothing Is Working - PHH 063

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

Welcome to the show. Here is a cry for help that I received from one of our coaching students recently. I'm feeling discouraged, she wrote, because I don't feel like I'm making the progress I want. No fault of my coach. She's excellent. I'll feel like I'll have really effective practice days and then go backwards. Argh. Not a happy place to be in, right? Nobody wants to be going backwards. So we had a check in call scheduled so she and I were able to talk through some of her concerns. But I think what made the most difference to her was simply knowing that she is not alone, that we all feel this way sometimes, and that the backward slide is actually a necessary part of the learning process.

Now, progress on the harp or on any instrument is a very forwards and backwards kind of thing. Often when we feel that nothing is going right, we're on the verge of a big step forward. It's not unlike a teenager's physical growth spurt where the joints hurt and everything seems out of whack and then all of a sudden they're several inches taller.

Well, it takes some experience to realize that the most powerful moments in our practice are those moments when the piece we've been practicing hard seems to regress. It's usually the signal that we've reached a new level with it. Granted, it's frustrating in the moment, and unfortunately it's the moment when a lot of harpists give up. They put the peace away, or even worse, they put the harp away and feel like they failed. None of that is necessary. What is necessary is to know how to survive the slump, how to help a backward slide turn into forward momentum. Today on this show, I want to equip you with the understanding, the reassurance, and the practical steps so that you can avoid being mired in the practice slew of despondency. Nobody wants to be stuck there. Now, often the words that we use around this kind of a moment, we talk about being stuck in our practice. We talk about going around in circles or being lost or not being able to see the forest for the trees. Well, sometimes it's just a practice blind spot. And once you uncover that blind spot, once you can see what's hidden there, you can go forward. And so, in addition to everything that we're going to talk about in the show today, I want to be sure that you know about a quiz that we have at heart mastery to help you discover your practice blind spot. It's a pretty quick little quiz, but I can tell you from the. From the comments of the people who have taken it, it can be pretty revealing. And the thing is that sometimes just knowing what, what's in your way, knowing what's there, that. What that obstacle is, or what's been hidden in your blind spot, that's all you need to be able to eliminate it, get it out of your way, and start moving forward. So if you haven't taken our practice blind spot quiz, I think it would be really helpful for you. And I will put the link to that in this episode's show notes. So today, it's all about freedom. It's about getting unstuck, and it's about finding your way forward, even when it looks like you're only going backward. So let's dive in. Well, first, a quick little side note. I love thinking about the slew of Despond. You know, that's that fictional deep bog that John Bunyan created for his allegorical tale the Pilgrim's Progress. And, you know, it's a place where the pilgrim gets really stuck. Interestingly enough, I read that the Slough of Despond may have been inspired by a wet marshy area near Bunyan's cottage. And the, the. The original wet marshy area was called squitch fen, which is just some words I love. So. Squitch fen. You know, when you think about something called squish fen, it's very hard to feel despondent. And so I think that that sets the tone for what we're talking about today. We're removing the Despond. And, you know, if something's a little squishy, no problem that we can fix. All right, so you had a bad day. You had one of those practice days where you sat down and your fingers couldn't find the strings. What do you do? Do you just keep practicing and get more and more frustrated? Or do you just stop for the day and say, okay, I'll come back tomorrow? Or is there a way to muddle through it and find satisfaction in your practice, even when it's difficult? Well, I'll tell you, all three of those things are possible, right? You can muscle your way through a bad day, but it's not very much fun. And for me, the only time that I will really muscle through a bad day is if I've got a deadline coming up, like tomorrow. That's when I'll muscle through. Now, what about, you know, just saying, okay, you know, nothing's working today. I'll just put the harp down, I'll step away from the harp. I'm going to go, and I'll go, you know, do my other errands, and tomorrow will be better. I think that's a really great tactic. You know, if something isn't working, step away from it. Kind of like when you're trying to remember something that's on the tip of your tongue. If you distract your mind, you're likely to come up with that answer sooner. Right? There is one danger with this tactic when it comes to practice, and that's that if you've skipped one day, you might be tempted to skip the next day, particularly if, when you sit down, you find out things aren't any better. So there's that danger that one day of skipped practice may turn into more, and that may turn into an actual slump, which we want to avoid if we can, at all costs. Let's avoid that. Right? But what about the third way? What can you do that will help you through that moment and still keep you at the harp? Okay, I've got the steps for that, and we'll get right to that. Let's look at the second scenario. Well, you had one bad day, and that wasn't such a big deal. But now you're having another bad day and another bad day, and it feels like you're losing ground. Day by day, you'd been making progress, you'd been moving forward, but now it feels like you're moving backward. That's really the situation that our coaching student described. Right? Progress can be so elusive and very hard to quantify.

And it can feel like all of a sudden you're not swimming with the stream, you're not swimming along in the current, but you're battling it and you're losing. So this takes a Little bit more concentration and a little bit more effort to get you back on track. But it's so important that you not only get yourself back on track, but. But that you, A, recognize that this happens to everyone, B, that it is part of the process, and we'll go into that a little bit more, and C, that it's totally recoverable from, but you need to do it quickly. And the more quickly you address it and just accept it for what it is and fix it, the easier it's going to be.

So let's start with the fact that, yes, this happens to everyone. We all have times, and sometimes it happens with just about every piece. You get to that messy middle section, and you're plowing ahead and plowing ahead, and it just. The progress just seems to grind to a halt. That's normal. And yes, it is part of the process. So accepting that this is going to happen and in fact, learning to expect it so that you can say, ah, okay, I've gotten to that point again. And then giving yourself a system to get through it is exactly where you want to be, right? I mean, think how much easier it would be when you have not only one bad practice day, but you feel like you've gotten into a grind with this piece and it's not moving forward. Think how easy it would feel, how much easier it would make your mind, and easier it would make your practice too, right. To be able to say, okay, I can. I. I've been here before. I know what it's about and I know how to fix it.

Okay, let's talk about what actually happens when we learn a piece of. When we learn a piece. We are getting our fingers, our ears, our eyes, our brains used to the patterns that comprise that piece. And we're putting all those elements together in a very specific way. Granted, every piece is going to involve playing the strings, and it's going to involve fingerings, and it's going to involve notes and rhythms and speeches, you know, a specific tempo and dynamics and all that stuff. All the elements are the same, but each piece combines those elements in different ways that make every new piece somewhat challenging.

But to a certain extent, every piece also has the same development curve where we spend the first part of our learning adventure with that piece, working on figuring out how those details are put together. We learn the notes, we learn the fingerings, we learn the rhythms, we learn the dynamics. And that's kind of a fun part of the process. It's a little bit like detective work. You know, you get to sort of Put that all together and it's very, very positive. It may not always go fast because sometimes those things are challenging. Right. But as you're working in that first part of the learning stage, it's very progress oriented. And you see some of that progress quickly. Oh, I learned this page. Oh, I learned that page. It might not always be easy, but you can see the progress. But someplace in that next stage, that stage we call the messy middle, that's where things start to bog down. It's very hard to see the growth. Now when you have ways to focus your practice so that you're concentrating on different elements of what you're playing, it can keep your practice more interesting for you, which is helpful. But what we're really doing is taking this time in the messy middle to ingrain those patterns to make them more and more familiar so that they become more secure and more confident. And it takes time. So as we're working through that, what's going to happen is that we're going to find some parts of it sort of come together. Some parts of it feel a little bit more comfortable and other parts of it don't. And just like a regular physical growth spurt, it's very uneven. And as you start doing the repetitions that you need to do to learn a piece and you're playing it and you're working, maybe you're working a tempo pyramid and you're working at repeating those notes and you're doing your 10 times through, or whatever it is, whatever your practice habit is, the time that you're taking to ingrain all those things.

Feels very static. It feels like you're not going anywhere. And what will happen, even when you're making those repetitions interesting and you're feeling like you're doing your best to make them productive, what's happening is that your brain is assimilating a lot of information in ways we don't completely understand and in ways we certainly aren't aware of. And all of a sudden we'll try to push it forward, or we'll just be doing the same old same old, and things won't work quite the same way. That's when you're ready for a growth spurt, is what I call it. And it's what I've experienced, that when things are starting to feel like they're not just the same, they're not moving forward, they may actually be moving backward. That's the time to push. That's the time to push that piece to the next tempo level or to combine more sections or to add more dynamics, or to start playing the piece through, push it to that next level because it's ready. It's almost never the case that when you reach that sort of slump where things start moving backwards, it's almost never the case that it's because you don't know this well enough or because you won't ever get it because you've been doing it, you've been practicing it. What's going to happen is that, that you need to do something different with it. You need to move it ahead. And when you do that, yes, there will be moments of discomfort and there will be some, you know, ugly little note things that might happen along the way, things you definitely didn't want, but you're ready for it and you need to take that next step. And that's what I mean by thinking that when you're actually moving backwards, you're ready to go forward.

But let's start thinking more practically here for just a second. What does this mean on a day to day basis and how can you do it instead of just wait for it to happen and then try to counter it? So let's take a look at sort of my first scenario where you have this one bad day, right? You sit down at the harp and all of a sudden your fingers, I don't know, they're kind of jello. They won't go where you want, they're missing all these, all these intervals. They won't, they just won't cooperate. You feel like you can't read anything. You feel like you can't concentrate, you can't focus. Any or all of those things might be happening at the same time. And this is where you have those three choices, right? One is to just muscle through that. Frankly, that is the one I have found personally to be least successful. I don't like gritting my teeth at my music. You know, speaking metaphorically, of course. You know, I, I like my music even when it's hard work. I like it to, to feed my soul, not to cost me, cost me years off my life. So I don't like muscling through. And of course choice number two is to step away from the harp, do something else and come back the next day or come back later, see if it's going to work better then. And that can work very well. You know, if you can't focus, it's very hard to force yourself to focus. So go ahead, go do something else, come back later or the next day, and that can be all the cure you need for that. Unless, of course, as I mentioned, that one day turns into two days and three days and four days, and all of a sudden you actually have a slump going.

But what do you do with that third way? Which is the way I prefer because.

It gives me a little bit of control and it takes away the possibility that I might be creating a slump. So for me, this is positive action and it actually works. So here's the thing. When nothing is working right, the first thing I would say would be, don't persist through it. Don't, you know, grit your teeth and bang your head against the wall and keep on doing it. But don't stop either. We're going to stay at the harp, but we're going to do things a little differently. And what the first step I take is the one I call my savior step. It's slow down to calm down. First of all, whatever I was playing, whether it's an exercise or a scale or a portion of a piece, anything, I slow it way, way down. I don't mean slow it down a little. I mean slow it down to where I know I can play every note, even if it's so super slow that it's kind of ridiculous and I don't feel like it's going to help me. I will do this with technical exercises. I will do this with a piece that I'm working on for a recital. Anything that's not working, I make it super slow. Even if it's, you know, note, note, note, just so that I can be sure that every finger is getting where it's supposed to be and playing the way it's supposed to play. Slow down to calm down. This is where I begin to feel that I've reestablished control over my playing that look, everything still works. It wasn't working a moment ago. But all I need to do is to take a deep breath, slow everything way down, and do it. And look, it all works. Once I've done that step, slow down to calm down.

Then I feel like I can get back and I can start doing things again. Now, I don't generally just go back to what I was doing before. Now that I'm nice and calm, I don't want to go back to the frenzy. I'm not looking to test out my calmness by going back to what I was doing before that I wasn't able to focus on. So the next step is that I find a new focus. Whatever it was I was doing that wasn't working before. I might still keep the tempo slow. I might go back up, closer to tempo. But I'm going to find a whole different focus. Whether it's okay, I'm going to play it this time and focus on the dynamics, or I'm going to focus on my technique, or I'm going to just play it through and see what happens, or I'm going to try to memorize sections of it, whatever it is that I was doing before. I'll go back to that same piece or that same passage or that same exercise. But I'm going to approach it with a different idea. This is where, if you want, you could play it in a whole different way. I mean, you can have fun with it. And that's my third step. If something's. Especially if something still doesn't seem to be working, I just go for the fun. I kind of funkifies it, you know, like, okay, if I were. If I were going to, you know, it might be a lovely piece by Hasselman or Renier, but what if I kind of put some funky rhythms to it and just didn't take it quite so seriously? Changed things up, you know, played it with a different rhythm, which is great for your technique, great for evenness, great for learning a piece, and kind of a fun challenge. It puts your outlook in a completely different place. And if you can find the fun in what it was that you were trying to focus on and not being able to focus on, then you've come a long way toward saving your practice for that day. All right, so let's just quickly review those steps. You get to that day, nothing's working. Your fingers won't do it, your head won't do it. It feels like you've never sat at a harp before. Ah, Step one. Let's not stop. Let's not give up. Let's not keep going. We're just going to change things up. Step two, slow down to calm down. Whatever it was, do it again right now, but super, super slowly so that you can absolutely get to everything you need to when you're supposed to. You cannot go too slowly for this step, by the way. If it means, you know, one note every five seconds, fine. Just find what super slow means and do it. Okay, then next step, find that new focus. Do you want to focus on the dynamics? Do you want to focus on the technique? Do you want to focus on just playing it through? Do you want to play one hand or two hand? Or switch the hand? Because don't be afraid to make it fun. Mix things up. This is a wonderful way to learn.

I used to be accused by my mother of messing around sometimes when I was practicing. And she was right, I was kind of messing around. But I had various teachers who told her, you know, that's okay because she's learning music in a different way, in a way that's going to help her remember it, help her discover more things about her playing and about that particular piece of music. You won't destroy your good habits by finding the fun in a piece, by changing it up, by playing it in different rhythms or different keys, or just making it a little silly. If you like, you'll find a new focus for the piece, which is exactly what you need when you have a bad day.

Okay, but what if that bad day, despite the fact that you do all those wonderful steps, what if those bad days persist and all of a sudden you feel like this is a slump? You feel yourself making regression instead of progression. Right? You feel yourself moving backwards. And the things that you're doing, which seem to be the right kinds of practice techniques, are not only not bringing you the achievement and accomplishment that you want, but they actually seem to be sabotaging all your efforts. And stuff that used to work well is not working anymore. We need a stronger strategy, and it's a three step strategy now. You don't have to do all three of these steps. I'm going to describe all three steps to you. But depending on what kind of a slump you're in or what kind of a piece it's with, you may not need all three of these. You may find that you're out of the slump early or that you might not even need the first step. Or two, just knowing that you're in the process and starting the process might be enough. It's amazing how quickly we can recover from a slump or from that kind of backwards feeling motion when we start to actually work on it in a way that feels positive. Instead of trying to do what isn't working and find that it still isn't working. Remember that if we're in a growth spurt and you have to assume that you are, because if you've been practicing all along and making progress and stuff is moving backward, it's not because you're not learning it, it's because we need to help move it forward. It's a growth thing, not, you know, a give up moment. So here's the. Here are the three steps for recovering from a slump or from a backwards motion time. And they. You can remember them as the three Rs, not the ones we're used to using, but here you go the three R's. A reprieve, recovery and rehab. Okay, now reprieve may or may not be the first step for you. You may not need a reprieve. It depends on how much of a break you really need, how bad your slump has gotten, how much you've let it get to you. So the reprieve is take one week.

Away from what you're trying to do. Just one week. And it doesn't mean you have to stop playing the harp. Although maybe that's the reprieve you need. But more likely it's, we're not going to do what we were trying to do. We are just going to do very simple, easy finger kind of review on the parts of the piece that we can play well. So if you've been working on a piece and it's just, you know, it's starting to go backward, there are probably parts of it that usually work okay, although maybe even these have started to fail at this point. And there are other parts that are trickier. Well, we're going to ignore the tricky parts. You get a reprieve from the tricky parts. And we're going to go back to the parts that you can play well or that you used to play well and use that one day technique. We're going to slow it down to calm it down. Do just finger work, nothing else. No, don't try to do anything with it. So not only are you getting a reprieve from the hard parts, but you're getting a reprieve from your pushing, a reprieve from your hard effort. On this part. We're just going to play through it, do little bits of, you know, finger review. Right? We're not pushing the tempo, we're not pushing the dynamics, we're not doing anything. Just getting our fingers through the notes slowly and calmly. So we start with reprieve. Now, you might need a week of this, you might need a day of it, but it's there for you and I give you permission. You have my leave to take a reprieve. There you go. So after the reprieve comes recovery. This is very tender care. And what you're going to do is go back to the thing, the piece you were struggling with. Do it slowly, do it softly, easily, and do it all the way through if that's what you were working on, as much of it as you were doing. But do it only one time a day. We need to get back into this kind of slowly and we need to build up the success and not push it too soon, recovery is important. Now you can keep playing the rest of your practice. If there. If everything else was going okay and it was just this one piece, you can still play everything else but this one piece, one time only. And these would be three S's. It's got to be slow, it's got to be soft, because we want to stay relaxed. That's why. So slow and soft. And a single time, just once through, and a week of that should be enough to start clearing the tension away from your fingers and away from your mind so that you can relax around the piece you're trying to do. Now, it's possible that after the recovery and maybe even a little bit of reprieve before that, all of a sudden your piece will just jump start and move right ahead. And if that happens, go with it. Don't hold yourself back just because of this system. So you might find that you're out of the slump at any stage along the way here. But.

You have all three stages, and we haven't even talked about the third one. We've talked about reprieve and we've talked about recovery. The third stage is rehab. And this is a slow, careful, intentional refreshing of everything you were working on with that piece. So instead of just playing it through a single time and putting it away the way we did in recovery, you're actually going to come back and work at it, but you're not going to work at tempo. You're not going to push anything. You're going to refresh everything. So in this kind of practice, you're concentrating on bringing it back to where it was, bringing it back to the place where you can work on it without getting stuck in it. So it's got to be slow. You have to be able to stay relaxed with it. Be very careful to the. Just mindful. Maybe it's a better word than careful, mindful or intentional. Allow yourself to have a relaxed focus on the piece. Don't push it forward. Let it come back on its own. And it will. It absolutely will. And it will come back. I can 99% guarantee it. It's going to come back to a place where it's very quickly better than it was before. It's going to come back to that new stage, but it can only come back and only get to that next stage in if you let it. And that means a little bit of leaving it alone, right? And letting it take its own time. So. So that's why we have the three steps here, the reprieve, where we just leave it alone. Or maybe just do some. Some easy finger work on the parts you know you can do well, just so you feel like you're not, you know, not letting it go too far. Okay, then. The week or less of recovery where you play it only once a day, slowly and softly. Once again, you want to build up that success pattern, right? So be sure that what you're doing isn't pushing it, but is just a nice, steady sort of a way to play it where you know you can do everything the way you want it to. Don't be afraid to go slowly here. That's the point.

And then that week of rehab, a week or less or maybe more if that's what you need, but probably you won't. And this is getting back to practicing it, but still slowly so that you can stay relaxed in your fingers and your mind. And it's very intentional. It's very focused on making things correct, bringing them back to where they were without pressure.

And that's the best way I know to recover from a slump. If there were one thing that I want you to take away from this episode today, it's that this is normal. This is a part of the learning process, and you don't want to stop here. You want to persist through it, but persist without pain, right? You don't have to push through it. You just have to let the music happen. And hopefully the techniques we've talked about today will let you do that and enjoy the process. I will tell you that the more you learn to work through those down moments, those bad days with techniques like this, the more confident you'll get when they happen, and the more you'll recognize them as part of the process and even be able to predict them. And it makes them so much less concerning when they happen. So with that in mind, I hope that you are able to approach your practice with a fresh mindset. Do be sure to click on that link in the show notes and take our practice blind spot quiz and find out where your practice blind spot might be. The quiz is short and easy, and it's kind of fun, but I think you'll enjoy the. The results and the. The tips we give you for getting through and revealing those blind spots and then, you know, working to cure them and remove them. Next week here on the show, we are going to spice up your scales. We'll talk about scales, not just to improve your technique with your scales, but some fun scales to do to help you increase your finger flexibility and your speed. So that's next week here on the podcast. I look forward to talking with you then. But in the meantime, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. 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.