Practicing Contentment: How to Balance Progress and Pleasure - PHH 167

If you were thinking about having harp goals in vacation terms, it would sort of be like taking a guided tour. There's a plan. You know that on Monday you're doing this, and at this hour you're doing this, and you've got this and you've got this. And then Tuesday you're getting on the bus and you're going someplace else and you're it's all about the plan. Now if goals were like a guided tour, contentment is more like a staycation, right? You just want to just chill out. You want to take things a little bit easier and just relax.

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 plan. Playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you now. I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.comjoind now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Right now, I'm in a tug of war with myself. Usually I'm all about helping my students and pushing myself to set goals, to find the next level, to discover more harp happiness through progress and growth. But it's summertime and I'm facing a tough choice between leveling up or lazing in the sun. I will admit that sometimes the sun wins. This struggle isn't just a summertime struggle, though. In our harp playing, we are continually caught between two opposing ideas to achieve and accomplish or simply to enjoy. It's not just about lazing in the sun. It's really the conflict between the two ways we approach the harp each day. Do we practice or do we play? Ideally, of course, we do both. Playing the harp means exactly that. Playing music. Practicing the harp includes all the wood shedding, the repetition, the struggle to clean up notes and fingers and rhythms and make our playing. Ah, note that word again. Make our playing the best it can be. In a perfect world, our practice would be balanced between the two, with both in fair, if not exactly equal measure. This idea of heart balance is one that I like to revisit from time to time. It helps me keep or maybe regain my perspective. Am I doing enough in depth work or too much or not enough? Mostly, it helps me remember why I am sitting at the harp in the first place. Because I love to play the harp. That's what underlies every moment that I spend improving my technique or drilling a few tricky measures or memorizing a piece for a recital. It's the motivation for my teaching and even for this podcast. I know you love playing the harp and I want to help you continue to love it. So that's what we're going to dive into today. How to regain your harp playing balance. We'll talk about how the various parts of your playing and practice fit together and I'll share how to make sure that your harp playing goals don't get in the way of your harp playing contentment. By the way, I love that word contentment and we're going to be coming back to that a lot in today's episode, so. So stay tuned. Of course, one of the ways to find an ideal harp balance is to have some help to do that, and I wanted to let you Know that one of the ways we have to support you in that quest is through our certified coaching program. We are just finishing up our spring summer trimester as I record this podcast and we will be opening registration for our fall trimester very soon. This is the session that runs from September to late November, early December. And this is a session that usually fills up quickly because people like to have the support of a coach as they're working toward their end of year harp goals. It doesn't mean that you have to be really goal powered and goal focused to take advantage of our coaching program. We do help you structure those goals and help you achieve them. But maintaining that balance, working for that balance is something that's important to us in our coaching program as well. So as we talk today about that harp balance, consider that coaching might be a great way for you to get on track and find out how to create that balance for yourself. You can go right now to our coaching registration page. It's on the main page at heartmastery. Com. Go to our programs, you'll see the coaching program and you can join the first first to Know list. The first to Know list gets notified of our open date for the registration. They get notified a couple days sooner than everybody else. So if you don't want to risk having the coaching program full by the time you get around to registering, this is a great way to do that because we'll give you the chance to register just a couple days before everybody else. We give our coach, current coaching harpists, the first chance to re register and join up for the next trimester and then we open it to our first to know list and then to everybody else. So the first to know list just gets that extra added added time to register and secure their spot. So you can use the link in the show notes or just go to heartmastery.com and find the coaching page there. Join that first to Know list and then you'll get some extra help on achieving harp balance. Let me say right off the bat that harp goals are important. If you want to make progress, you need to set goals. Goals provide direction. They provide focus. They shorten the path to achievement because they eliminate those unhelpful detours. I mean, sure, we all want to take detours and side paths for a little bit, but sometimes you can get way off track. And if you have those goals, it's easy, easy to refocus and get back to going in the direction you want to go. But you're not playing the harp just to make progress. I know that I'm not either. And how do I know you're not? Because you're listening to me now. This is the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, not the Practicing Harp Achievement Podcast. You want to enjoy your harp playing and and be able to play more of the music that you love more easily and more beautifully. On the other hand, it's important to remember that achievement is not just for the young super talents, the people who want to be concert harpists. Our human desire for achievement isn't relegated to youth or to the loftiness of our ambition. It's about progress. And as we know, progress in music takes practice. Practice is work. Yes, practice can be enjoyable, but it's still work. So where's that elusive balance point? That one, that intersection where progress and pleasure meet? Well, we're going to explore that right now, starting with some clarity about goal focused and contentment focused mindsets. I know you're familiar with goal focused thinking. Goal focused thinking is everywhere in our culture. And I talk about harp goals a lot, both here on the podcast and in my teaching. But appreciating a contentment focused mindset is just as important, if not as frequently discussed. So let's start with goals. If you were thinking about having harp goals in vacation terms, it would sort of be like taking a guided tour. There's a plan, you know that on Monday you're doing this, and at this hour you're doing this, and you've got this, and you've got this, and then Tuesday you're getting on the bus and you're going someplace else and you're, it's all about the plan. Now that's a great thing, because having a plan makes it easier, easy to get something done. When you're on a guided tour, you get to see all the cities. Do you see everything in every city? No. But those various cities that you're seeing on that guided tour, you're going to get to see a little bit of all of them. And hopefully you're seeing some of the important highlights in each one. And this is the same thing you get to achieve in all those areas.

But that doesn't mean that you're going to get the chance to sort of live in one of those cities, live in one of those things, live with a piece of music and really dig into it and experience it. Maybe that is the goal, but it doesn't allow for that deep immersion.

That's part of contentment, and we'll get to that in a second. But think about what goals do for you. They give you a direction. They're action filled so that they're filled with that sense of accomplishment and purpose. You know that they're going to bring you progress. They take planning. And lots of us love to plan. And you know that you're going to be experiencing growth. This is the whole idea. It's, I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this because I want to grow, because I want my heart playing to improve, because I want it to be better so I can play more of the music that I want. So it's got a lot of upsides to it. It's full of energy and achievement. Right. It allows you also to resist distraction so that you can put away that shiny object that appears. Oh, this is a great piece. I really want to learn this. You can put that in that later file because you know you're on track and you're going to get something done. And so because you're not distracted, it allows you to get where you're going faster. So goals are great. Having them, terrific. And I think everybody should have them. I think that that's part of our human nature, wanting to accomplish something, wanting to see progress and growth, particularly when you're talking about something like the harp. And your growth is going to allow you to play more music. However, there are some downsides to goals. And perhaps you're the sort of person who doesn't like setting goals to start with because they feel very restrictive. I don't know if you've ever gone bowling. I am a terrible bowler. I rolled more gutter balls than just about anybody I've ever known in my bowling life, which, granted, I haven't done a lot. But for me, I love having those little bumper guards up. They put them up for kids so that when you roll the ball down the alley, it can't go in the gutter. That's what I need. I need those gutter guards so that I can get the ball all the way down to the pins instead of having it roll off to the side. And that's what goals are like. They're like those gu guards, right? They're like those bumpers that keep you on track and keep you from getting distracted. And when you're not distracted, you can get where you're going. On the other hand, those very limits that keep you on track and accomplishing can feel limiting and restrictive. Kind of like that guided tour. The schedule is great. It keeps you moving and you get to see all those various things that you were hoping to see, but it doesn't Allow you to just find those moments of experience where it's like, oh, but wait, I want to spend more time here.

That's part of the. I don't want to call it a downside of goals, but it's the flip side of the direction that goals promise and hold you to. It keeps you moving when sometimes you just want to sit and enjoy for a moment so that having goals can sometimes feel like you're under pressure a little bit. It can make you a little bit dissatisfied because you don't get perhaps the experience or that part of the experience you were looking for. And it can feel very skills focused, not music focused. Let me be clear. I don't think any of those downsides, if you want to call them that, I don't think any of those are reasons not to have goals. I personally think goals are really important. But I do think that those are absolutely vital reasons that the balance we're talking about today is so necessary for you. Because I don't want you to feel like you have to keep moving in order to accomplish those contentment qualities which we're going to talk about now are equally important. And you need to nurture those, too. So I don't want you to give up on your goals. That's not what I'm about at all. I'm about progress. But let's see what the other side has to offer. That other side is the contentment side. Of course. Now, if goals were like a guided tour, contentment is more like a staycation, right? You just want to just chill out. You want to take things a little bit easier and just relax. Maybe you're relaxing at home, or maybe more like my guided tour example, maybe you just want to say, stop the madness of the tour for a second. I just want to stay in this one place for a couple of days and immerse myself a little bit more in this one place. That immersion, that depth of experience, is part of the true value of contentment. Now, this isn't to say that contentment as a mindset, as we're talking about it today, isn't about action, because I think it is. I don't think it's just about lazing in the sun, at least metaphorically speaking, but I think it's. It's about a different kind of action. These are the words that, or some of the words that I associate with this sort of contentment, mindset, experience, enjoyment, certainly immersion, as I mentioned a moment ago, consolidation, where you're getting to absorb everything that you might have been putting into practice in a goal focused kind of way. Serendipity, right? The idea of accident and discovery, deepening of experience, of intensity of experience with the music, maybe exploration, looking into different things, new things that have to do with music or the harp. So there's a lot of action in this contentment mindset too. And all of these words not only have action, but they have growth embedded right in them. When you broaden your experience, and not just in terms of skills, but in terms of musical experience, you are growing. Let's face it, I think a contentment focused mindset when it comes to heart, playing sounds wonderful. And it is. It's experiencing more of what you love, more music, more of the kind of music you like to play, getting to play more. It's, I think what is at the heart of people who say, I just want to play for my own enjoyment. I mean, what a wonderful goal. Look at that. Contentment could be a goal, but what a wonderful idea to be playing for your own enjoyment. It's like having perpetual dessert, but kind of like perpetual dessert would be in real life. It comes with some downsides. I mean, you're not going to gain weight from playing the music that you love. But there could be some real drawbacks to just having that contentment focused mindset. It can create a real lack of progress because you don't have direction. Perhaps you're not paying attention to some of the areas where if you strengthen them a little bit, you'd be able to play more of the music that you love. It can make you feel whether or not this is true. It can make you feel like you're not growing, like you're not making progress because you feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again. And it can lead to that sort of sense of dissatisfaction because you don't feel like you're getting any better. And I think that that need for improvement in some way is part of most of our experiences as humans. It can lead very obviously to a stagnation in your harp skills. If you're not pushing your skills just a little bit all the time, they're going to stagnate, they're going to stay where they are. They might even get a little bit rusty because you need to have some way to keep those getting stronger. Right? We don't want to just keep them where they are. We want to push them a little bit so that we can play more, so that we can play a little faster. If we're feeling like speed might be an issue for our fingers, or that we can just play with more facility and more ease. It can also be dangerous in that it creates a loss of motivation. If you don't have goals, you have nothing to push you to move forward. And your heart playing can just sort of become, oh, it's a nice thing that I do, but it can be less meaningful and less satisfying. I'd like to go back through some of the words that I used as part of the contentment focused mindset just a moment ago and talk about those a little bit more deeply. For instance, we talked about experience and enjoyment. I mean, experience is part of what we want to do. We want a nice broad experience with lots of different aspects of harp playing and harp music. But of course, if, if our experience is too broad, then we don't have that sense of focus that allows us to accomplish anything. But if it's too narrow, the way we sometimes have with goals, focused mindsets, then we have no sense of freedom, no sense of personal expression. So that's part of where that is. But think about something like immersion. What if you just took a month and decided to immerse yourself in music of a particular composer, or from a particular place, or a particular piece that you just love and just dig into that, maybe for no particular reason, not because it's a goal per se, but because it's a thing that you love, a piece that you love, a composer whose music you love, and it's an idea that you want to immerse yourself in. Well, exploring something like that in depth is a wonderful way to develop more harp contentment, to promote your own harp happiness. And it's going to have wonderful benefits too. Even if it's not a goal and not focused and directed like that. It's going to help you grow. It's going to enrich your musical experience and your musical understanding. It's going to allow you to explore something, an aspect that you particularly love of music or the harp or harp literature. And maybe you don't have a particular topic that you want to immerse yourself in, but. But maybe you just like to explore and discover that serendipity sort of thing I was talking about a moment ago, where you just get to sort of happen upon music that you love and that you want to play. There's nothing wrong with that either. Of course, take that too far and life becomes an endless buffet and all you do is get fat, right? If you're only exploring. We need a little bit of. Of focus just to help us make sense of the things that we encounter. Here's that downside of serendipity. If you're always experimenting and just playing through music and having fun with it, that way you have nothing perhaps prepared to play. And even if you don't think anyone is going to ever come to your house and ask you to play something for them, you, if you don't have something that feels like you can play it well, even if you're only playing it for yourself, you're missing out on something. You're missing out on that sense of pride, that sense of look at all the playing and the work that I've done, the years that I've put into this. And this is what I can do. To be able to play a piece of music pretty well is part of that. And so just skimming over the surface of a lot of music won't get you there. You need to have a little bit of structure in order to actually accomplish. So serendipity on its own is not a bad thing, but it really leads to a deeper level of harp happiness when it comes with a little bit of, of a framework to help you get something done as well. So exploration is terrific. Deepening a single experience, immersing yourself in a single aspect of heart, playing without a particular goal is also great. Playing for your own pleasure is the best.

But I want you to be able to do that well. And I think in order to be able to do those things well, you, you need to have that structure and framework along with it. So if you're that sort of free spirit who really wants to live in that staycation world, I'm right there with you. But let's talk about how to do that and still feel like you're accomplishing and like you can be proud of the work that you're doing and of the play of the way you play. And if you are a more goals focused kind of person, I want to make sure that you're getting all the enjoyment out of your hard work by using it to help you play music. So let's talk about ways to blend those two mindsets. What we're looking for is a way to combine the power of the direction of goals, right? The power that a goal brings you, along with the musical and personal satisfaction of contentment. I want you to be able to accelerate your progress and celebrate the music that you love to play. Accelerate and celebrate. Pretty good, right? So here's a very simple and easy way to do this, and you probably will have thought of this, but let's talk about it in a Different way. You can do both. You can simply create balance by including both kinds of mindsets, both kinds of practice or work or play in your playing every day or every week. For instance, you could have a once a week play day where maybe most of the week you're really focused on goals, if this is what you like. But you take one day a week where all you do is play music and you get to explore, try new music, all that sort of thing, put your goals on hold for a day and just play. Or maybe you are.

More of the free spirit, you want more of that contentment sort of mindset, so you like to play a whole bunch of different stuff during the week. Well, maybe what you need is a skills day set aside one day a week where you drill down on technique or you have a particular goal that is maybe you want to work on sight reading or memorizing or something you specifically want to achieve. And you have one day a week that's devoted to that. Easy peasy, right? Just balance them that way. It doesn't have to be an equal balance, you just want a little taste of each. Probably one of them is more natural to you than the other. So go with what you love. If you're a goals person, go with goals. If you're a contentment person, go with the contentment. But either way, be sure you're putting in some of the other. Now, you could use the one day a week strategy, or you could just put a little bit on every day just to make sure that your goals don't keep you from playing music or that your love of playing music doesn't keep you from keeping your harp playing skills as sharp as you want them to be in order to play the music that you love. Simple. That's the easiest way to create balance. But let's look at a couple others. This second way is just as easy as the first.

Choose a music goal. All right, Once again, it feels like a no brainer, right? We're putting both things together. We're making music a goal. For instance, if there's a piece of music that you want to learn, make it a goal to learn it or develop a repertoire. Any piece of music that you play is going to require a set of skills. It's going to require you to step up, up in some way in order to be able to play it. Whether it's playing a tempo, playing greater dynamics, playing with more flow, there's always going to be something that you need to work on in order to play a particular piece of music. Well, Even if it's just one measure, any repertoire you play requires skills. So if you make playing a piece of music, learning a piece of music, whether you're going to perform it or not, whether or not you want, are going to memorize it, whatever it is, learning that piece of music the way you want to learn it, well, just set out a plan to do that. Set out your plan to learn this piece of music and develop the skills that you need to do that along the way. If you're a contentment focused sort of person, this is great because you're going to be playing a piece of music and you're going to be playing it in a way that really satisfies you. It might take a little bit more work than you sometimes invest in a piece of music, but you know, that's good for you, right? And if you're a skills focused person, this is going to remind you if you're a goals focused person rather, this is going to remind you that you need certain skills developed. Yes. But that your skills have, have a purpose and music is their purpose. So making a piece of music a goal is a good thing for you too. It just combines both of those things and, and give yourself a time frame. This puts power behind that. It puts impetus, it puts a sense of action, maybe a little sense of urgency there. Just say, you know, okay, well, I'm going to take a month to learn this piece and at the end of the month choose whether or not you're going to continue learning it or playing it or whether or not you're going to put it away. That's all fine. And you can decide whether you're going to approach it from a goal sense or from just a I'm going to just play it for a month and see how good I get at it sort of sense. It doesn't take the same kind of practice approach to make this happen. But when you make a piece of music a goal, you will experience the direction and the power of having the goal and the enjoyment of having a piece of music you can play. I know, sort of a no brainer, right? Well, here's the third thing I want you to consider and it's a no brainer too. In fact, it's so simple that you probably haven't thought of this as being as powerful as it is. And it's this. Keep a practice journal. Now, how does this help you? Say, well, if you are keeping a practice journal, what I want you to write in your practice journal is what you're working on.

And how is how it's going, even if you're not working, let's just say all you're doing is playing through pieces. Well, make a list of what you played every day. Just keep that journal of what you're, what you've done. It doesn't have to be a plan, doesn't have to be a goal, although it could be. But if you're keeping a journal, you're keeping track of something. And keeping track of what you're doing, even just by writing it down, is the easiest way to know how you're spending your time and when. You can have that concrete page there where you've had to write down what you did in a day. You can see what you're doing and you can see what you may want to do to create more balance. Did you work so hard on those two measures all week long that you never played a piece of music just to enjoy it? Well, it's time to create more balance. Or did you just play through stuff this week and you never actually remember to do that etude that you had sort of promised yourself that you would do? Keeping track, just writing it down is going to give you that smack in your face reminder of, oh, this is what I'm doing. Is this really what I want to be doing? It will show you your skill deficits if you're not working on anything. Oh, I haven't worked on exercises and gosh, two months. Maybe it's time I got back to those. It might show you limits in your repertoire. Gosh, I've been working so hard on these measures and on these etudes, and I have nothing lately that I've played. Haven't even reviewed any pieces lately, or, you know, you have too much music going on, not enough music going on, whatever it is. Or maybe the music is all the same. Gosh, I've played these last pieces and they're. Every single one is the same kind of piece. Maybe I need to branch out a little bit. So just keeping a journal can show you how you're spending your time and give you the choice of how or if you want to change that. It can be very confirming to say, oh, look, I've done a better job of balancing things than I thought. That can happen, too. And in that case, give yourself a big pat on the back and just keep doing what you're doing. One last thought. Whatever is your particular mindset or your blend of mindsets, resist the urge to compare your choices with others. Your harp, happiness is your own. You don't have to fit into anyone else's idea. You don't have to play like anyone else. You don't have to play the same music as anyone else. You don't have to structure your practice same as anyone else. Your goals are yours. Your music is yours. What you are doing is perfect for you. Now you can get help, like coaching help. I told you, we've got our coaching registration coming up very soon. You can get help to do more of you if you need it. But please know that what you are doing is enough. Your harp happiness is the way you want it to be. It's playing your music the way you want. That's what's important to me. I know it's important to you. So please resist the urge to compare you. Do you.

Okay, next week here on the podcast, I'm going to be sharing some lessons I learned from a Heart Colony reunion that I had earlier this summer. And I'm going to be sharing some things that went on at that wonderful reunion, which was in Camden, Maine, some things that happened there, and some wonderful lessons that I learned from it that I think might help you too. So it's going to be a fun, a fun podcast next week because I'll give you some insider scoop on the reunion, but it's also going to have some really, really interesting lessons. I think that things that I learned anyway that I hope will help you. So that's next week on the podcast. Until we talk, please 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. 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.