Taking the Mystery Out Of Mastery - PHH 116

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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. I once had someone suggest to me that harp mastery was a little ambitious as a name. Was I intending that my blog and my website would only help people at the highest level? Or maybe help them to become masters of the instrument? Or was I proclaiming myself a master of the harp? Well, eek. Definitely not. In response, I told her I believed that mastery didn't have to be defined as the ultimate level of achievement, although that is often how we think of it. I had a different idea of mastery in mind. Certainly the term can be applied to the virtuoso whose skill and artistry are or are destined to become legendary. But I believe that all of us harpists, at whatever level of accomplishment, can attain the feeling of mastery, a feeling that encompasses confidence in our ability at our skill level, pride in our achievements, and pleasure in our playing. Is that true mastery, as we would apply the word to to harp legends like Rainier, Hasselman, or o'? Carolan? Possibly not, although I feel certain those harpists would have felt confidence, pride, and pleasure in their harp playing. I think it's essential, however, that all harpists, particularly those of us who struggle to feel like we're making progress toward our goals, understand that every level of harp playing is not just a growth stage, but an accomplishment in itself. We may not feel like harp masters, and we may be very far from feeling like virtuosi, but we can recognize the results of our hard work and celebrate how far we have come. Every piece we learn, every technical or musical skill we develop, is another step on the mastery journey. So today I want to talk more about mastery. Not the virtuoso kind, but everyday mastery, the kind we can all enjoy. We'll review the key components of mastery and of course I won't leave you just with the big concepts. We'll get super practical and tactical and I'll show you what you can do in your everyday practice to bring you closer to that place where competence, confidence and joy convergence. For those who attended finish camp, this will amplify what we spoke about there, but this is about much more than just finishing a piece. This is about starting your mastery journey from wherever you are and creating your mastery path to suit you and your own personal harp goals or dreams. I'm sure you're going to find some mindset gold in this episode and you're going to want to bookmark it to return to it again when you when you need a little pep talk. Also, if this episode resonates with you, please share this with a couple of Heart Friends Sometimes we can feel discouraged by our inability to make a positive impact on the world around us, let alone feel like we're making progress in our heart playing. So you can do your friends and me too a big favor by spreading a little podcast sunshine their way. All you have to do is click the share button wherever it is you're listening to this podcast episode, or capture the link and email it to them. But just remember that that's something you can do. So if this episode, as you listen to it, sort of makes those little light bulbs go off, remember it's going to do something for some of your friends too. So be sure to share that along. I mentioned finish camp just a moment ago. That was the third of our summer Sizzler camps and our Sizzler camp over for this summer. They were so much fun. It was sort of a last minute idea on my part and I'm so glad that I did them. They were really fun for me to put together and fun to do. And I just had so much fun seeing the people that would show up not just for the first time I did the workshop, but the second time I did the workshop. I did, you know, two live workshops for every camp. They were the same workshop, but I did one in the morning and one in the evening and there were people who just very faithfully showed up for both. And really there were so many light bulb moments that the students told me about and I was so excited to see what happened for everybody on those calls. So the bad news is that they're over for this year. The good News is that if you didn't join us for the Sizzler camps, it's not too late to to register. Now, obviously the camps are over, but the PDFs, which have all the information and all the warm ups and the workshop outlines and all that stuff, plus the replay of both calls for each camp, all of those are still available and you can still register until this coming Sunday. So when this podcast goes live, you'll have the opportunity to register just this week, so till August 13th, and you can register and have access to all of those things. And if you are feeling like, oh, I don't know, but I won't have time to dig into the information this week, never fear if you are registered for the summer Sizzler camps by the time we take the registration page down. And of course, if you're already registered for the Sizzler camps, this applies to you too, if you already participated in them. The replays of the calls, the PDFs, the entire course will stay open for you until September 30, so you have six weeks or more to go through all this information. So even if you're traveling, you've got plenty of time. Plus the videos, the PDFs, everything is downloadable, so you can get in there and download them to your computer and have them for whenever you want. So the course themselves will stay open and until September 30th, but your last chance to get in there and register and have access to those materials, if you haven't already, is August 13th. So be snappy and get to it. We had so much fun and I hope that you have fun watching the replays and we'll do something fun like that again. But right now we're going to start taking some of the mystery of mastery, okay? Mountaintop mastery, the kind we think of when we think of musical legends or legends in any field. We think of those three characteristics that I talked about just a moment ago. Confidence, Confidence in your abilities, pride in what you're accomplishing, pride in your work, and pleasure in the doing of your work. I think when you look at those, you know, we see that this must be, these things, must be components of the way great masters of anything have proceeded and, you know, worked their craft and their art, right? That they should have confidence and pride and pleasure, whether we lay on top of that, the struggling artist syndrome or not. I think at the root of true mastery.

We find those three things, confidence, pride, and pleasure.

The good news is that those three qualities, confidence, pride, and pleasure, those three characteristics are available to us at any level. And we can experience them just because they are natural results of our skill development and our experience.

The more skills we develop and the more experience we get, perhaps the greater our levels of confidence, pride, and pleasure. But certainly when we are playing music at our level, we should be able to experience all three of those things. Confidence that we can play it well, pride that we play it well, and pleasure in just the act of doing it. But along with those feelings come, you know, a couple interesting other things, like the freedom to experiment, right? Within the parameters of your own skill level. You have a certain amount of knowledge of the musical and technical materials, and you can play with them, you can manipulate them, you can be creative. We do this in terms of our expression. We do this if we improvise or just kind of mess around. But we do this in all kinds of different ways at every level. It's not an exclusive province of the advanced player.

We can and should be doing this no matter where we are on the development spectrum. Harp wise, right? So there's that, the freedom that comes from that. And then also, I think part of mastery is an awareness of how you're going to maintain the level where you are and that you can see the next level and you have an idea of how to move to that next level. This is a knowledge of sort of means and methods. What do I need to do? Do I need to develop another skill, a new set of skills? Do I need to just keep the same kind of skills, but learn to play faster? Right. So there are different ways to get where you want to go, but there's always a next level. Even for true masters, there's a next level that, you know, their, their levels might seem ridiculously small to some of us who are struggling with, you know, just let me get these notes out. But there's always a next level. Mastery is one of those journeys, right, with no end point. And it's a continuous search to learn and to grow. I think this is why those great masters always appear so humble. They know that their true goal is in their growth. They're not satisfied with their achievement as the ultimate place. And they don't need to go any further. They're looking for that next level. And I think that's part of the pride that they can take in their work, knowing that they're still growing. So there's that look at sort of great mastery, but there's the everyday mastery for us. And I think those same things apply the confidence, the pride, and the pleasure where we are now.

Allowing ourselves to experiment within our skill set and then an awareness of what's next for us, what we can do to keep moving forward.

So we're going to talk today about mastery, sort of in three different ways. Mastery of a piece. What might that mean? Overall mastery, like mastery of the instrument, you know, mastery as a harpist, and then self mastery. Each one of those things only has a few key components that we really need to pay attention to. There are lots of little, you know, little bitty details that, that come into play. But sometimes if we're focusing on those little details, we're not really seeing, just seeing the big picture of what mastery in this case might be. So mastery of a piece, mastery of the instrument, and self mastery, we're looking at that. But before we dive into that, I want to give you one last sort of warning here. Don't confuse mastery with perfection.

It doesn't have to be perfect. We have an ebb and a flow. We are human, and the music that we create is a product of a moment. It is a snapshot in time. Unless you have a recording of exactly what you did, as soon as you've done it, it's gone. So we're going to have good days, we're going to have bad days. Those bad days don't count against your mastery. Instead.

Your desire for mastery will help you know how to surmount those bad days and get past them. Setbacks, failures, they're an inherent part of the mastery journey and the mastery experience.

They will happen. So don't let a bad day throw you off your game. That's part of our making music process. No musician escapes that, and you won't either. So just remember, that's not a black mark against you. It's just part of the process, part of being human, part of making music. So having said that, let's talk about mastery of a piece. This is the smallest level we're going to talk about today. So mastery of a single piece. How do we want to define it? I'd like to reduce the idea of mastery of a piece, distill it down to its essential kernel of truth. Mastery of a piece is the ability to play it and have it communicate the music.

You could use fewer words to say that. It's the ability to make it communicate. It's the ability to make it sound like music. It is in the expression of the idea of the piece.

However you choose to say it. Mastery of a piece is that little nugget. It's the essential truth of the music coming through you and communicating itself. To a listener, that's where mastery is. When you can communicate the music of a piece, you're doing it well. It is something that you ought to be able to take pride in and enjoy doing. Components of mastery right there.

What mastery of a piece is not necessarily is all the right notes. You have to have enough of the right notes there, certainly, or the music won't communicate right. It won't tell the story properly if you don't have enough right notes. But a piece can survive a few wrong notes. What if you set yourself as sort of, you know, like a 90% correct goal? Just think about what a piece would be like. A piece that you know and play. If you played it sort of 90% correctly and you were able to express the music, would that be good enough? Would that satisfy you?

I think it might. I mean, 90% is pretty good. Remember, professional baseball players, a good batting average is way less than half, right? Less than 50%. And those are people who only get one shot at it too. So, you know, 90% goal, it's not bad. And I only offer that because I know some of you want to think of it in terms of numbers. It's so much easier to count the wrong notes, to count the notes that we've missed, than it is to evaluate how well you're conveying the idea of a piece of music. That's much more difficult. It's harder to quantify the result. Right. We can't just kind of put check marks. Wrong. Right. Wrong. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Wrong. Wrong the way we can with wrong notes. So that's why I think we often think in terms of notes. But that's not where the music is.

And your ability to play that piece well is a product of time and familiarity, where the familiarity is developed over time. And I don't necessarily just mean how much practice time you put in on it, but rather how much you have practiced and played it over a period of time. Like days, weeks, months, years.

Some pieces will take only days for you to master. If I opened a beginner book and put it in front of you, you could likely play one of those pieces nearly instantly and. And feel like you could play it comfortably for somebody tomorrow.

On the other hand, if I put one of those concerts etudes in front of you by, you know, master of the harp, this might be something that would be a project of many months for you.

And that's okay. Right? You don't have to play one of those very hardest pieces to achieve mastery. Mastery can be for a single piece. So What I'd like to suggest to help you get to that mastery mindset and that mastery place of playing with a particular piece is to when you've got your piece, you know, mostly correct, I often use 80% as a marker percentage for those of you who find it easier to work with numbers and keep score. But you know, it's 80% correct, 80% of the time, maybe even 80% of tempo. That's where you're going to start your mastery practice. And that's all about playing the music and communicating it.

The notes that still have to be worked out, the familiarity that still has to be developed, maybe even the tempo that still has to come, all of that will develop over the time that you need to really get that piece in your bones is the way we often think of it, to really become familiar with that piece. Because it is in that longer term experience with a piece that you begin to get comfortable enough with it, to play it with confidence, to play it with mastery. But at 80% correct, you know, 80% of the notes, 80% of the time, 80% of tempo, that's where you need to start thinking that way. Start doing practice that plays through the piece. Get past your section thinking, okay, I'm going to get these two lines, I'm going to get these two lines, I'm going to work on these four measures. Get past that thinking. Play the entire piece. The idea here is to start thinking about communicating it and think about the communication more than about the correctness. The correctness will come. I can guarantee that you're not going to be satisfied with those wrong notes.

But you need to think about communicating it. For those of you who were in Finnish camp, this kind of idea should sound familiar to you.

The mastery of a piece is something that you develop when you play it often. And when you play it for others often, there's a different level of familiarity, a different level of experience that you get when you play it for others.

And here's a thought, something I want you to register. You can write it down if you need to, but think about it. This may be a new way to think about it for you. I know that we all get nervous. I had somebody ask me, a young student ask me when I was giving a workshop not long ago, if I still. Did I get nervous before I played. I said, oh, yeah. I told her, I said, if I didn't get nervous, I would be worried that I. I didn't care about what I was going to do.

So, you know, nerves are a part of that. More for some people than for others, and that's okay. But I want you to think about this. You can be nervous about playing a piece you have mastered. You know, oh, gosh, I've got to play it and I'm a little nervous about it. But you don't have mastery over a piece that makes you nervous. If the piece itself makes you nervous, it. You haven't mastered it yet and it's not ready. You can be nervous about playing.

But not nervous about the piece. So let me say that one more time because I want you, you know, don't do this if you're driving, but if you're not, you can, you can take a moment and write this down or you can come back to this later. It's, you know, about, oh, 25 minutes into the podcast if you need to find it fast. You can be nervous about playing a piece you have mastered, but you don't have mastery over a piece that makes you nervous. Okay, something to think about. All right, so there's mastery of a piece. What about overall mastery?

Remember that I'm defining overall mastery not as.

The mountaintop skill that most of us will never achieve. Right. You know, I mean, I'm never going to play like Rainier or Salzato or Granjeni. I play pretty well. I play very well some days, but I'm still not there. So. And I won't be. I don't expect to get to that level. That's okay. But overall mastery does mean that you need to have your essential harp skills in the bag at whatever level you are. Right. There's going to be a next level, but mastery at a particular level will be about those critical, those essential skills. And if you, you know, I think I talked in the last podcast, episode 115, about rounding up those critical skills, those especially the non technical skills that you were going to need for success. We know about the technical skills too. Right? So that's part of it. We're what your fingers need to learn and do. Those musicianship skills, what you need to know, you know, that little bit of theory, that little bit of harmony or.

Note reading, all those kinds of things. And of course, the repertoire that's appropriate to your level, that's very simply the music your skills enable you to play. So whatever level you happen to be, whatever stage you happen to be inhabiting in your harp life right now, now the skills that are appropriate for that, the music that's appropriate for that, all those things that you need to play at that level, all of those things need to Be there. And you'll know if you're missing one, right? You'll know if. Well, gosh, this music doesn't seem too hard for me, but I still can't play it fast enough yet. All right, There's a technical skill to work on, or I can't read the notes fast enough to be able to play this. This music. I'm not, you know, maybe that's a musicianship skill you need to work on. So all those skills come together, and that's what we talk about in my harp. Mastery with the scale of success, working through all those various different skills, trying to fill in all the little holes. And that's where overall mastery is. But once again, it's not, you know, one level that you have to attain before you can be a master. No, you can have mastery at every level, level, wherever you are.

So think of it as something that you stair step up, right? It's gonna happen. Mastery is gonna happen to you in stages.

You're gonna be able to master very easy things, then pretty easy things, then easy things, then harder things all the way up. And I want to urge you to feel the satisfaction, to feel that sense of accomplishment that comes from having mastered the skills and music at a particular level. Look back, look how far you've come. What were you playing a year ago or two years ago and struggling with. But things that seem so easy now, that's growth. That's the mastery journey, and that's what you need to be looking at.

Confidence, pride, pleasure. All of those things incorporated in that. In that feeling of, yeah, I've done this. I can check this off. Okay, so I should add one more thing there before we move on to mastering yourself. I should add in this. There's no one definitive set of guidelines for any particular level. You've heard me talk before about that. You know, the. The levels that people use to indicate music. I mean, an intermediate level can be anything from almost from row, row, row your boat to the Salzado variations on an ancient theme. You know, the. It can be almost anything. So that level is not something that you can particularly quantify as, okay, I've done these things, so the world would say I've achieved this level. The closest we come to that is one of those graded music exam curriculums like the ABRSM or the rcm. Those kinds of things can, you know, can give you that sort of standardized marker for where you are.

But other than that, there really isn't one. So, you know, you need to find that for yourself and be Confident in your own definition of what that level is for you. Okay, I know that might be the hard part for you, but we'll get on with mastery of yourself, and maybe that should be part of it. So mastery is. If it's something that we are defining on our own terms and defining at our own level and for our own music, then we are essentially owning our own mastery. And of course, we're responsible for it. And there are a few habits, a few ideas around your mindset that are going to be important on this journey.

These are things that we talk about frequently. But if you think about them as essential components in your ability to attain that next level, to move beyond where you are right now and to grow your mastery, they might have a little bit more importance for you, or you might be able to think of them in a new way.

So the first mindset that I'd like you to remember to keep as part of your work is resilience. We talked about those good days and bad days kind of thing. Well, setbacks and failures are going to happen. They're part of this. You're going to have several good days and then a bad day. You're going to have played that piece for people a hundred times, and it always works. And then the hundred and one time, 100 first time you play it and you forget what you're doing. You forget where you are. Your fingers feel like they've never seen the strings before. That happens. It's just part of the journey. And you can't wallow in that moment and you can't even really regret it. You may be able to learn from it. Well, gosh, if it worked a hundred times, what did I do differently that didn't work this time? Was it that I forgot to have dinner? Could be. Or was it that I was really worried and stressed about something else and I allowed it to distract me? Did I just not have enough light? Did I not prepare properly? You know, there are all kinds of reasons you might have a setback, and it's worth looking at those. But you can't be blaming yourself and letting yourself get stuck in a bad day. We need to be resilient. We need to move on. And resilience allows you to bounce back. It allows you to embrace the lessons, if there are any from those bad days, and to keep on going despite them. So resilience. You might take a look at what you've been doing and how you've been demonstrating resilience. If you've been playing the harp for any length of Time. I guarantee that you have already demonstrated resilience. Take a moment, one of those little I get to pat myself on the back moments and find those moments of resilience. Those places where you have demonstrated.

That you can overcome an obstacle. I guarantee they're there. Next would be consistency.

Mastery needs consistency, right? It's about being in there for the long haul. It's consistency in your practice. It's consistency in the things that you pursue. Not jumping from one thing to another necessarily, but planning just a little bit, organizing what you're doing so that you can master your skills at a particular level. That's how you make significant progress. It doesn't have to be the plan to end all plans. It doesn't have to be super organized. It just needs to have a direction that you.

Relentlessly pursue.

That relentless pursuit is what's going to drive your progress. It's about honoring your commitment to yourself in terms of follow through, in terms of. I said I wanted to do this. It is important to me and I'm going to do the work to get it done. Maybe in my own time. It might not be in somebody else's time frame and it might be just the way I have to do it, but this is what I'm doing. I want to do this. I'm going to be consistent. I'm going to follow my, my ambition. I'm trying to stay away from the word goals. Did you notice? It doesn't have to be about a big term goal. It just has to be about progress and the path.

Which leads me to the third component I wanted to talk about here, time and patience. Obviously, mastery at any level is a commitment and it's often sort of a long term commitment. It's not an easy route. There are going to be obstacles. Not just bad days, but obstacles that come up that hinder you in terms of your ability to stay consistent.

When those things happen, it's not worth regretting them. You want to be resilient here as well. Embrace those moments as part of the process. You need to be patient. It's absolutely essential to be patient with yourself as you navigate those plateaus, those high points, those low points, the times when things just don't seem to be making progress. Because you know that if you keep on going and you slog through that place where it just doesn't seem like it's going to be going at the end, there's going to be this big burst, just like the seed that's been growing underground. You don't see it. And then all Of a sudden, it comes through the soil and bo, there it is. You need to have a process that you can trust that will allow you to keep moving forward.

If you're not feeling confident in your process, there are lots of resources for that. But your best resource is going to be a coach or a teacher, somebody who can help you plan your process, show you how to stay consistent, and point out the progress that you're making as you're doing it. Because sometimes when we're down in the trenches doing the work, we don't see what's really happening. Perspective is everything, my friend, isn't it?

Some final thoughts here before we wrap up for today. If mastery can be that wonderful combination of confidence, pride, and pleasure that you can take in your playing, realize that mastery is not what you accomplish, but how you allow yourself to feel about your accomplishment. It's not that you can play a particular piece as much as the fact that you can enjoy playing that piece, play it confidently, and feel proud of your accomplishment. That makes sense, right? Does that turn the idea of mastery on its head for you? I want you to be able to enjoy the accomplishments that you have made with the harp, to feel that confidence, pride and pleasure that comes from playing a piece that you play. Well, it's not about what you play, but how you play it. The author, Gail Sheehy, has a wonderful quote that I wanted to share with you, and it is this. She says, ah, mastery. What a profoundly satisfying feeling. When one finally gets on top of a new set of skills and then sees the light under the new door. Those skills can open even as another door is closing.

Isn't that a wonderful thing? Light under the new door?

If that's what mastery is, we can all get there. And it is exciting to think about. At least it is to me, and I hope it is to you, too.

So that's our episode for today, taking, I hope, some of the mystery out of mastery. A quick reminder that the Summer Sizzlers registration is still open. If you have one of those FOMO moments like, oh man, I missed the Sizzlers, you can still get in until Sunday. August 13th is the last day we will have registration open and you'll have access to all the PDFs, all the replays, and we will put the link in the show notes so that you can get them. So do take a look at the show notes because that's where the link is. You won't find it on the website at the moment. So next week on the podcast, we're doing a Rhythm Master class. It's called Count, Click and Canon. I'm actually going to be looking at the Paco Bell Canon and you can use whatever version of the Paco Bell Canon you have, but we're going to be using that as a vehicle to talk about counting and talk about the metronome and how to use them. And I'll be able to share with you.

Specific strategies for learning to develop your rhythmic skills with the metronome. If you're a, you know, if you're one of those people that hates the metronome, we're going to start right there. If you can never seem to work with it successfully, we're going to work with there. We also have a level of stuff we're going to be doing for those of you with more intermediate skills. We're going to be working on some subdivisions. Plus we'll have some really spiffy games for for those of you who are already comfortable with the metronome and you just want to up your own rhythm game. So Count, Click and Canon is a rhythm Master class and that's on the podcast next week. In the meantime, until I see you then, 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 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.