The Four Levels of Goals

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 today's show. Today is the first in our series of goal setting for harpists. Now, I realize that goal setting may sound a little bit dry. Perhaps you think that you don't have any harp goals, or maybe you think your harp goals aren't worthy of actually setting out as a goal and making a plan. Perhaps you think that goals are only for serious harpists, or perhaps you have things you want to accomplish with your harp playing. You just don't know that those are goals. So over the series of these four podcasts, we're going to be talking about what goals really are, how they are part of your playing, whether you know it or not. Today in particular, we'll talk about the three types of goals that you might have. And my guess is that you have at least two of the three already, even if you don't know it it. We'll talk about the four levels of goals, how to set yourself up for planning for success for your goals. On next week's show, I have an interview with one of our certified coaches who's going to give you her very valuable insights on what achieving goals can mean for you and how to go about knowing when you get there, setting the right kinds of goals, all of that stuff. The third week in September, we'll be talking about, we'll be going through a case study, actually working on a specific goal that I had with one of my students about hands together playing. And I'll show you how we created the goal, to be very specific, how we broke it down, how we created the plan and how we were able to achieve it. And we'll also talk about how to tweak that plan if you, if that one doesn't exactly suit your learning style. And then the following week, the last week in September, we'll talk about practicing your plan and making sure that you know exactly when you get there, when you get to the end, when you've achieved your goal and arrived. So, in brief, that is the setup for the next few weeks of the podcast. But before we dive into today's specific topic, I. I want to talk to you a little bit about goals.

When I ask harpists what their goals are, often the first response I get was, oh, well, I don't really have any goals. I just like to play for myself and da, da, da. But if we consider and dive into the conversation just a little bit more, all of a sudden they tell me about, well, I want to learn this piece and I want to work on this technique, and I really think that I'd like to learn a little bit more about this or I want to get ready to play this particular kind of music. Maybe they're interested in playing in a therapeutic setting, or maybe they want to play at church, or maybe they just want to have a piece ready that they can play beginning to end for their own pleasure. All of those things are goals. And just because as a harpist, we might not consider ourselves a serious harpist, I mean, I certainly do, and I encourage all my students to think of themselves as serious harpists. After all, you've made a serious investment in your instrument. You've made a serious investment of time when it comes to your practice time. So, yeah, you're a serious harpist, whether you're aiming to be professional or not. You. You're serious, and it's time to own up to the value of your desires. After all, what is a goal? A goal is, very simply, something you want to do. We could use other words for it if those feel more comfortable to you. It could be an objective, an aim, a desire. It could be just something you want to accomplish or something you want to try or something you want to do. And I think here, do is the key word. A goal, quite simply, is a dream put into action. When you have a dream, when you have an idea, when you have something that you would like to do.

That'S a goal. And the way we get there is by doing the things that it's going to take to make that happen. So I think if you consider a goal as just something you'd like to do.

You see that you probably do have goals, don't you? And the power of a goal is that it gives us a direction very simply. If we didn't have something we wanted to do. Even if it's just, I'd like to be able to play this piece. If we didn't have a specific thing that we wanted to do, our practice, our harp playing would be a little bit meaningless. And certainly I've run across people who have lost their way where they don't have a goal to help direct their action. A goal doesn't have to be something hard. It doesn't have to be something lofty. It merely has to be something you want to do so that you can direct your practice every day toward doing that.

If we don't have a reason to direct our practice, I don't know about you, but. But I don't know if I would practice if I didn't have a reason to practice. Practice is hard. It takes focus, it takes time, it takes concentration, and we have to do it by ourselves. So it's not even something social. Right? Practice is hard, but practice is how we get better. And the reason we do it is because we have a why that we want to get better. We have a reason.

So looked at from that particular perspective, a goal becomes our why. Why do we want to do this? What do we want to do? And now we just need a direction to go in order to accomplish it. So over this course of podcasts, we'll be talking about what goals are, and that's our real focus for today. What is a goal? What does a goal for harpists look like? Next week, we'll be talking more about.

The way a goal feels and the power of a goal and how to be sure that you set a goal that you can achieve. And as I said, the third week, we'll look at a case study so you can get very practical and know exactly how your goal could be designed so that you can design a plan for it and protect that plan so that you know you're going to get to the end. And then we'll wrap that all up with some practice plans and ways to know that you've actually achieved your goal, which, of course, can be part of the problem. So before we dive into today's topic, let me just say that part of what we'll be doing today is setting out outline my plan that works you through all four levels of goal setting, and I'll give you a link. It's in the show notes to download that plan, and we call it the progress planner. And you'll be able to download that for free and you can start sketching that out. I may even have a little bit of homework for you. We'll also put a link into my practice journal, the Spark Journal, in case you are the type that likes to plan your practice on paper, whether it's as a print copy or a PDF that you can print for yourself over and over again if you like. So we'll give you a link to that if you're that type. And I want to point out that if you are interested in setting goals and achieving them, but getting some help along the way. As of this point, we still do have some openings in our certified coaching program for this very session. The session is just starting, but it's not too late to get in. And as our coaches have openings, I'm resistant to closing the registration for the program until we have those openings full. So please do take advantage of this and you'll find the link to that in the show notes. My coaches are expert at setting goals and helping students achieve them. In fact, that's what our coaching program is all about. So you can read more about it by going to the link on our on the page that's here in the show notes. You can check that out and see if you would like the help of an expert to help you set and achieve your goals. So there is that as well. And without further delay, let's dive in. Let's begin by talking about the three types of goals. Whatever it is you want to do with your harp playing, it almost certainly falls within one of these three categories. And whether you consider your goal as a goal or an objective or a desire or a dream, it's going to fall into one of these three categories. Now, the first type of goal is the easiest to understand, and I call it an achievement goal. It's something specific that you want to do. It could be a piece that you want to learn. It could be a book of pieces that you want to go through. It could be a particular performance that you're preparing for or a program that you want to study in. So those are very specific goals and as such they're the easiest because they're so easily measurable. You know when you have done it. If your goal is to play a particular piece, you know when you can play it. If your goal is to play a particular performance, you know when it's over. So the deadlines, the finish lines are very, very clear for an achievement goal. So it makes it easy to establish where that ending point is. So that's a big hurdle removed. And you'll see from a couple of the other kinds of goals their ending Points are less clear. So that's a wonderful thing. It doesn't mean it's easy to accomplish, of course, but at least you know when you're done with it. And so your biggest challenge there is to set out a plan that's going to lead you in that direction. It's also one of the most powerfully motivating kinds of goals. And partly because that finish line is so clear, it gives us such a clear vision of the end that it makes it easier to keep working toward it.

The second kind of goal is almost the opposite of it, and that's a habit goal. This is the sort of goal where you're going to create a habit that will in turn lead to the progress or the growth that you're looking for. For instance, your goal might be just to practice five days a week or to practice a specific amount of time. It might be to set up a review habit where you're regularly reviewing pieces that you've already learned. It might be something like something you do in your practice every day, a particular warm up or a particular set of exercises. It may be even a performance habit where you do a video every week, or post a video to social media every week, or play for a friend or a relative every so often. So a habit goal is very different. It doesn't have an end to it. You have to decide exactly what you want the habit to be, and then the accomplishment of that goal is in the doing of it. And where you want to be specific about a goal like this is to say, I'm going to do this particular thing in this particular way for at least this amount of time. For instance, I'm going to practice every day for 20 minutes a day and I'm going to do that for four weeks straight. Okay, that's specific enough that you're able to do it and measure it. And that's, I think, how you start about working with a habit goal. Stephen King is one of the most frequently cited examples of a person with a habit goal. And as we know, he's extremely creative. So, you know, you can't, you can't say this kind of goal isn't for a creative person. It certainly is. His habit is to Write at least 2,000 words a day. And he does it at a specific time of day each day. I think it's usually between 11:30am and 1:30pm or something. But his goal is to write daily. And he's been known to say something along the lines of, you know, he's a writer and this is what writers do. So this is one of the ways in which he prevents writer's block. He just writes every day. So another big example would be, you know, sort of a Grand Canyon kind of example, right where the river has created this giant canyon over time. So the power of a habit and creating a habit that will lead you to progress is just that, the longer you do it, the more progress you'll make. So habit goals can be difficult because they require effort over a sustained period of time. But once you get clarity about what you want that habit to be, the progress that you see and the comfort that you will get from having the reliable process that leads you to that progress, the comfort and the confidence that gives you will help you stick to that habit. So that's the second type of goal. The third type of goal is the toughest one. And that's what I call an improvement habit. This is something that we harpists tend to talk about a lot. Oh, I need to get better at. I want this to be better, I want to be better about. And better is a tough word. It's not very powerful. It's very vague. What does better mean? How do we measure better? It's very difficult to measure better. So you need to be very clear about why you want to get better. For instance, if your goal is to get make your technique better, what does better mean?

And perhaps better might be difficult to measure.

So your process needs to be very clear how you're going to make your technique better. And trusting that the process will yield the results is key to an improvement goal. Having a way to measure it is also extremely helpful. But sometimes there aren't good ways to measure what we want to do. I want to get better at playing trills. I want to get better at performing well, you know, that's an up and down process, isn't it? One performance might go well, another one not quite so well. So I think that the, the measurement of an improvement goal is very difficult. Once again, the key is in the process. I think the best example that I ever read about.

Of, of an improvement goal, and one that worked exceedingly well, was what Benjamin Franklin did. Now, you know, Benjamin Franklin, one of the, the founders of our country and known for, among other things, his writings, so the story goes, and this is documented to some extent. He was exchanging letters with a friend and as a young man, and they were engaging in political debate in their correspondence, and he showed the letters to his father, and his father looked at Ben's letters and said, well, you know, you raised some very Good points, but you're not nearly as articulate about them as your friend. You don't state your points very well. So Benjamin Franklin, being Benjamin Franklin, took this to heart, and he found one of the best examples of writing that he could. At the time, this was the Spectator magazine.

And he created a process to improve his writing. And his process involved taking a Spectator article that he thought was very well written, analyzing each sentence, writing the meaning of each sentence in his own words, then sometime later, going back from his notes, from reconstructing the sentences and then comparing them with the original to see what he had done. Now, he had some other.

Parts of his process that were included in here, but what a creative and just difficult but powerful way to solve this problem. So he created a process that was going to allow him to improve in the way that was important to him. And that's the key to an improvement goal. It's in the process. This is where a lot of harpists need help in creating their process. But you probably know a lot more about how to work on whatever it is you want to improve than you think you do. So those are the three types of goals. The achievement goal, the habit goal, the improvement goal. And as you might have suspected, the key. Once you have those goals and you're clear about what they are, the key to actually making them happen is in the plan. And I believe that each goal has four levels of planning that you need to do. And before you think that this is really too difficult and too hard, I will tell you that it's not only much easier than it sounds, but it's very practical. And in fact, it may change the way you do things on a daily basis. So let's talk about that now. The four levels of goals. When I'm talking about the four levels of goals, I don't mean a level in the sense that one goal is easier or harder or better or.

More serious than any other goal. It's that each goal has four levels within it. And the temptation for all of us is to start with the easy level and work up. And that's sort of the wrong way to do it. So I'm going to give you an overview, and then we'll talk about a couple. A couple examples. But let me start with this illustration. If you're getting in a car to go somewhere, the first thing that you have in mind when you get in the car, assuming that your car has gas in it and you know you're ready to go, the first thing you do is decide where you're going, and then you can decide your route. Now, I know that seems really obvious, and I know that if I asked you about goals, the first thing you would tell me is, well, anybody who wants to do something has to have an idea of where they're going, of what they want to accomplish. And you'd be exactly right.

But think about how many of us sit down at the Harp every day. I know this has happened to me, although it has not been my habit in a very long time to work this way, and hopefully it's not yours either. But how many of us have been, you know, gone to the harp, gotten all ready to practice? We're sitting down at the Harp, and then we say, okay, what should I do today?

Well, that's the equivalent of getting in your car and pulling out of your driveway and saying, well, let's see, should I turn right or left? And then getting to the end of the block and saying, should I turn right or left? And then getting to the end of the next block and should I turn right or left? And then you find out eventually, when you run out of gas or run out of time or just decide to stop working, stop driving, you decide, you know, it's like, oh, well, look, this is where I got. And that's sort of serendipitous. And it might be interesting and exciting, but it's not motivating over the long term. And in terms of driving, it's not going to get you somewhere you want to go. In terms of practice, it feels very creative, and it feels very expressive, perhaps. I know that, you know, there are some people who thrive on that kind of.

Lack of structure.

Because it. It feels creative, expressive, individual, all those things.

But whether that is the sort of MO that appeals to you, the modus operandi that you, you know, that you like, or whether you're a more directed, checklist sort of a person, the fact is that if you don't have a place to go, if you don't have a direction or a goal or a destination.

Then you know, you're just going to be sort of aimlessly turning corners. And so if you sit at the Harp and say, well, I don't know, what should I do today? You're likely to find less energy for your playing. You're likely to be less satisfied with the results because you don't have a particular result that you're aiming for. So what I'd like you to suggest to you and what I'd like to have you take away from this part of our discussion is, is that your daily practice is the way you're going to get wherever you want to go if you don't want to get anywhere. And that's okay, right? If you're just out for a joyride and it's just like, oh, well, okay, should I turn right or left? That's great. But it probably won't keep your energy up long term, and it probably.

Won'T make you feel satisfied in terms of the desire for improvement and, you know, pride, satisfaction in what you're doing, which I think is a part of what most of us want from our heart playing, whether we're professionals or not. I think that sense of accomplishment and, you know, is. Is part of it. So I would urge you to really rethink your.

Serendipitous, freewheeling sort of attitude toward practice. If that's your style as something that you can do some of the time, but some of the rest of the time, we need to know whether we're going to turn right or left. We need to have a destination in mind because that's where the power is. That gives us a reason to practice. It gives us a reason to focus on what we're doing. It does prevent that. Well, here I am at the harp. What do I do now? Feeling. Which I don't know if it feels this way to you, but that doesn't feel so good to me. I like to sit down and start on something. So the destination is important.

Because the destination determines what we're going to do daily. So what I teach in terms of goal setting is not to start from what you're going to do in your practice today.

But to start from what it is you want to accomplish.

And then let that drive your daily practice.

I usually teach this from the top down, and I will tell you about that in a moment because it's how I'm going to teach it to you today. But I'd like you to consider it from the bottom up. For just a Mom. What if your daily practice were to lead you toward a particular result or progress point by the end of the week? If you said, okay, every day today I'm going to work on this, or I'm going to do it this way, or I'm going to do a particular thing so that by the end of the week I can or I have or I will be able to do whatever it is.

Then your week will have meaning. And every day's practice has purpose because it's leading you to a weekly goal. And what if that weekly goal were part of A plan to accomplish something at the end of a few weeks, say by the end of a month.

You can see how your daily practice becomes the multiplier for your progress. If your practice is directed every day toward a weekly goal and your weeks are directed toward a monthly objective.

Then at the end of the month, think how far you'd be ahead. Think how much more energy you'd be able to bring to your practice every day, knowing that you're stair stepping your way toward a slightly bigger objective.

You can see how this would be part, could be part of a 30 day plan to finish a piece of music, or to work through a set of exercises, or to learn four new pieces, a piece a week that become the basis for a little set of music perhaps that you're going to play somewhere at some point.

Now, if you take that monthly progress that you've made and let's make that part of a slightly longer term objective and maybe put three of those months together.

Over 90 days, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but it's a quarter of a year, you will have achieved three times that monthly objective. And in that month you will have made four steps of progress, which you will have been able to see happening every day.

That is a key to harp happiness right there. When you know that when you're sitting down at the harp, it's part of a plan that is going to get you where you want to go, help you do something you wanted to do. Whether you think it's, you know, one of those bhag goals they talk about, big, hairy, audacious goal, or whether it's just, you know, a piece you want to learn or a book you want to play through, or a style of music you want to try, or anything.

So the daily practice is key. And by daily, you know, most people, you know, practicing five days a week is, I count that as daily practice. You don't have to practice every single day, but you do have to be consistent about it or it makes progress that much more difficult. Practice is itself a habit and it builds progress when you are consistent at it. Right? So that's. That is something that I take as, as a given, and I hope you do too. But so let's look at the goals not from your daily practice, but from how you would plan your goal from the top down. This is what I call my 9037-1 plan, and it's what is outlined for you in the progress planner download that you'll have at the end of this episode. So in the 90371 plan. We start by creating your big goal, your 90 day goal, and then we break that into three steps. So that for instance, if your big 90 day goal was to learn and perform a particular piece of music.

Your first monthly goal might be to have the piece learned and hands together, even if it's still a little bit slow and a little bit rough. Your second monthly goal, and I call these progress goals, usually that that second progress goal on the way to your big goal is going to be to get the piece polished and up to tempo and get, you know, get the, get it all working and fairly smooth so that it's kind of ready for performance. And then that third month is going to be giving some preview performances and really testing out, performing it instead of just practicing it. So there would be three monthly progress goals on your way to your big goal. And then each one of those monthly goals you could break down into weekly goals. So that if your first monthly goal is to get the piece learned hands together, maybe we've got some detail work, some big section work, some small section work, so some hands separately, hands together, different tempos, all that sort of thing, spot practice, all that built in there. And you could make a schedule for yourself based on the amount of practice time you have and the way that particular piece is going to work for you. Then from those weekly goals, you now know what to practice every day. If you're, if you have a goal for the week, it's pretty easy to see what you need to accomplish each day to get that done in a week.

So there's the 90371 system, right? It's the 90 day goals, the 30 day progress goals, this, the seven day weekly goals. I often call those benchmarks. It's sort of your benchmark on the way to your progress goal and then your daily practice ideas, right? This is what I want to work on today so that I can achieve what I need to do at the end of the week.

Now, most teachers do this for their students, but they often keep the process in their heads so that they're working with a system, something like this, but they don't often share it with their students. I have just shared it with you. And in fact, with that download, you'll have the paper you can write it all out on. But I think having this clarity about how music goals work, whether it's an achievement goal or a habit goal or an improvement goal, this 90371 system is going to help you organize it so that it happens so that you are less frustrated along the way can actually start to make the progress that you're looking for in a pretty predictable, consistent kind of fashion. It is the secret to any kind of creative process. It feels a little bit, perhaps a little bit too.

Pen and paper for you. You know, it's like, oh, well, I just thought I played the harp and it happened. Well, you know, guess.

Can play the harp better when you're a little bit more intentional about what it is that you're trying to do and why. It's very powerful and very helpful. So I hope that you will check out this download. Now, let me give you just a little bit of homework. As I said before, a goal is a dream put into action. So what would all this talking benefit you if I didn't ask you to put it into action? And so that's your homework. I'd like you to first of all identify, just for kicks, an achievement goal, a habit goal, and an improvement goal for yourself. I don't want you to work on all three of them at once. That's a lot to ask of a person. But if you were going to achieve something, would it be a piece you would learn, a book you would work through, a performance you would give?

What's an achievement goal that appeals to you? What kind of habit goal would you like to set? Is it being consistent with your practice or practicing a specific length of time, A specific time each day? Is it setting a special day of the week to review your pieces or a particular time of your practice to review pieces? Does it have to do with working on some music theory weekly or daily? Would you like to do some improvisation every day? Would you like to set up a habit of videoing yourself and posting it to social media or not? Would you like to play for a friend more regularly or play at church every month? What kind of habit goal would you like? And you can see with some of those, the habit goals embody a performance goal or an improvement goal, don't they? Sort of interesting that way. But setting up the habit is what you would do in a habit goal, obviously. And then there's an improvement goal. What would you like to improve?

And I'd like you to think of one of each of those kinds of goals. And then just as an experiment, try setting out your progress plan, your 90371 plan for each of those goals. You don't have to put it into action at least certainly not yet and certainly not all at once. That's a lot to do. But set out if you know, work through the whole process, if this is your goal, whatever that goal happens to be. Can you break it down into two.

Intermediate steps that will be your monthly progress goals so that by the end of month one, you'd be doing this, by the end of month two you'd be doing that so that by the end of month three you will have achieved your goal.

And then you don't have to break down each of those months. I generally don't for myself or for my students. I start by breaking down just that first 30 day chunk into four weekly chunks.

And start there. Give yourself those. Okay, well let's see. If I want to have this done at the end of the month, then what do I need to get done the first week and then the second week and then the third week. And here's a secret. As you start to create those weekly benchmarks, give yourself some extra time, right? If you think that it's going to take you one week to do something or you know, build in a little bit of extra time. So you know, maybe you want to break that monthly progress goal into three weekly goals and give yourself a catch up week just in case things don't go the way you expect. It's always good to build in some real lifetime.

Then when you have your weekly progress goals, look at that first one and figure out how you would break that down into your daily practice. Now I suggest that you keep this exercise sort of theoretical for the moment. You don't have to put this into play in your heart playing right away.

But do it as an experiment in goal planning. And let's see how this goes. See which type of goal energizes you the most. But practice doing the plan because that's where the progress starts. It all starts with the plan. So get your down, you know, download your, your progress planner, fill it out, do your homework. You'll find the link to that in the show notes so you'll, that's easy to get to. I would also suggest that you do not miss next week's episode when I'll be talking to our certified coach and goal expert harpist Caitlin Mertens. And she has some wonderful, very realistic ways of thinking about goals and helping us, helping you create goals you can achieve and, and particularly what to do if you find that you've misdirected yourself or you're not sure if you can achieve your goals. So she's got some really wonderful ways of looking at that and I don't want you to miss that interview. So that's all coming up next week. I thank you so much for being here with me this week and I'm so excited about starting you on this goal setting process. Stay with us as we work through the rest of this and remember that a goal is only as good as the practice that you put into it. So rest assured that's going to be coming up along the course of our discussions here too. So don't miss next week's show and I look forward to talking with you then. Thanks so much. 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.