The Success Habit: How to Fuel Your Courage, Confidence and Creativity - PHH 057

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started. Welcome to the show. What is success when it comes to harp playing? And is success something you're really interested in anyway? I don't know. Success is a loaded word. It's easy to imagine success only in terms of applause and record deals and bouquets of flowers. Even if we know that that's only a Hollywood style illusion. Even considering success from a more realistic perspective, you may not feel that success is what you're looking for in your harp playing. After all, your goals may not include winning competitions or playing solo recitals or making CDs.

I want to challenge your idea of success on today's show to show you how your success is more important to you than you may think, and that it is the single most important factor in your harp happiness. Now, if that sounds like hard work, let me reassure you right now. It's much easier than you think and quite possibly much more rewarding than you've imagined.

And I'd like to share a quote with you from Albert Schweitzer. He was a theologian and a musicologist as well as an organist, and he was famous for his edition of the keyboard works of J.S. bach. And here's the quote. Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you're doing, you will be successful. Now, of course, talking about harp happiness, I love the way Schweitzer connects success and happiness. For us harpists, that kind of happiness isn't just the happiness we feel when we play well. It's finding happiness in the work we must do in order to play well. If we dread our practice or avoid it, or feel guilty about it, or feel like we're just going around in circles and not making progress. We are off the success path. Success, or at least the kind of fulfilling success we want, doesn't need to involve gritting our teeth and grinding out another practice session that's actually the wrong way to go about it.

Success is something that can and should be a daily part of your harp life. Success is built with small steps of courage and confidence and creativity, and the more small steps you take, the more success you build. You can think about these steps as daily wins if you like, and today we'll talk about how you can create those wins consistently by fueling your courage, confidence and creativity. This is about finding the fun in your practice, not in a way that avoids the hard work, but in a way that allows you to renew your love of the harp no matter how hard you're working.

But before we dive into today's topic, I would like to take just a moment to thank the many My Harp Mastery members who were on the live podcast recording last week. If you listened to the podcast last week, that would be episode 56. You'll know that we did that particular podcast recording as a live recording in front of a zoom audience of my Harp Mastery members from all over. And they were there to ask their questions and you heard some of the answers that I gave them. And perhaps if you've already checked it out, you know that in the show notes for that episode there is a link to the video that we did from that same podcast. So you can actually see me record the podcast instead of just hear me. But that was a really fun episode to do. It was a special episode in to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of HARP Mastery and I was so pleased that those members were there to celebrate with me. And if you haven't listened to that episode, it was a great one on Big Picture and Little Picture Practice. And I urge you to go back to episode 56 and give it a listen.

On another note, about my Harp Mastery, this is a fabulous membership community. I teach myself live in the membership community. We have live calls every week and they're group calls. We deal. We have workshops on different topics. I teach, my certified coaches also teach in that community and it's a wonderful place to support to find the support that you want for your harp playing, to find the information to ask questions, have a real person like me answer the question in real time. So think it's a great resource and so do the My Heart Mastery members, of course. And why I'm mentioning this is that membership in My Heart Mastery is now open. We only open membership one or Two times a year. And it is now open. We will open it for 10 days until June 30, and so you can hop in and join us. It's a monthly subscription. And I'll tell you that the resources that we have, the connections that you will make in that group, will more than compensate you for the cost of the membership. It's very modest. And if you take a look at the show notes here, you'll find a link to a page that tells you more about My Heart Mastery and will get you the link to register to join us. I'd love to have you join us. It's something I look forward to every week, getting to talk to those members. And we would love to have you on board. So thank you again, my Heart Mastery members. If you were on the call, thank you for being wonderful community members. And for those of you who are ready to join us, we would love to have you. So now back to talking about success.

First, let's be clear about what success is, or maybe what it should be if we have a more realistic perspective about it. Because obviously success is not, you know, all flowers and record deals and, you know, Carnegie hall performances. Success is what you want it to be. But more than that, success is a path. It's not a destination. It is a path. Now, when we see, you know, think about an overnight sensation that we see, all of a sudden the. The. This new pop star is there, or this new star in any arena, right? We've not ever heard of them before, and all of a sudden there they are, and they're selling a million records or whatever it is they're doing, and they look like an overnight success.

What we see is.

That moment of arrival, not that that moment is the only success they've had. Success has been a succession of smaller wins, wins that maybe didn't feel so small at the time, but built up to that place where all of a sudden their success has become public. But success happens on the path, and one success will lead to another. Failure can also lead to success. I believe that we learn a lot more from a failure than we may learn from a success.

But if you think about success as a path, then you can think of success as your path. What do you want your path to look like? You don't have to think of it in terms of where you might end up.

Because we never know where we're going to end up. And I'll talk about that in just a second. But think about what that next step is and how that can look like a Success for you.

But if success is a path, success is also a mindset, right? It's a mental habit. It's an attitude. It's a way of thinking about what we do. And it's important to have a positive attitude, certainly. But I'm not talking about a positive attitude itself, creating success. But to go back to the Albert Schweitzer quote, if we're not happy in what we are doing, we will not find success.

So we need to know that the path we are pursuing is its own reward. Success is the bonus, right? The path that we're following. The fact that for me, I get to play the harp every day, I get to play music that I love. I get to play it in all kinds of places with all kinds of other kinds of colleagues and for all kinds of audiences, I get to enjoy what I do every day, even when it's doing my exercises, my conditioning exercises, and working through the hard parts in a piece. That's happiness for me. And it's that kind of happiness, the happiness in doing the work that we need to do in order to create what. What we want to create.

That's the kind of happiness that breeds success.

And then, of course, success is a habit, right? You build success one win at a time. That's those daily wins I was talking about just a moment ago. And that habit is a series, right, of small steps taken consistently.

Think about the Grand Canyon, right? This huge hole in the earth that was carved by a river over a long, long time. Now, we don't have to wait that long for our success, thank goodness. But we're not trying to carve a really deep hole in the earth either. But the principle, the idea of it is the same. If you build a habit of success, and we'll talk about what that is going to look like, we'll get really specific about it. If you build that habit of success, then success becomes easier.

And success doesn't mean that you have to win all the time, that you have to be good all the time, that you have to be perfect ever.

Success can be something else altogether. So let me just tell you. Let's go back to this happiness idea and let me tell you what my own harp happiness has looked like very briefly. We're not going to go through my whole. My whole life story here, but I will tell you that I got off to a great start with the harp. I was so fortunate. I had. I was living in a place where. In Philadelphia, the Philadelphia area, where there was. Was a wonderful musical culture and where I could Find fabulous harp teachers.

My. My first harp teacher was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, where I later went to school. But when she graduated, after I'd been playing, I guess for two years, I start. I became a pupil of her teacher, Marilyn Costello, who was the principal harpist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. And she was my teacher all the way through my college education at Curtis Institute. So, you know, I was privileged to be living in a place like that, have and had parents who were willing to support me. But that didn't mean that every single step along the way was easy or smooth. I had plenty of disasters, many of which taught me important lessons about what I really needed to be practicing, the level of preparation that I needed.

All different kinds of things, of course, lessons along the way. But then eventually.

Although I. I still do an incredible amount of playing, a lot of solo playing recitals, chamber music concertos, that kind of thing, I'd been doing a lot of freelancing. And then we moved. We moved from the Philadelphia area. This. My husband and I, we moved from the Philadelphia area to the middle of Pennsylvania. Now we were very close to State College, where Penn State University is. So there was a cultural life and there was a musical life and good people. And I had a wonderful time there before we moved back last year, But I had a lot more time on my hands. I was doing teaching. I was still driving back and forth to the Philadelphia area just about weekly. But that was when I became interested in doing things online. That was when I became interested in the idea that not everybody had had the same opportunities that I had. In fact, very few harpists had had the opportunity to study with the people that I studied with or solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra the way I was, the way I did when I was a child. But, you know, there. There were all kinds of things that I had done and was privileged to know.

Having been taught by incredibly generous and gifted teachers. And I wanted to be able to share that. So eventually, I sort of found my way into the online world and found a creative mission besides just playing the harp. But being able to share the knowledge that I had gained with more harpists than any teacher a couple of generations ago would have thought of the access that we have to harp teachers and harp students through the Internet is just unfathomable. It's incredible. It's wonderful.

But while I was prepared for this success, if that's what you want to think about it, for this next step in my harp journey, it wasn't something I could have predicted, but it was built on those little wins along the way. And of course, heart mastery was built from a small and insignificant first blog post. It didn't start with much.

But I was consistent with the blogging and I kept it up and I just kept finding more little wins and enjoying it all along the way. So that's part of what harp happiness has looked like for me, a small part of it. But if you want to think of it this way, you can think of harp happiness as having or being a mindset.

Finding those steps that are going to lead you to that harp happiness mindset, which is where success is. And I've already mentioned the three big ingredients here. They are courage and confidence and creativity.

Now, I don't want you to make the mistake of thinking that courage and confidence and creativity are the products of success.

Success can fuel them.

But they are truly the fuel for your success. They're the things that you need to not have, but need to develop, need to employ, need to make part of your daily habit.

Courage, confidence and creativity. Courage is hard, you know. To be brave is tough. I have one student whose motto is to be courageous and act courageously. And she reminds herself all the time that she needs to be courageous.

That doesn't mean that you have to plan to do something difficult or you have to walk into the lion's den. I think the main part of courage for any harpist is to own your ambition. Whatever your ambition is, admit it to yourself and act on it. That is courage. Do you, for instance, want to play at your church? Then admit to yourself that you want to play at your church, and then admit it, own it to the person that's going to enable that for you? Do you need to talk to the music director, the minister? Who do you need to speak to that will make it possible for you to play at church? Do you need to speak to your teacher about it and say, well, I know I've been taking lessons and I know we're working on these things, but I'd really like to play at my church. Would you be able to help me with that?

Own your ambition.

And then act on it. I know it's so easy to say that and it's so hard to do. Or it can be hard to do, but you can do that in small steps. You don't have to try to be totally brave all at once. You don't have to. For instance, if your ambition is to play at church, you don't have to schedule a full recital at church. Or you don't have to say, oh, I'll do all the music next Sunday. No, do one thing. Prepare one piece.

And schedule it for a time when you feel comfortable doing it and prepare it one step at a time. Step into the role gradually.

You don't have to try to eat the elephant. Right? That's one of my favorite sayings. The, the thing is, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Yeah, okay, that sounds really good. Well, with courage, it's the same thing. You don't have to do everything. Just do the first thing first, the first little step. So if you're going to create your harp happiness and create your success, then the, the, the daily step, the daily fuel for your courage.

Is going to be to find that small bite of the elephant. What's that first little thing that you can do? For instance, if you're going to play at church, well, make the phone call and say, you know, I'd like to play sometime. What do you think?

Or if you want to start a big piece and you're afraid of the, of how hard that piece might be, well, just learn the first line or learn the ending. Sometimes it's fun to learn the last couple of measures to a piece and start with those. Maybe, maybe you need to start with a smaller bite. Buy the music. Here's an act of courage that I think many people are slow to take. Set a date for your next lesson.

Right. How many times have you left your teachers house and said, or whatever the virtual equivalent of that is, and, and said, I'll call you to set up our next lesson. And then weeks go by and you haven't called and you haven't set it up and you start to feel guilty and you're not practicing as much anymore.

Well, set a date for your next lesson. Do it now. Make the phone call, send the email, whatever it is you need to do.

Or if there's a, a nursing home where you would like to play sometime, give them a call. There's your small bite. But whatever it is.

Be honest with yourself about what you want, why you're doing this, what you would love to do, how you would love to share your music, perhaps if that's what you want to do, and then take that small bite, find the smallest bite you can take and take it. That's your courage. Habit.

The small steps are easy and that's how success will build.

The second success step is confidence. A lot of people think you have to have confidence. That's not true. You just have to act with confidence and allow yourself to create confidence.

Now I believe that the most productive way to think about confidence, the one that involves the least amount of guilt and shame, perhaps we're afraid of being overconfident, is to think about confidence as living in a growth mindset. Think about that. If you're in a growth mindset, then you're learning, you're getting better. Sure, we're not doing everything right right now, but we're growing now. Compare that to the way we often practice, which just feels like an endless cycle of self correction and self critique, right? We can be hard on ourselves in practice. In fact, I think we're the harder on ourselves than anybody else would be on us, for sure.

But living the habit of just correcting and criticizing without.

Honoring your growth is not the path to success. It's certainly not a way to stay happy in your practice, is it? So you want to think about developing that growth mindset. Remember that, you know, when a child is learning to walk, they stumble, right? They stumble and we still applaud. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and they get up and they try again and we applaud.

I'll bet you don't applaud your own mistakes, do you?

But your mistakes are a necessary part of your growth. You have to have those stumbles. It's the same as if you were preparing a performance and you were going to do a preview performance. The whole point of that preview performance is to find the mistakes that you still need to fix the ones you didn't know were going to crop up. So we want to find those mistakes because that is how we grow.

But we don't want to endlessly criticize the mistakes because then we won't be encouraged to keep on growing. We don't need to be so hard on ourselves. And I believe we need to take a little bit more time to celebrate the things that we do well. So if you want to start developing confidence as a daily habit in your path to success and harp happiness, this is the step I would encourage you to take. Always leave your practice session with a win. For instance, it might be just playing a favorite piece that you love to play. Just imagine that you've gotten through a tough practice session and you've been, you know, woodshedding this passage, and it's still not coming together. But your practice time's just about up. So you take out this piece that you just love to play. Could be a beginner piece, an easy piece, but you just love it and you play through it. Ah, you've left your practice with a win. Or maybe if you're not ready to leave that thing you've been working on just quite yet, maybe do it with a. Leave your practice with a slow motion run through of what you were working on so that you're going to play it all the way through, but you're going to take it down to that super slow mo kind of tempo where you can do everything correctly and get rid of the panic. This is great. If you've been trying to speed up a piece, end with the super slow mo. Another way to finish with a win is to finish your practice with your warmup. I mean, yeah, you would have started with a warmup, but think of it as a cool down.

Any one of these strategies, or any one that feels like a win to you, is a great way to wrap up a practice session. Because no matter how hard you've worked, no matter how little progress you feel like you've made, you're leaving your practice with a win. And that is a great confidence booster. And when you make confidence a habit for yourself, you will find that you have more of it. What a great thing to find out. Right? Okay. So if there's courage and confidence, there is also creativity.

Creativity, I think, in your practice is about letting go of the shoulds. I should be doing this, I should be doing that, and embracing the coulds. I could do this, or what if I did that? So release the shoulds. Embrace the coulds. Embrace. This is the difference between what I often think of as mindless repetition and deliberate practice. We're not going to do this exactly the same way every time. This passage you're working on, we're not going to just do it 10 times, but we're going to do it 10 times with focus. Maybe this time we'll focus on dynamics, or this time we'll focus on technique, or this time we'll focus on tempo, or this time we'll focus on. On phrasing.

What could you do with that passage? You don't just have to do it the same way ten times. In fact, if you do, you're going to be practicing in a way that is anything but creative.

And actually, I was talking about deliberate practice. I'm really not a big fan of the word deliberate because it feels forceful. Like, okay, I'm very deliberate about this. When really, I think better words might be purposeful practice or intentional practice or focused practice, or even kaleidoscope practice, like my Kaleidoscope practice book, where you're practicing with different focuses as you go.

And creativity is easy to Bring to your practice. And it doesn't mean that you're going to make any less progress. You will probably make more because you're going to make more discoveries as you practice. Discoveries about the music, discoveries about how you learn. And you're going to find new ways to express your music, which is always a win. Right? So I think you can fuel your creativity with any number of fun and effective kinds of practice techniques. These are things that allow you to. To stay focused on your practice. Your mind won't wander. They foster growth, going back to that growth mindset again, of confidence, and they free your musical energy.

We're not trying to box all your musicality into. I have to play these two measures 25 times. Argh. We're letting you play those measures maybe 25 times, but. But to experiment with them, to find out more about them, to push the limits just a little bit.

That kind of exploration, that's where creativity comes from.

And if you want the simplest and easiest daily step to keep your creativity going, it's to play every day. And I'm using the word play as different from practice. Practice. We feel like we're, you know, we're fixing things, we're making things right. I want you to enjoy your playing. To just sit down and play through a piece of music that you like. Stumble through it. If you're sight reading especially, or if you haven't played it in a long time, allow yourself to stumble without regret. It's like, okay, well, I just haven't practiced this in a while. It's going to have mistakes. But play through it in a way that.

Gives your musicality to the piece, that lets you enjoy it. Play it.

With freedom and abandon. Just enjoy playing it. I know it's not the way we usually think of our practice, but think about what that would do if you got up from your practice every day knowing that you had had that much fun in your practice.

I don't know about you, but that makes me very happy when I do that. And happiness, according to Albert Schweitzer, is the thing that breeds success.

Success is not a destination. Success is a path. And it's your path to your kind of success, your way. And you can get there by taking simple little daily steps of courage, of confidence, and of creativity.

Now, how does that sound? Well, I hope it sounds great, because I'll tell you, it sounds great to me, so I hope it sounds great to you. And I know that this is something that our My Heart Mastery members embrace. Not always without a certain amount of skepticism. But this is something that they find in the work that we do together. We are encouraging you to be brave, to be courageous, and we work hard to give you the confidence and to inspire your creativity by bringing our own to the teaching that we do in this community.

Remember that, as I said before, membership is now open. It's open for a very limited period of time, just for 10 days and then we'll be closing it again. We probably will open it just before the end of the year, but I can't guarantee that we spend most of our energy in the My Heart Mastery community working together and creating the materials for the members. So we don't have a lot of time to get out there and, you know, invite you to join. But I am inviting you today. I would love for you to join us in this community and just love you to give it a try. So follow the link, look in the show notes, follow the link, read more about what we do you and if you think it might be something for you and might be a way to keep you connected to your harp playing and to other harpists and to all the goodness that is harp happiness, then I urge you to give it a try. We would love to have you. So check that out, follow that link and we'll, we'll look forward to seeing you on our next weekly call. In the meantime, let me invite you to join me right here next week on the podcast. We are talking all about thumbs. It's thumb day on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. Everything you wanted to know about what your thumb needs to do to play well, we will be talking about on next week's show and I look forward to having a chance to share that with 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. All right, 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 right running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.