The Surprising Power of Just One More - PHH 225

What makes these one more things so beneficial is the power of compounding the idea that this particular kind of one more thing will give added benefit over time without costing very much at the moment, and without leading you into a black hole. Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist 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. 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 My Harp 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 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.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Now imagine you're looking at a box of chocolates, knowing you've already had at least three too many. Your hostess is holding out the box to you saying have just one more. It couldn't hurt. Well, it's hard to actually know what one more would do. That one more candy might be the one that pulls out your filling. That one more episode of your favorite Netflix show might turn into an hours long binge watch. That one more task before you leave the house might be the one that makes you miss your train. But there's the other side of one more too. The extra rep in the gym that builds muscle and stamina. The extra pinch of spice that makes a dish delectable. That extra, extra touch to anything handmade that makes it unique and treasured. Those are just a few examples of the beneficial power of one more. There are lots of opportunities for one mores in our heart playing, both helpful and distinctly unhelpful. When you know which of those extras you should avoid, you can stay out of some of the most problematic pitfalls for any harpist. When you know which ones have the power to move your playing ahead, that's almost like magic. But there's no magic to it. Just a little information. And that's what I'm going to give you today. I'll give you the do's and don'ts of that extra step when it's worth it and when you'd be better off having stayed in bed. In fact, I'll share three things that you absolutely must avoid and I'll tell you why. And we'll counter those with seven One more things that will multiply your efforts in ways you might not expect. There's a lot to talk about here, so let's get started. But while we're on the subject of powering up, I wanted to let you know about a couple of easy ways for you to power up your heart playing. And they're coming up quickly. Well, one of them we will be announcing very soon. We'll probably be announcing that later this week. And that is our back to school night. We haven't done one of these for a while, but it's so much fun. It's just an hour of essentially it's a webinar, but each of our certified coaches will be coming on and talking about a topic that you can use to power up your fall approach to your heart playing. Now that we're ready to get back to school, it's nice to refresh things. And that's what each of us is going to be talking about. I'll have a little message for you. Each of the coaches will be there and it's Just a lot of fun and you don't have to go anywhere. Unlike a real back to school night where you have to walk from classroom to classroom. We'll bring the different classrooms to you. So that's a webinar and that's free. Please watch for that announcement. We'll be announcing it on our website and in the hub and in all our social media. So be sure to watch for that and sign up because you're going to want to really enjoy that. And of course there's a PDF that goes with this. So you're going to really want to register and be sure you can get ahold of that. And then if you are really looking to power up your heart playing between now and the end of the year especially, this is the best time to work with one of our certified coaches. Our certified coaches can help you do what you want to do faster than you can do it on your own. It can be something as focused as working on a particular piece and getting it ready to play. Oh, perhaps by the holidays. Or it could be something more fundamental. Let's get your technique to the next level, whatever that is. Our certified coaches are experts at helping you do that. Now we also, in addition to our certified coaches, we have accredited teachers that you can work with. And these are teachers who have taken a course with me to learn how I do things, how we create the success that we do at Heart Mastery for the students that we work with, whether it's through the Gold Circle where I teach or through our coaching program, how we work with students to help them move faster. Our accredited teachers have been certified by me. They know how to do this. We have five accredited teachers at this point. All of them offer online lessons as well as in person lessons and they're in different places. So be sure to check out our accredited teachers and see if one of those sounds like the perfect match for you. So there are lots of ways for you to power up your playing and make it what you want to be. Right now we've got our back to school night. We have certified coaches to work with, accredited teachers to work with. There is no lack of resource here at Harp Mastery. So there's lots for you to do. And now we're going to talk about some of those things that you can do every day, those one more things and some of those one more things that you probably don't want to do. I realize that one more, like one more time, one more thing sounds like a good idea. It sounds like if we just do it once more things will get better. Whatever it is we're trying to get better. One more sounds like a good thing. I'm going to go that extra mile. I'm going to take that extra step. But what's important about the one more is what we expect from that one more. If we're expecting one more to make everything right, we're not looking at one more the right way. Here are some examples of one more thing that probably have that expectation in the wrong place. The first one, and this is such a common one, you might call it the hit me one more time idea. You know, when a gambler is sitting at that table and they're like, oh, no, this is going to be it. I know this is my lucky roll, or this card is going to do it one more time and I'll hit the jackpot. Well, in our practice, how many times have we said to ourselves, I'm just going to play this one more time so I can get it right, and then one more time and it's not quite right, so we do it again, and then it's one more time and it's not quite right, so we're going to do it. More time can actually lead you down into that sort of, you know, black hole of this just really isn't right. And you actually get up from your practice or finish that part of your practice feeling worse than you would have perhaps if you had just left it alone and said, okay, I'll come back to this tomorrow. See, this is the whole thing. If you're thinking, I'll just do this one more time and it will be right. Well, what if it isn't? Why should you stake what all your practice expectations on a single repetition? Remember that practice success or the success that we expect, the results we expect from our practice happen over time. We're not going to practice it today and fix it and it will be right forever. We get to do it again tomorrow. Whether we fix it and have it correct today or. Or not, we're going to need to do it again tomorrow. So you don't have to just have that one correct time before you get up from your practice. Now, maybe you want to do that and you want to drill it down, but you need to be careful about that because as I said, you're staking all your practice expectations on that single repetition. And if you have to do it again and again and again, it can be pretty demoralizing. So please be very careful with that. I'll just do it one more time thing second, one more thing that you want to watch out for. And this happens when we do recordings. You know, recording didn't used to be a big thing, right? It was something that you only did if you had specific things to record for. Like you had to turn in a recording for a competition or, you know, they were pretty intense to do because we didn't have anything near the technological capability that we have today to punch in a single note or whatever it is. And of course, today we all record, or a lot of us do. Whether it's just recording something to send to a friend, or recording something for Facebook or Instagram or maybe TikTok or recording something for your teacher. We do lots of recording. And the trap we can fall into when we're trying to do a nice recording of something is, oh, I'll just try it once more. I'll just do one more take. This is where we run into the law of diminishing returns. Now, this can be part of the practice syndrome, too. But when it comes to recording, you probably only have so many takes in you at any given time. Recording requires so much concentration and focus that it's very much more taxing than just playing through your piece or even practicing hard. It's difficult. And if you've done any recording, you know exactly what I mean. It takes so much focus, and you have to get stuff set up ahead of time. You have to make sure it sounds good, and just. That takes a lot of time and energy. So what I would suggest, instead of getting into that, oh, I missed that note. I'm just going to do it one more time and then I missed that note. I'm just going to do one more take or, well, that didn't really sound right. I'm going to do one more take. I suggest that you set a number of takes you're going to do like, okay, I'm going to try it five times, and if I like one of those five times, great. If I don't like one of those five times, I'll come back and I'll do it later or I'll do it the next day. What I also suggest is that if you do it five times and you're not sure that you like any of those, pick one of those takes, at least one. But do pick one to save. You can delete the rest if you want, but I don't want you to come out of a session of recording without anything. It's quite possible that what you hear on that day when you're recording is so focused that you're not really Listening to how the recording sounds or how it would sound to someone else. So rather than ditch everything because you're not happy with it that day, save one. Pick one to save so that you have a baseline and your efforts will not have been wasted. You have a recording. We understand that it's not the recording that you think you want now, but you can check it later and see how far off you really were. But this is my best advice for recording. Don't get stuck in the one more take idea. Set your limit and stick to it, and then you can come back to it another time. The third one more thing that I'd like you to avoid has to do with one of the trickiest words we use, and that's ready. And the one more thing is often something we frame like this. Oh, just one more week and it will be ready. One more month, one more lesson, and my piece will be ready for me to play. Now, if it's a lesson, if your teacher is telling you, yes, this is your time frame, one more lesson and then it'll be ready. That's great. And then you have to trust your teacher on that. But see, ready is a dangerous word because we often try to make ready mean perfect or consistent so that we're playing a piece of music and it's not really consistent yet. It's not as perfect as we want it to be, and that means it's not ready. Here's the thing. Consistency and that quality of being able to play a piece for others with a certain amount of ease and relaxation, that's not developed before you perform a piece. It's developed by performing a piece. I know that's a scary thing. It means that you have to go out before you feel, and I use the word advisedly, ready. You have to get that piece in front of people before you really feel confident with it, because that's how you develop the consistency. That's how you find the things you need to fix the places that you don't know. This is why professionals always do preview performances before they do a big one. They take it on a lot of test runs so that they can get those kinks out of the piece and make it more consistent so something becomes ready over time. Don't wait for it to be ready. Play it now, just go ahead and ship it. You know, there's only so much preparation you can do before you have to take it, take it out and take it on the. On the test drive and run it through. So those. I'll quickly review the three things That I don't want you to get stuck in the one more loop with. It's the one more practice repetition, that one more take when you're doing a recording and that, oh, just one more weekend. It will be ready. When you're trying to prepare a piece to perform, be very careful. None of those things is bad in itself, but each one can lead you to that black hole that just saps all your energy and ambition. Now, enough of the dark side of one more thing. Let's talk about the one more things that can power up what you do and give you so much extra momentum. What makes these one more things so beneficial is the power of compounding the idea that this particular kind of one more thing will give added benefit over time without costing very much at the moment and without leading you into a black hole. And the same as a bank account. Right? You can put those little amounts in over time and they add up with the magic of compound interest. They don't cost you very much at the moment, but they create great wealth. This is the same idea, only it's heart playing wealth. It's all about leverage. If you do this one thing now, it's going to make something easier for you in the future. And this is the primary difference between these one things and the one things we wanted to avoid. Now. Could you use this sort of compounding idea with the three things I talked about a moment ago? Yes, but you have to be so much more careful. You may need to be careful with these things as well, because you can get carried away with them. Right. That's the too much of a good thing idea. But take these with the idea that you want them to be small changes. You want them to be one more thing that is small and a relatively simple investment of your time and energy and one that's going to give you results over time. We can't do anything as an instant fix in music. It doesn't work that way. It takes familiarity, it takes habit, it takes consistency, and all of those take time. So if you want to take a moment and just sigh now, because I didn't give you a magic fix, you can do that just like, oh, darn. Okay, got that out of the way. So let's talk about these seven things. And there are, I'm sure, many more, but I just picked seven that are really good for adding one more thing that's going to give you lots of benefit. And the first one, maybe you've already thought of this, but the first one is add one more practice session. What if you did later today, you've already done your practice. Maybe, maybe you've worked for an hour, maybe two, maybe just a half an hour, whatever you usually do. What if you came back to the harp later today and you did 10 more minutes or five more minutes, or another half an hour? If you added one more practice session to your day, even just for one day this week? Or what if you added one extra practice session every week and you said, okay, I usually do five days of practice, but I'm going to add one more. Maybe I'll squish one more in during the week, or maybe I'll do one on the weekend, or whatever works in your schedule. One extra practice session. Think about it in terms of compounding, right? Instead of doing five practice sessions a week, now you're doing six, which means you're going to have four extra practice sessions a month. That's almost another full week of practice every month, depending on what you want to do with that practice session. But that's the kind of compounding I'm talking about. It's a small investment of your time because really you could do just a very short practice session. But it's going to create momentum, it's going to create growth. And that in itself creates more energy and more momentum and more growth. That's the kind of powering up I'm talking about. So consider one more practice session. But maybe that feels like too big of a commitment, at least right now. Here's something that you could consider that will be much less time consuming and. And will have that same benefit. Consider one more playthrough of your piece. You know, if you've listened to me for any length of time, or if you've worked with me in one of our programs, playing your piece is different from practicing it. If we want to play our piece and have it flow nicely from beginning to end, whether we want to just play it for ourselves or play it for somebody else, we have to practice that. It's not enough to just practice hands separately, or just to practice the fingering or for the notes, or to practice section by section. We need to play through the piece and get used to that. So what if maybe every day this week you added one time playing through that piece that you're working on. Granted, you may be stumbling through it at first. That's okay. That's part of learning it. And if you played through that piece one more time every day this week, you will have played through it five times by the end of the week, by the end of the Month, you'll have played through it 20 more times. Power of compounding once again, adding one more playthrough. That might be five minutes. That's all we're talking about adding. And it's going to give you the kind of results you want. Once again, over time. Maybe your mission is to speed up a piece. You need to get it up to tempo. And maybe you've been working with the tempo pyramid and you're struggling. You're still trying to get this piece just to go faster. Well, what if you're. One more thing for the next couple weeks perhaps is to take that metronome up one more level, one more notch, move it up one more than you figured you were going to, or you get to that top of that tempo pyramid and you decide to go for that bonus level and go one more notch higher. Remember that working a piece up to speed is a messy process. You're going to have mess along the way and you just have to keep working through it because everything changes when you go fast. So if you take just one more repetition and you go up that tempo pyramid just one more notch. Yeah, we know it's not going to be good, but the sooner we try it at that speed, the sooner we succeed. You don't have to keep working at that speed. You get to work back down the pyramid. So you'll be nice and comfy, but you're going to spend that extra moment to push it one more notch because eventually you want to get there. So why not try it now? That's part of this too. If you want to get there someday, why not try it now? So that's the metronome notch. One more thing. Now, the fourth, one more thing I want to suggest to you is a little bit different in that it's going to solve a problem for all of you who say, ah, if I only had time, I would do this now. We already talked about adding one more little practice session. And so this would be something you could do in that one more practice session, but it wouldn't have to be. It could just be something that becomes part of your regular practice. So what if in your practice session today, or every day, this week or two days a week, what if you did one more review piece? I mean, if you want to develop a repertoire, you have to have pieces that you are comfortable playing, and so you need to play them regularly. And I know it's really hard to fit in an entire day of regular review or work through the 40 minutes of music that you have in your Fingers and every week. That's tough. But what if you put one review piece into your practice today and you put a different one in tomorrow and a different one in the next day? You'd get through that 40 minutes in 40 days. Okay, so it would take you a couple months maybe to get through all the pieces if you just did one one minute piece a day. But if you put one of those pieces in every day and you had 10 pieces, you'd work through all those 10 pieces in two weeks. And you'd be keeping your repertoire fresh while you're working on building new things. Or maybe the skill you want to develop is sight reading. Well, so don't worry about the review piece. We don't need to put that one in. But instead try sight reading one piece every day. Or try working on your scales once a day, or try adding some rhythm work if that's what you're trying to improve. Any skill that you want to improve, any particular thing that you want to develop and a repertoire is one of those things that we all want to develop. Then put one of those things in to your practice session. It's not going to take a lot of extra time. Make sure that what you're trying to put into your practice, it doesn't take you more than a few minutes to do. So it's not going to be onerous at the moment, which is part of the key principle of these one more things. It's not going to cost you a lot now, but it's working toward a goal that is important and it's going to help you work toward it over time. So number four is all about adding a review piece or adding a sight reading piece, or adding some rhythm work or some theory work if that's what you want to do. Not much time to spend on it, but a little bit all the time. Compound interest. I love it. Now, let's talk about a particular piece that you might be working on. And you're working and you know the piece is going to take you a long time to learn. Maybe it's a long piece and you're, you know, you're working on it and you're putting it hands together and it's just going very slowly. Well, if you want to move ahead faster in that piece, here's a one more thing. Way to do it every day, no matter what you're working on, add one measure to what you had planned to work on. Okay, I'm going to work on the first line of the piece. Well, work on the first line and One more measure. Or if you feel like the situation warrants it and you want to do it, you could work on that one line and then read through the next line. Just because you don't have to work on that next line the same way you're working on the first one. But read through it so that you're getting a little bit of a taste of what's coming. Once again, this is a small investment of your time. I mean, let me go through that situation with you. You're learning a piece, you've divided your piece into sections, but you're looking at a three page piece and it feels kind of long for you. Maybe that first section is just about eight measures, maybe it's four measures, I don't know. Let's say it's eight measures and you're working through it. You're doing it hands separately, you're working on it hands together. You're fixing, fingering, learning notes and you're trying to get it all in tempo. And your expectation is that when you get this one a little bit more in control, you're going to start the next one. Well, what if we did one more? And the way we're going to do that one more thing is you're going to do all the work you're doing on that first section, but then read through the right hand of the next section. And maybe tomorrow you'll work on the first section again, but you'll read through the left hand of the second section. And then maybe day three, you'll work on the first section the way you're supposed to and then read through both right and left hands. And then maybe day four, you'll be able to put that hands together and you will have moved ahead faster. Sure, you're doing all your focused work on that first section, but it's going to probably shortcut the time you have to spend on the second section when you get there because you've already done some of the work on it and you can do that just one more ing it. Boy, that's a kind of a weird way to say that. But you can do it as just one more thing. I'm going to do all my work and then I'm going to do the right hand of the next section once. That's all you have to do. You don't have to make it perfect, you don't have to get it all right, you're just dipping your toe in the water. But it's going to make learning section 2 a lot faster when you get there. And you could do this measure by measure. You could do it line by line. You could do it section by section or page by page, if that's what you can do with the piece. But that one more time. I'm just going to do one more thing. I'm going to do it once through. That's the kind of thing that will move you ahead. Resist the temptation to get stuck and start to work on it, because if that's not practice time that you had allocated for that, then you're not going to feel good about the way you're using your time. Right? If you take time away from another piece you wanted to learn because you're digging into section two and you didn't really mean to, that's not the best use of one more thing practice. So this is where you have to resist the pull of the black hole. And you just need to do it once. Just that much and you'll be moving ahead without costing yourself practice time on something else that you had really committed to. Number six of our one more thing list. I would like to suggest that you try incorporating one more minute of technique work. You know, like one more minute of an exercise or scales, arpeggios, whatever that is. One more minute. And I want to tell you about how that compounds. Pay attention here because this is kind of fun. If you did one more minute of technique work every day and you practiced five days a week, that's what. That's five more minutes of technique work a week, which is 20 minutes more a month, which is four hours more of technique work a year. And that's by just adding one minute. Now, what if you decided your one more thing was going to be to add two minutes a day? Well, that means that you will have done eight hours more of technique work a year. Think about how much technique work you do now and think about how much difference that 8 extra 8 hours a year could make in your technique work. And here's one of my favorites. If you did, you don't even have to do five minutes a day. If you do four and a half minutes a day, that comes out to 90 minutes a month, which is 18 hours a year. If you want to strengthen your technique, look what you could do with five minutes a day more than 18 hours a year. That's crazy. You could do a lot, and you could do plenty with just one minute. Consider adding that one minute. That's one of my favorite one more things. And here's another one. I would be very remiss if I didn't Mention this one, There are others, but we're going to stop here with this one. I would suggest that you try adding one lesson a month to your schedule. Now, if you're already doing four lessons a month because you're taking lessons every week, this probably isn't the one for you. But if you're holding yourself to a diet of one lesson a month, you will more than double your progress if you add another lesson. The effect that that has in the level of your motivation and energy. Because you get this infusion of energy from your teacher twice a month instead of once. You know how you feel when you come out of a lesson. You're ready to go, you've got a plan, you've got energy. Your teacher has given you this terrific idea of what your next couple weeks or your next month is going to look like and where you're going to and what you're going to work on and you're ready to get to work. Well, imagine if you had that just in the middle of the lessons that you have now. If you're having one lesson a month, if you were to have that every two weeks, or if you're having a lesson every other week, what if you added one more lesson and just gave that the emphasis of, well, I just want this to be sort of a check in to see where I'm going and if I'm doing the right thing. Or maybe that could be a lesson that you dedicate to a particular topic, like, okay, I just want to work on this piece, or I just want to work on technique, or I just want to work on my sight reading. You could do that. And that's going to give you so much benefit. Right. Instead of just struggling by yourself for an entire month, maybe between lessons, you're going to be able to double your access to your teacher and that's going to more than double your results, I promise. It moves you ahead so much faster. I see it with our coaching students, particularly when they space their lessons far apart, there's always more time and energy that's spent bringing them back to where they were so that they can move forward. When the lessons are closer together, there's less time spent with covering the ground we've already covered. And moving them forward comes faster, so it's a big step up. And if you're just doing one lesson a month, try every two weeks. If you're doing every two weeks, add a third one in there. Now, if you're already doing every week, you probably don't need another lesson a month. This is not your one more thing, but I've just given you six other one more things that you can try. In case you couldn't tell, I get very excited talking about these one more things because I know from my own experience, not just as a teacher, but as a harpist, those little things add up to big progress, at least if you do them right. Don't get caught in the idea that more is always better. Make your one more things small, small investment. Plenty of time for big payoff. That's what we're looking for. That's the power of one more thing. Now, next week on the podcast, we're talking about how to enlarge your perspective. Lots of times we get stuck in the small things. We get stuck in the details, we get stuck in the fingering or the measure or the notes. And. And it can be very hard to think about stepping back and looking at those things in the context of the entire piece. And so I'm going to share with you some of the best ways to make that happen so that you can make that shift from working on those details to stepping back and working on the piece as a whole without feeling like you're messing things up and you're doing things wrong. We're going to be talking about enlarging your perspective. That's next week on the podcast. Now remember, watch out for the announcement about our back to school night. That was so much fun when we did this a few years ago. And so we're redoing it, refreshing it, and it's going to be a great way to come back to the harp if you've had a great summer vacation or just refresh your harp playing. And if you're ready to do that because this is a great time of year as we come into the holidays. This is a terrific time to be thinking about that. So back to school night. It will be free. And just look for the link to sign up. That's coming out very soon. As I mentioned before, you know, if you're looking for those lessons, consider one of our accredited teachers. Consider working with a Heart Mastery certified coach. Of course, if you're ready to take that commitment to the next level and really dig in, I would be thrilled to work with you in my Gold Circle program. So there are three different ways to work one on one here in the harp mastery universe. So consider one of those because that's a quick path to progress, too. All right, until I see you next time, 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. It.