Three Steps to More Confidence - PHH-012

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. I hope that that welcome sounded positive and energetic and confident to you because that is the topic of today's show. We're going to be talking about confidence. Now, if you have ever met a person who tells you that they have never felt unconfident, if they've never felt insecure, if they've never felt doubt or questioning, they're probably not telling you the truth. Almost every creative person, and probably every person on the planet, but certainly this is the case with creative people, feels a lack of self confidence. And maybe not every day, but often. And I believe that part of the reason for that is because creativity calls for questioning, it calls for curiosity, it calls for exploration. So a lack of confidence can often be seen like that. But when a lack of confidence keeps you from doing what you really want to do, for instance, playing the harp in front of people or being in a new performance situation, or even just feeling comfortable in your lesson, when a lack of confidence prevents you from doing those things, it's really time to take a look at it and see what we can do to change that. Confidence is isn't something that you're born with, it is something that you can develop. It is a product of your experiences and both good and bad, the successes that you have enrich and develop your confidence. The failures that you have focus it and sharpen it and allow you to to go forward. I have some views on failures that create confidence from my own experience and I want to share those with you as part of today's show. But more importantly, I want to share with you the steps that I have used to help my students gain more self confidence and help them play and practice from a specific base that has more confidence, more self assurance and more positive energy. So we're going to be talking about confidence. We're going to be talking about some really practical ways to help you grow that. I'll be sharing some of the struggles that I've had with it as we go through today's show. But first, I would like to remind you, if you haven't seen the announcements, we are coming up on a very exciting virtual event called Back to School Night. Now, of course, you could feel more confident if you know your stuff right? And Back to School Night is a virtual event that might help you get the answers to some of those things that you need so you can be more confident. It's a an online event and we're going to have a series of mini workshops led by me and the Heart Mastery certified coaches. If you remember those old pta, you know, back to school nights where you would go and you'd go to each different classroom and you'd find out what you or your child was going to be learning in that class during the course of the year. Well, that's sort of what our Back to School night is like. We sort of designed it that way just to be a little bit fun. Only you don't have to go traipsing through crowded hallways. You get to sit in the comfort of your own living room. And we'll do all the classroom to classroom work for you. We've got some really interesting topics that our coaches are going to be talking about. From goal setting to how to have a good lesson to finding your unique sound, easily incorporating music theory into your practice and support system for harpists. How to find one, how to be one. So there's a lot of good stuff going on. Plus I'll tie it all together for you. And if that isn't a confidence builder, I don't know what is. Back to School Night will be a ton of fun. I will put the link in the show notes. It is happening Thursday, August 19th at 8pm Eastern Time. That would be 7pm Central and 5pm Pacific Time. So we're just going to whisk you through these virtual classrooms. I certainly hope you can join us for this event. It's going to be a lot of fun. You will find the link in the show notes to register. It's totally free. And I think if anything can be a confidence builder, perhaps that's a great step. But I have lots more to share on that topic with you. So why don't we get started?

What would you do if you felt More confident. Is there a piece that you would start, a place that you would play, someone you would play for, someone you would study with, something you would try?

And how would it feel to be confident? How would that feel? Would you feel eager and excited to be doing something new?

You probably think you wouldn't feel quite so fearful or so nervous. Maybe your fingers wouldn't shake.

You just wouldn't worry the way you are worried without confidence. Confidence is sort of the opposite of being fearful, isn't it? Well, the great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar had a wonderful acronym for fear, and it was False Evidence Appearing Real. I love that. False Evidence Appearing Real. Because we are afraid of some things that are very real, right? What if we forget everything? What if our fingers are shaking too much to play the strings? What if a string breaks? Our musical life is made up of what ifs and we have to figure out how to be prepared for them.

And we feel most of the time like if we were prepared for them, if we were ready, we would feel confident.

I'm here to tell you it's kind of the other way around.

I know that's not particularly encouraging, but let's talk about those what ifs for just a second. Let's look at worst case scenario. One of my friends used to say, well, what's the worst that could happen? I could die. And since I probably won't die, then the worst can't happen.

Fair enough. I think that's a fine way to look at it, but it doesn't cover the things that most of us are afraid of most of the time, right? What if a string breaks while we're playing? What if we forget our music? What if we can't find the strings because we're just too nervous to see? What if we don't remember how our piece starts? What if our fingers are shaking too much to play? What if we make too big a mistake? What if we have to stop? What if we get so distracted that we don't remember what we're doing and we lose our place? What if we don't get to to the performance on time? What if our bench breaks? What if? I mean, there are endless what ifs, huh? And the truth is, you can't prepare for them all. The other part of that truth is that many of those will probably happen to you. A lot of them have happened to me.

What if a string breaks in a performance? Well, the first time a string broke in a performance that I played, I was 12. And I remember being quite distracted the Nice thing about being 12 is that you don't know enough to worry. You're not really so scared. Nervousness doesn't set in, I find, until an. Until later, but. So I wasn't particularly worried about it. It just happened and I had to play through it.

But I learned something from that, too. And that was the last time that I ever performed on stage without having strings right with me. And there were plenty of performances after that when a string would break and at the first possible opportunity, I would be pulling the correct string out of my bag and putting it on the harp, right? Then.

You learn from these things. And no matter which of those what ifs happen to you, you will learn from that too, and you will be a survivor. You will have survived that particular what if.

Sometimes it's not fun, but we always learn from these things. So the what ifs are less to be feared than they are to be endured. Expected, chalked up. Chalk that one up to experience. But that's how confidence is born, right? So confidence actually begins. First of all, confidence isn't something that you are born with. I guess some people have more of their fair share of it than others, but it is something that you learn.

And the way we learn it is by doing, right? The first time you do anything, you're not very confident about your ability to do it. But after you've done it once or twice or 20 times or for 15 years or whatever it is you're doing, you feel much better about it.

So the first time you get behind the wheel of a car, you're a little bit nervous about it. But after you've been driving for just a few months, you take your driver's test and boom, you're out there on the road driving like you were born to it.

The first time you make a new recipe, you might not be nervous, but you don't know how it's going to turn out. Especially if you're making one for company. That's always a little bit scary, right? Maybe not such a good idea, because you know that if you had tried it out the week before, just on your family, you'd feel much more confident about how it would come out for company.

Confidence is a product of experience.

Confidence is not.

A prerequisite for acting. It comes about as a result of your action. In other words, we don't do something because we feel confident about it. We feel confident about it because we have done it.

And by extension, this means that the first time you do it, you're not going to be confident. You can only be confident the next time.

So we need to persist and act even when we don't feel confident. So I think that what we need to do, understand.

Is that our. It's our experience that brings us confidence step by step, but that we do, at some point, have to take the plunge into that new place, into that brave new world.

There are plenty of firsts that you will experience in your harp life. As a freelance musician, I have experienced a lot of them. The first time I played a musical, the first time I recorded in a sound studio. The first time I played a concerto with an orchestra. There are lots of first times. And every first time comes with its insecurity and its fearfulness.

But the key is to act. And the more you act, the more the fearfulness doesn't bother you because you know you'll be able to do it and you'll still survive.

There's a wonderful Rosa Parks quote that I'd like you to consider. She says, I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, it diminishes fear.

So the diminishing of fear, the growth of your confidence, is related to your decision and your action. So the first step in building confidence is deciding to act.

Now, we harpists, we tend to use this phrase to keep us from acting, well, I'm not ready yet. My piece isn't ready. I don't feel ready. I'm not ready.

That perhaps, is the phrase that's the confidence killer. More than just about anything else. The truth is you will not be ready. And you won't know how ready or not you are until you're in the situation.

There was one performance that I did where I was at Curtis at the time. I was a student and I had just performed a piece in recital. And then the composer of that piece, some months later, a few months later, not too long, died. I mean, there's no relation between the two events. But he was elderly and he died. And the school, the director of the school, asked me to perform that piece of his that I had played a few months ago as sort of a memorial tribute to him.

I was so pleased to be asked. And of course, one did not turn down the director of the school. And I knew that I knew the piece. What I did not know was that I was going to be performing in. In a really featured spot, and it was going to be a sort of a celebrity audience. And I hadn't prepared my piece enough, and I didn't play as well as I would have liked. It was okay. But it wasn't the sort of performance I would love to have given. The thing I learned from that was that I needed more review, that if I'm bringing back a piece to that sort of performance level, I need to prepare it with a little bit more focus and a little bit more intention than I put behind it. At that point I was sort of thinking, well, you know, I just played it, no big deal, right?

Wrong. So while I may not have felt especially fearful going into the performance, my experience, it taught me a new way to prepare. Think about that old ready, aim, fire idea. Right? Well, okay, I'd like to tweak it because if you agree with me, and I hope you do, that ready is not necessarily going to happen. We're not going to know when we're ready. Then let's try this first. Let's try aim, prepare, fire. So that we start with an aim, we start with our objective. So let's have a performance date or a deadline or a goal, something we are aiming at, something we can make up our mind to, to go back to the Rosa Parks quote, make up our minds, set that goal, choose the challenge that we set for ourselves, and then prepare the best we know how. Not endlessly, but the best we know how. And then when that performance date is there, we just have to fire. We just have to do it.

And then we'll know if we have prepared enough. We'll find out the flaws, we'll find out what went well, we'll find out what didn't.

But the idea that we're going to have a purpose, make up our minds, then prepare for that, and then do it is a much more.

Confidence building way to look at the whole learning, practicing, playing music scenario than waiting until you're ready. Ready never comes. But we can have something, have a challenge that we choose, and then prepare for it, and then do it, and then learn from it.

So the first step then in creating confidence is to choose your challenge, to set that.

Goal for yourself, to decide to make up your mind, to prepare and to do it.

If the first step in creating confidence is about taking action, deciding, deciding to take action.

Then it's clear that along the course of our actions, we will have some successes and possibly some failures. Maybe a big win, maybe a big loss, certainly a lot of stuff in the middle. And those successes and failures together.

Are the root of our confidence.

The successes are easy to take.

The failures not quite so easy.

Let's look at what failure could mean for us. First of all, remember that failure is not just an option here. It's almost guaranteed. But it's an important step along the way.

And I'd like you to think about failure as part of a process.

One of the things that I discovered, it was one of those random facts I came across. But think about being a telephone salesperson, right? You're calling people up on the phone and trying to get them to buy something. Well, those telephone salespeople make endless calls day after day after day. And they call people they don't know. It's cold calling, right? So they're calling people they don't know, asking them to buy something that possibly these people don't want. I cannot imagine a more excruciating way to make a living.

I would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. And I can just imagine someone who, you know, it's their first day on the job, and they're given the list of numbers. Call all these people and ask them to buy something.

It's really. I can't imagine. Right. Think about what you could get. You could get people who just don't want what you're selling, people who hang up on you, people who are rude to you. Maybe eventually you'll get somebody who buys. Well, the salespeople that get good at this know their numbers. They know exactly, on average, how many calls they're going to have to make. To get one person who says yes. They might know that every 10 calls they make, of those 10 calls, one will be a yes. Or they may know that they need to make 50 calls before they get one that says yes. The average. And knowing their numbers is actually something that gives them the courage, the spirit, the confidence to make that next call. Okay, I get one. Yes. About every 10 calls I've made. Number nine. This is my call. I'm going to make that. I'm going to get that. Yes. This time.

It's the track record of failures that brings the success.

Guess what? It's not that different for us. It's making the mistakes in performance. It's having those failures. And I'm not even talking about the epic fail kind of failures. I'm thinking about the sort of thing where you've played a piece, but this part didn't go as well in performance as it went at home. There's a learning moment right there. And you know what? The next time that you play that piece, you will have had an opportunity to make that part better, to prepare it in a different way. And over a certain amount of time.

That part will not be a problem any longer. You will have gone through the enough nos to get to the yes.

So that for us, building the confidence that we have or that we want in our performance comes from having that reliable process. I had a student say to me once or not long ago, either that because of some of the work we did together, she now has a system that she knows what will allow her to prepare a piece in a certain amount of time. And that that gives her confidence knowing that the piece of music that she's preparing isn't going to be an endless journey, but that after a certain predictable amount of time, she'll have the piece ready to play. This, I think is so crucial to our confidence building. To look at the failure not as an embarrassment or not as a criticism, not as something that's wrong with us.

But to show us how we can prepare better, how we can improve where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are, so that we can better use our strengths and better support our weaknesses.

Every time you play, whether it's just making a recording for yourself or playing for your teacher, or playing a performance, every single time you play it will teach you something. The first thing that I would like for all of you to do is to ditch the scorecard. You know the scorecard, I mean, it's the one where you say, well, let's see, I played this piece but I made a mistake here and here and here, and it really needs to be faster and I messed up this petal and I did this and I did this and, and this wasn't good. We create those scorecards for ourselves. No one else, including our teachers, is listening and evaluating our playing exactly that way. A wrong note isn't going to mar a performance.

Especially not for an audience. But we keep these scorecards and when we're keeping track of, oh, that was a wrong note. Check, Play, play, play, play. Oops, that was another wrong note. Check, check. Oops. Totally screwed that section up. When we're keeping those scorecards, we are sabotaging our own efforts and certainly our confidence, right? But the scorecard is not helpful. It's totally self imposed.

And as a way to evaluate your playing, it's not helpful. I don't want you to measure your performance in terms of the wrong notes that you played. I'd like you to measure it in terms that are more like this. I got to the end, I played a beautiful retard here. And you can give yourself a goal like that ahead of time. Create a confident sort of scorecard for yourself that says, I really want to play a beautiful first chord. I'd love to make a big dynamic contrast in this section, and I want to have a very grand ending. But don't use the kind of scorecard that is adding up the things that you did wrong. It's not going to be helpful, and it's going to SAP every bit of confidence that you have. And trust me, you're the only one that's keeping that scorecard. So you can throw it out anytime you want.

Next, I'd like you to count your wins. And what's a win? A win is anytime you play something for someone, if that's your. If that's your goal. For instance, your teacher is asking you to play on a recital, and you've never done that before. And so you play on her recital and you don't play as well as you would like, and you mess up here, and, you know, you. That middle section was kind of a. Kind of a mess. Well, we're not keeping a scorecard of that. We're noting it after the fact. It's sort of a little postmortem on it. But it still counts as a win. Doesn't matter how much you screwed up, it counts as a win because, first of all, it's an experience that you will never have to repeat that first recital that you play on. Now you've played on one. You will have another recital to play on, but it won't be your first one. And hopefully you will play that piece again at some point. It won't be the first time you've performed that piece anymore either.

And on top of that, there's something that you learned from what went right in that performance and what didn't go so well in that performance. And that is a win, because it's building experience, it's building wisdom, it's building the bed of knowledge that you need to have the next, more successful experience. And when you've got all those wins under your belt, how could you not be confident?

All right. But in case you want one more little bit of advice for developing more confidence, it is this I would urge you to learn to say, yes, I will.

Instead of, oh, well, maybe next time. So that when someone comes to you and they say, you know, would you play for our women's club?

Say, yes, I will. Staying in your comfort zone may be comfortable, but it is not the way to build progress, to build experience, or to build confidence. It's only when we stretch outside that the real fun starts. That first time, as I was telling you before, that first time that you play in an ensemble or with another instrument. Mentalist. That first time that you play with this group or play in this place or play that piece, it's fun. It's an adventure. It's exploration. Yeah. It's a little dangerous. It could bring up a little bit of fear, some apprehension. Yeah. But it's going to bring you more confidence and it's going to bring you more joy to be able to reach out rather than saying, oh, I'm not ready.

So harkening back to what we said before, let's take ready out of the equation. Right. Let's take it out of the formula. Aim, prepare, fire. And if someone offers you the opportunity, go for it, enjoy it. What's the the worst that could happen?

Okay. That was some pretty hard work. It's always hard talking about confidence because you know that it's going to involve some self challenge, it's going to involve growth. And growth often comes with a little bit of discomfort. So I'd like to give you some insight, a little bit of inspiration. This is a quote that comes from one of the Iron Chefs, if you've ever seen that television show. This is Iron Chef Kat, Cora, and this is her take on a very similar topic. What she says is take chances. Mistakes are never a failure. They can be turned into wisdom.

And wisdom is a wonderful source of confidence. Right. When you feel wise or know that you possess knowledge or wisdom, you have much less to be afraid of. So take those chances, make those mistakes, turn those failures into wisdom and develop your confidence.

Step by step, moment by moment, and give yourself lots and lots of grace along the way.

Now, let me remind you that if you have not registered for our back to school night, this is the perfect time to do it. Our back to school night is Thursday, August 19th at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. It's going to be a quick whirlwind tour, sort of back to school night style, through many workshops presented by me and by my heart mastery coaches. All those wonderful topics that I talked about at the beginning of the show will set you up for success this autumn. It's a great way to find out exactly what you might want to focus on in your playing in this new season. I don't know about you, but I have always loved back to school time. I loved getting my new notebooks, I loved getting my new clothes. I loved thinking about all the fun, new, exciting things that were going to wait that were just waiting there at school for me, whether it was friends or activities and learning, of course, and just all that fun stuff. So much promise in the new year and, and there's that promise here at this point for you too. And I'd love you to take advantage of our free Back to School night. Come in and explore a little bit with us and see what what tickles your fancy and where your heart playing might go this year. Everything from goal setting to developing your sound to how to have a good lesson, the support systems, music theory, and of course, a little bit of message from me about how to tie that all together and and how to move forward from there. I'll also be bringing you some information about two new programs that we are offering at Heart Mastery. Can't tell you about those yet, but I will tell you about those at Back to School night. Next week's show is going to be about a topic that I know you may or may not have confidence about, and that is working with your metronome. I'm going to give you my best tips for mastering the metronome, why you should work with it, when you should work with it, and how you should work with it. I would love your metronome to be your best friend instead of your best friend of me. So we're going to be talking metronome next week. Tick, tick, tick. In the meantime, hold yourself up nice, straight and tall. Breathe deeply, smile and approach the world with confidence this week. I will talk to you next week. See you then. 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.