Transforming Your Practice in 2025 - PHH 190

I think most of us, sooner or later, and certainly at one point or another, get into this rut, if you want to call it that, I suppose thinking that practice is about making something right and it doesn't have to be just about that. Yeah, we want to get everything right. But practice isn't just about repetition. It's about building a relationship with our harp, building connections between us and and this music. It's about developing the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. Whether it's mastering a challenging piece or simply playing with more joy and confidence.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

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 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.com join now. That's harpmastery.com joinharp hyphen now. Happy new Year and welcome to the show. I'm excited about 2025. I'm excited about all the harp happiness that you and I can add to the world together. I'm excited about the harp goals that I'm putting in place for myself this year. And I'm extra excited about the opportunity to talk with you about your goals today. Well, we aren't actually going to be talking about goals as much as we will be talking about the most important step you will take to toward achieving them. Of course, there are a lot of things that are important to the success of your harp your motivation, your time, your choice of goals. Whether or not you're working on your goals alone or with the support of a teacher or coach. But perhaps the single factor that is most important to accomplishing any type of harp goal is this. Your practice. Without practice, your harp goal is just an idea. Practice is the engine that drives your goal. Whether you want to improve your technique, develop a repertoire, play a concert, learn to improvise, speed up your fingers, or anything else, you can't do it unless you practice. Your practice makes whatever you want to do with your harp playing possible. Without practice, you might be on the right track, but you aren't going anywhere. That's why I chose to make this first podcast of 2025 about transforming your practice. Today, I want to give you some different ideas about practice that I hope will help you find new direction, new energy, new purpose, and more fun in your practice this year. And not only this year, but starting today. After all, isn't fun a big part of what playing the harp should be? I certainly think so. Now, if you haven't set goals for 2025 for your heart playing right now and you think you might like to, a great way to get some help doing that and some guidance is with our January seminar series. You'll find the link to our January seminar series, which is called Journey to Purposeful Practice on the upcoming events of our harpmastery.com page where you'll find it right in the Harp Mastery app. Certainly hope you have downloaded the app. It's such an easy way to keep up with everything that's going on at Harp Mastery. And of course it's free. You can just go to your Apple or Android app stores and you'll Find the Harp Mastery app. You search for it. But our January series is all about knowing how to set goals. Set goals that you will be able to achieve and how to set them, why to set them. We'll be talking about defining progress and avoiding distraction and how to take those big goals and make them really actionable with your seven day plan and your one day plan. So I'm going to be teaching one of those weeks and the other weeks will be taught by our Harp Mastery certified coaches. And we're going to be helping you work through this whole goal defining process. Our coaches are experts at that because that's one of the things that they have done for years as part of our coaching certified coaching program and working with the harpists in that program. And it's just $12. And of course, these four calls are the same calls that our my Harp Mastery members will be participating in as part of their membership. So I would also like to offer you the opportunity to join us in my Heart Mastery as full fledged my Heart Mastery members. If that's something that you think would be helpful to you, I certainly think it would. But start by getting your feet wet with our January seminar series. I hope you join us there. Or also this. While the seminar series will help you focus on your goals, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to really activate those goals with me at our getaway retreat. It's coming up very soon. Coming up next month, February, February 12th, we start in Kissimmee, Florida, the Orlando area. And so we'll be using some of the, the Disney magic that is in the air in Orlando and bringing that to your 2025 HARP goals. Have the chance to work with me at this retreat. Remember, it's the only retreat we're having this year, so don't miss this chance to, to get in there and really start your goals off right. So those are two big opportunities. And you'll find links to both of those on the upcoming events@heartmastery.com or right in the Heart Mastery app. As I said a moment ago, practice is really the engine of progress. We need to practice in order to do anything we actually want to do. Practice is sort of where the magic happens, where we take that piece of music that's on the page and we transform it into something that can actually communicate from one person to another. And if you think about what happens in that moment, you're not just playing notes, but you're playing notes that somebody else wrote. Quite likely it's somebody else that you never even met. Maybe somebody that lived hundreds of years ago, and that person wrote these notes not knowing anything about you. And you're taking those notes and you're bringing them to life again. For people that have never heard them before, it's just. It's magic what happens when we play. And practice is part of that story. Without the practice, it doesn't happen. Right. But I think most of us, sooner or later, and certainly at one point or another, get into this. Oh, rut, if you want to call it that, I suppose thinking that practice is about making something right. And it doesn't have to be just about that. Yeah, we want to get everything right. But practice isn't just about repetition. It's about building a relationship with our harp, building connections between us and this music. It's about developing. Developing the habits that lead to success, whatever that looks like for you. Whether it's mastering a challenging piece or simply playing with more joy and confidence. Practice allows us to do so much more than we can right now. As we practice, we improve our skills, we develop them, and it lets us explore all the things that the harp can do. It lets us experiment, discover new kinds of music, discover the kind of things that we can bring to the music that's different than something that anyone else can bring. Do you see the difference this can make? When you think about sitting down to practice and you think about, okay, I have to do this again and again, I have to repeat it and I have to get it right, and I have to check the fingering and I have to check my position. That's a mindset that. That can actually prevent you from experiencing everything that practice can do for us. But when you look at practice as a step that's going to bring you closer to that magic. You don't just have to endure the repetitive, rote sort of work that is part of learning to play something well. But you get to create along the way. You get to stay connected to the music. And that's the transformation that I want to talk about in your practice today. And as woo woo as that might sound, I'm going to bring it down to a very practical step. And that is, I just created an acronym. You know what an acronym is, right? I spelled out the word practice. And for each letter in the word practice, I'm going to give you a specific aspect that I want you to include in your practice. You don't have to do them all at once, but just remembering these things and considering these things as you practice is going to keep your mindset from falling Back into the okay, I have to play this 20 times, and I just have to get the fingering right sort of mentality. So I would urge you, as I go along, have that word practice written out and write down each one of these prompts next to each of the letters. If you're driving or walking, you can't do that. That's fine. Just come back to the podcast and do it later, because I think you're going to find it that at least a couple of these really, really resonate with you. And you're going to be able to say, oh, yeah, I can do that in my practice. And wouldn't that feel great? And that's what I'm hoping you get out of this. So we're going to get started with the first letter in the word practice, the letter P. So for the letter P, I chose a word that perhaps we most often see as the opposite to practice, and that's the word play. When we think of practice, we think of repeating things and fixing things and correcting things. When we think of play, we usually think of this finished product that just flows beautifully from start to finish. But playing doesn't have to be perfect, but it is a very different way of experiencing music. And when we are just experiencing those bits and pieces that we're working so hard to learn, we're missing out on, well, certainly on the joy of music, but we're actually missing out on an important learning aspect of music. Because until you learn to play something beginning to end and learn to play each piece you're working on beginning to end, you won't really have experienced what you need to know in order to do that. What I'm trying to say is that you can't just work on the parts of a piece and expect it to become a whole. So even though we look at playing and practicing as kind of opposite things, they're part of learning to actually play a piece well, you actually have to play it. So for this part of your practice, I would say certainly play the pieces you're working on, but if that's not something that you feel prepared to do at this point, even in your own little practice studio, I would say play something every day. Maybe it's something that you worked on last week or something you worked on yesterday, or something that you're sight reading, but play something every day. Playing is where the joy is. Honestly, it can feel really good to work on something and, you know, struggle with it and conquer it. But playing music is why you got started on the harp in the first place, Right? So play something every day. And this takes us right to the letter R, which is review. Yes, you need to review your pieces. I know you've worked really hard on something, and certainly I know it's the case for me. After I've worked on something for a very long time, I'm ready to put it away. I don't want to see it again for a while. But go back to earlier pieces, even if they're very early pieces that you learned, bring them back. You spend a lot of time learning it. Don't lose it. There's a lot you can also learn from Revu. It can be great, essentially, sight reading practice. It can be great practice at playing through something, which, as I mentioned just a moment ago, is really important. And of course it can help you build a repertoire even better. It will show you. If you go back and you pull out a piece that you played years and years ago, a nice easy piece, hopefully you'll see how far you've come. You'll remember the struggle that it took to learn that in the first place and realize how much more easily it comes back to you after a time or two through it. So don't just play, but also do some strategic playing and review those pieces that you've learned before. So important. And it can be part of your practice. You don't have to schedule it separately. Review is practice. So just because you're playing something or reviewing something, don't kid yourself that you're not doing important work. You are. And this brings us to the letter A. The letter A. I chose the word aspire. Aspire. Think about what might be next for you. Where is your goal? What's that next level of harp happiness for you? What do you want to learn? Where do you want to play? What music do you want to play? Who do you want to meet? What skills do you want to develop? Who would you like to play the harp with? Right? Is there a group that you want to play with? Let yourself dream a little bit. You don't have to be just a harpist in your own little room, by your own little self. Think about who you might want to have help you along the way. Would it be nice to have a coach or a teacher that you could take a lesson with every once in a while? All of these things are so important. Just dreaming about what you could do. And you can have big dreams that seem years off, or you could have a dream that's just around the corner. You just haven't acted on it yet. That Would be another good a word, wouldn't it? Act. But for now, I want you to think about your practice as being aspirational in that it's going to help take you where you want to go. This is why goals are so important, right? They give you a statement of where you want to go. I always think that having a goal is just like having a destination when you drive. I mean, if you just get in the car and you drive without any particular place to go, you might have a very nice Sunday drive, but you really won't have gotten anywhere. It can be very pleasant. But if there's actually some place that you wanted to go, just driving around aimlessly isn't going to get you there. And this is what goals do for our playing. They give us someplace to go. And a goal like that starts with an aspiration. It starts with a wow, I'd like to. I'd like to be able to do this.

Let that be part of your harp experience. And it can be part of your harp experience every day. You can aspire in your practice to play through a piece that you've not played through yet, or to sight read a piece that you think you might want to play someday. That's certainly part of aspiring. So let yourself dream a little bit. And this brings us to the letter C. Now, the word I chose for this letter C, might be a little bit of a challenge to some of you. And challenge is not the. The C word. It just starts with a C. But I think that the C word that I chose is something that we so often try to remove from our practice, and I think that it's a little bit harmful when we do that. And I want to encourage you to put it back in. And that C word is creativity. I want your practice to be creative, and I mean it in this sense, not just your practice. Not just. Okay, well, how many different ways can you play that passage? But I want you to think about the music that you're creating as you do it. What I know is that when we practice, we try to eliminate all that extra stuff. We try to do something exactly the way it is on the page. We're following the fingering, following the directions, the dynamics. We're getting all the notes in the right beats on the right place. We're trying to do so many things, and we can't add in creativity at that point because we need it to be correct. But we don't want to banish creativity all the time. And I don't just mean putting creativity in your practice. Like, okay, well, let me see. How many different ways can I repeat these three measures? That's certainly creative, and it is also certainly something that I encourage you to do. However, I want you to remember, even in your practice, even in the midst of playing those measures that won't come together. I want you to remember that music isn't just about what's on the page. If it were just about playing what's on the page, a computer could play what's on the page and we'd all think it was wonderful. And granted, computers can do all kinds of things like that now, and we can think it's wonderful, but it's not the same. Right? You are your music. We're going to get to that in a moment, too. But your music is what you are doing right at that moment. And it's different than somebody else's. And that's how we know that music isn't just about what's on the page. Because if it were, when I played a piece, it would be the same as when you played it or she played it or he played it, or anybody else. Music is so much more. So I would encourage you to play. What if with a piece, what if I went a little faster, a little slower? What if I took time here? What if this piece had this kind of a picture to it? What if I imagined it this way? What if I added a chord here? What if I took away that left hand that I can't play and substituted something else? Music isn't just about the dots, those dots that are on the page. You know, it's about so much more. And of course, we can extend the word create, can't we? And a really powerful part of your practice could be improvising, could be composing. Oh, there's another C word. You could actually create music yourself just by messing around with things and trying out ideas. And all that counts, all that's important to your development as a musician and a harpist. So don't say, okay, well, that's not real practice. It absolutely is real practice. Do I mean that you have to add composing into your practice routine every day? No, I don't. Do I mean that you shouldn't spend time making sure that all those measures are correct? No, I don't mean that either. I just mean that in that process, that process of getting everything right, remember that it's not about the correctness of it, it's about the music. And you're allowed to add in your own thoughts. You're allowed, you're encouraged to be Creative music is a creative art, and that's what we need to not practice out of our practice, if you know what I mean. Which brings us to the letter T. Something much more prosaic, something that might feel a little bit more comfortable for you, at least when we're talking about it. And that is technique. Yeah, technique had to be in here somewhere, didn't it? Now, I'm not going to belabor this point, but if your technique isn't up to it, you can't do it, right. If your fingers can't play it, you can't play it. So making sure that you not only keep your technique strong, but that you keep developing your technique is vital. It's so important, and it's really easy to think, well, I'm playing all the time, and I'm getting plenty of practice. This piece has lots of scales and arpeggios, and that's enough. It's not. To my way of thinking, technique requires doing on purpose so that it needs specific drills. Not that you can't get good review in your technique from playing something that's very technical. But when you spend time actually working on your technique and working on all those skills that are so important to our technique, the scales, the chords, the intervals, the arpeggios, the patterns, all those things, that is what will keep your technique strong and allow you to move it forward. We don't just want to keep our technique where it is. We want to keep it developing so that we can play more and more advanced music. So having a plan and incorporating that in your practice to keep your technique moving forward and developing and growing with you so that you can grow into more music is an important part of your practice. Okay, that's technique. Enough said. Here's the letter I. I simply is I meaning you. Where are you in your playing? When I play a piece, I am playing it. This is what I was alluding to a moment ago, right? The fact that when I play something, it's different than when you play it or he plays it or she plays it or somebody else plays it. Our music is specific to us, and I want you to decide where you are. Where is the you in your playing? What do you want to say with a particular piece? What do you want that piece to be about? What's the color, the tempo, the pacing? You don't have to look at each one of those ingredients individually, although you can. Ooh, ingredients. Another I word. Something to think about. But you don't have to look at all those characteristics separately. Just think, well, Okay, I want this piece to sound like a sunset. And whatever a sunset sounds like to you, that's what you need to work at. What you want the piece to say. Do you have a picture of it? What do you want to do with a particular piece? What can you add to a piece to make it yours? What's your vision for the piece? What kind of music do you like to play? Are there some pieces that are definitely you and other pieces that aren't in the same way? You might wear that particular blouse, but you're not going to wear that one. So, you know, think about where you are in your playing. Let your playing be individual to you. Let it express something about you. You don't have to feel self conscious about this, by the way. Just remember to add in that ingredient that is you to your piece. You don't have to make it sound like somebody else's sounds. You don't have to play like someone else. Everyone's playing as individual, and yours can be and should be you.

It's kind of fun to think about, and I encourage you to give that one a try and see how that might inspire you in your practice to say, okay, well, I'm not just playing this piece again. I really want it to sound like, oh, the sunset again. I really wanted to have that sense of calm and spaciousness and that fading away, but the beautiful colors and the richness. All right, well, have that in mind when you play. And I guarantee that your playing of that piece, once you have that in mind, is going to sound different from anybody else's. It doesn't mean that a person listening to your playing is going to picture the sunset the same way you do. How would you know anyway, right? But your playing will have been forever changed because of the vision you have of the piece. So don't ignore your own contribution to your music. It's important. And we come to another C. As we come close to the end of the word practice, we're up to the letter C for the second time. And this C is about the word connect. Your practice should connect you. You should be able to connect to the music, connect to your harp. This is about learning. It's about making those kinds of intellectual connections. Like, where did this music come from? Who wrote it? What were they thinking? What was their life like? What was the time like? What are they trying to tell me with their music? So those are one, you know, that's one kind of connection you can make. Another one is that more visceral connection, similar to what I was Talking about with the letter I, how do you connect to the piece? What does it say to you? How do you want others to connect to it? Another kind of connection. And of course, there's the connection that you make when you share your music with someone else, when you play it for someone else. That is a different kind of connection. And maybe that's a connection you want to prepare for and practice for. In your practice. You can also connect it by maybe this is music you're going to play with others, maybe in a. In a harp ensemble or a harp circle, maybe in an orchestra or with just another instrumentalist or two. But connecting your music to your world.

Bringing the music into a more personal connection for you, connecting it to what you're doing at the harp, connecting what you're doing at the harp to the music as a whole. This can be a really important thing to practice, right? It's not just that I'm playing these notes, it's that this is the part that they have in the piece. This is what their function is in the entire piece. So learn, share, grow, but connect.

And this brings us to the final letter in the word practice. The letter E. Quite simply, E is for enjoy. I want you to enjoy every minute of your heart playing. Not that they'll all be easy or all be fun, but I certainly want you to enjoy your practice. This is when you get to really connect with your harp. Oh, connect. There you go. This is when you really get to dig in. You really get to explore up another E word, if you like. But you get to enjoy all the richness that we experience when we play the harp. Everything we do, everything we hear, everything we see, everything we feel, all of that can come together.

And if you're not enjoying your practice as much as you enjoy playing for people, or perhaps even a little bit more, then I think you're missing out on something. So I want you to consider what makes you enjoy your practice. What is it about your practice that you enjoy? Do you enjoy digging in and making something correct? You might very well. And that's okay. Just remember that your practice doesn't stop at correctness. It goes beyond that to creativity. It doesn't stop at repetition. It goes beyond that to playing, which is something we really want to enjoy.

It doesn't stop with the notes or even stop with technique. It goes beyond that to what we're able to create, what we're able to convey, and the kind of harp happiness that we are able to feel and to share with the world. All right, so I'm going to go through that word practice one more time and we'll just sum everything up here. So, P is for play. Play something every day. R is for review. You learned it, don't lose it. A is for aspire. What is that next level of harp happiness for you? C is for create. Don't limit yourself to what's on the page. Move beyond that and make the music yours. T for technique. The tools that we need to do what we want to do. The I for the I I am. Don't forget to put you into your music. The C for connect. If I is for putting you into the music. C is for connecting maybe to others and connecting to the wider world of music. And lastly, E. Enjoy. Enjoy it.

One last thought here. Did you notice that nowhere in here, none of those letters refer to fixing things or correcting things? Although we've talked about that a lot today. None of them refer to struggling and frustration. Now, that struggle, that correction, all that, that might be part of your learning process. And it may be that those are steps you need to take towards your goal, but they aren't or they shouldn't be the core of your practice. I mean, after all, what would it be like if when you sat at the harp and you started practicing and maybe you started practicing a piece with a creative mindset or with your own idea of what the piece means, or maybe just playing it through instead of saying, oh, I have to get this right, how different would that be for you? What kind of a transformation would that be in your practice? It might be a profound transformation. So I want you to release yourself from the idea that you just need to be endlessly perfecting something in your practice. We know that you're going to want to get it right, and we know that that's going to be part of what you do. But that's not the goal. Correctness is not the goal. The music is the goal. Your harp happiness is the goal. So as you work on your own harp specific goals for 2025, I want you to keep this practice idea in mind. It's going to help you move there faster, it's going to help you get things done more quickly, and it's going to keep your focus on where you want to go instead of where you feel you might be stuck right now. That's so important. No matter what your harp goals are for this year, transforming your practice in the ways I've talked about today could be a real key toward making those goals happen. Giving yourself permission to look at your practice in a different way can help you move toward those goals faster. And once again, I invite you if you want to look at what we think at Heart Mastery are the best ways to recreate, set and implement HARP goals. Join us for our January seminar series. The My Harp Mastery members are experiencing this right along with you. That January seminar series is called your Progress A four week Journey to Purposeful Practice and you're really going to enjoy this look at how to set goals and how to maintain them even when your life is really busy, even when you really don't have time to practice. We're gonna be looking at all of that in the month of January. Also, time is running out for you to register for our Getaway retreat in the Orlando, Florida area. This is our only retreat in 2025 and it is your best opportunity to have me work with you so that you can move forward on your goals as quickly as you can and really make those goals happen this year. This is a great way to start 2025. The retreat is February 12th to 16th. All the details, everything you need to know to register is on the homepage of heartmastery.com go to upcoming events or right there in the app. Next week here on the podcast, we're going to be talking about fingers, flow and faith. This is a different look at technique has nothing to do with religion, but it's going to give you some ideas for how to let go of and trust your fingers to do what you've trained them to do. This is about being able to sight read better, being able to play faster. It's about moving to that next level. Plus, I'm going to give you some very interesting exercises to help you let go to let flow. So that's next week on the podcast. Until then, remember, every day is a day you can add more Harp Happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit, your and all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to 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.