Your Simple Six Week Holiday Music Readiness Plan - PHH 231

It's our beliefs, our concern about not having enough time. That very concern is what causes the panic to start. Now, it might not feel like panic at first, but if you're starting to feel the pressure, saying, oh, I don't know if I'll be ready in time, and you're worried about performance nerves on top of that, you are creating a cycle that's really not healthy and is going to add more stress. So let's take that little bit of stress out of the equation and start by remembering that we will have enough time, because the time we have is all the time we have. We just have to figure out how we're going to use it.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Anne 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.

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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 welcome to the show. It's nearly the end of October and already my daily practice is revolving around what I will need to play this holiday season. Yours might be too. The smart harpist knows that this is the time to plan your practice carefully so that you don't have to cram practice time into an already overloaded holiday schedule. If we feel prepared to play going into the holiday rush, it makes everything about the holidays more fun. So now is the time to plan. We have about six weeks from now until the end of November. In my own planning, I usually use our Thanksgiving as my target date to have my music ready. Now if you're not up to speed on American holidays, our Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, so. So date wise, it's a movable feast. But as it marks the kickoff for our holiday rush, it's a great target date for music readiness. Today on the podcast, I want to share what I think is the easiest and most realistic schedule for making sure whatever music you have to play this December will be ready. I start by looking at the three most critical decisions what ready means and believe me, it's different for each piece, each player and each performance, how much practice time you have and how to divide that time among everything you want to practice and play. Once you've made those decisions, it's about making a realistic and flexible schedule that allows you to get your music ready without the stress and lets you feel confident that you are ready to play your your best. Before we get started with that six week schedule though, I want to quickly remind you that today is the day. We are starting our Arpeggios With Ease course and we've left registration open just for today. So if you think that this course might be for you, this is the time to get in. And so when this episode goes live, it will be Monday, October 20th and you still have time to get in and get the course and all the goodies. This is a really powerful course. It's not just about arpeggios, it's about learning how to take technical exercises and really apply them to your music. So we're going to be working with real life musical examples, some of them sent in by members of the Chorus saying, you know, hey, can we talk about this sort of, you know, example by request kind of idea? And so we'll be taking these drills and the pieces and putting them together. There are over 24 practice techniques that you'll be learning that relate specifically to arpeggios, but the ideas actually will carry across to other skills as well. But I think this is a really powerful course and it's still available if you get in quickly so you can use the link in the show notes, get yourself in the door and hopefully I will see you inside the course. So that goes on just for this week. And of course, everything has a replay. It's always available for you. You have it forever, but you just have to get in now. So that's going on. But I don't want to delay our talking about holiday harping any longer. I know it's such an important topic. And thinking about getting from where you are right now to the readiness you want by the time we get to your performance of whatever holiday piece it is, whatever that performance is like, that's such an important thing. And we worry about it, right? I don't want you to worry about it, and here's why. When we worry about not having enough time to get our music ready, I want to tell you that I can guarantee you have enough time. Absolutely. And that's because there isn't any more. The time you have between now and when you have to play is finite. We can't create time. So you will have enough time, because that's all the time there is. What we need to do is stop worrying about the amount of time we have and start figuring out how much we can actually do in that amount of time without driving ourselves crazy and what we want the end product to look like. That's where we're going to start our discussion. But I also want you to realize this. It's our beliefs, our concern about not having enough time. That very concern is what causes the panic to start now. It might not feel like panic at first, but it. If you're starting to feel the pressure, saying, oh, I don't know if I'll be ready in time. And you're worried about performance nerves. On top of that, you are creating a cycle that's really not healthy and is going to add more stress. So let's take that little bit of stress out of the equation and start by remembering that we will have enough time, because the time we have is all the time we have. We just have to figure out how we're going to use it.

It's funny, isn't it? It does help you feel relaxed already, at least. It has always worked for me when I realized that it's not about not having enough time. It's about using the time properly and using the time we have. So I hope that that has the same effect for you. Now that we understand that, we can start talking about what being ready means. We dealt with the first part of this equation. I don't know if I'll be ready in time. Okay, we've got the time part of it. But now let's discuss a little bit about what ready means. Deciding what ready looks like for you for your piece in this performance that you're preparing for. That's the first of our three decisions. And you may think that ready, having a piece be ready means the same all the time, but here's why I think it doesn't. First of all, there are certain pieces that have maybe a tempo marking, maybe they've got some real specific way of being performed, but that doesn't mean that you have to do them that way. Just because the metronome mark on the page says quarter note = 80, it might sound perfectly fine and be more playable for you at the quarter note equals 60. So this is why I think you have some decisions to make right up front. If that tempo marking is too fast for you and you're working hard over these next six weeks to make it happen, and it still doesn't happen at week six.

Then that's not going to feel very good. But if we make the decision right now, here in week one, if we make the decision that, well, you know, to have the piece really be ready, it only needs to be at 60. It doesn't need to be at 80. If we make that decision now, it sets you off in a completely different trajectory and one that you can feel right at the outset, more comfortable and confident of achieving. Doesn't it make sense that if we set the goal closer to something we think we can really achieve, we're more likely to achieve it? I mean, after all, if you decide that, okay, this piece would be okay, if I play it at 60, it would really sound okay. If you get it to 60 and you find it's going well and you get there sooner than you thought, you can go ahead and do it faster. You've got some. Some leeway there. We've built in some headroom. But you don't have to set your sights higher than you think. You can actually make that mark. You know, you don't have to set them so high that you can't achieve it just because that's what it says. So that's why ready has some decisions. Also, it's worth considering what ready would mean to the people you're playing for. I mean, if you were playing for a very highly, super critical audience, then yes, you have to be really prepared to play absolutely at the highest level you possibly can. But much of the time, particularly at the holidays, people are looking for beautiful music played well, and that doesn't require the same level of perfection. I'm not asking you to lower your standards, but I am asking you to give yourself the grace that the listener is going to give you. We want to do the best we can, but we shouldn't be forcing ourselves into an impossible ideal of perfection if that's really not what's required. That doesn't serve us or the music well. It just makes extra pressure. So this is why I often talk about, you know, if it's one note that's holding you up, well, leave it out. We're looking to present music well, not just to present it perfectly. That's not good enough. Perfect isn't what we're aiming for. We're aiming for beautiful. We're aiming for meaningful. We're aiming for musical and expressive and all of that good stuff. So this is another reason to really consider what ready means. Our second big decision is about how much practice time we have. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a really ideal practice time block set in my mind that, gosh, I'd love to have this amount of time, and I don't often get all that amount of time. There are so many things that can interfere with practice, right? I mean, you know, the phone can ring or there are plenty of ways that our practice time gets used up besides in our practice. So I want you to take a moment and be very realistic with yourself. Be very firm and say, okay, yes, this is how much practice time I have on this day and this day and this day and this day. Look at how much time that you've got and remember to take into account the things that take up room in your day that don't often get on the calendar. I mean, for me, it's things like grocery shopping or picking up things, things doing errands. There are things answering email. There are things that I spend a lot of time at that don't always show up in my calendar. So when I try to calendar my practice time, which I do, I've got blocks in my Google Calendar devoted, you know, just to my practice time. When I try to schedule them, I often forget that, okay, well, that day is a little too full because there are these other things I haven't thought of. I find it really challenging to actually get my practice time on the calendar and keep it. I'm pretty good at it, but that doesn't mean it isn't a struggle. And I imagine that it can be a struggle for a lot of us. So if that's one of your challenges, be very firm with your practice blocks, get them in your calendar, but be realistic, too, and realize that, okay, am I taking everything into consideration? Am I really going to have this much practice time? And I suggest that you look at practice time for every day for the next few weeks. Get it in your calendar now. I mean, you've already written the. The date of your performance in your calendar, right? So why not get all those practice blocks in your calendar now so you don't accidentally schedule that luncheon that you really want to go to with a friend right, over that time that you had devoted in your mind to practice? So let's figure out how much practice time you have. Get it in your calendar. All right? That was the second decision. It was about practice time. The third decision is about that practice time. Also. You've got your practice blocks in your calendar now we need to know how to use them, how much needs to fit in that practice time. And this might be a case of trying to put too many socks in the drawer and it won't close. We need to find out how much you're really counting on being able to practice. Will everything fit? I mean, take a look at the music that you think you're going to play or the music that you've committed to playing. If all of that needs to be done and you need to do all of those things in the practice blocks that you have.

Are you going to be able to get it done? Are you able to put some of those things aside for now while you focus on some of the holiday things? Maybe all of those things are holiday things, in which case we have to be very careful how we apportion your practice time, and it's probably going to involve some rotation, which I'll get to in just a moment. So that's another decision. Take a look at everything that you've got, everything you're committed to practicing, and see if that's really what you're going to be able to fit in with the practice time that you've got. So if you need to jettison a couple things, delay a couple things. That's also not a bad plan. And this is the time to do it before you spend three weeks practicing these things and then realize that you don't really have time to keep on going. Okay, so now having decided that we've, you know, we've got our practice time scheduled, we know what we're going to practice in it, and we've made some decisions about what readiness really looks like for the pieces that we need to play. It's time to start thinking about that six week schedule. And we can't spend too much time thinking about it because we actually have to get in there and practice it. Right. Okay. So let's get going. Okay. Step one is to start from the end. Go to your calendar and find the date of that first holiday performance you have coming up. That's going to be your altogether ultimate due date. That's the day that we need to schedule around. Now, if you have performances that come up after that, that's going to be bonus time. And the pieces that you're going to play in those later performances, they'll be extra ready and you'll have more time to focus on them. So that's just a bonus, you know, if your first performance is December 1st and you've got ones also on the 15th and the 24th, let's get everything ready by the 1st. One good reason to do that is that by the time you get to December 1st and that first performance is over, the December schedule that has everything else in it related to the things you want to do for the holidays. Whether it's sending cards or baking cookies or going out with friends, all of that schedule is picking up. So your practice time is likely to be a little diminished. And so if all of that music is ready by the beginning of December, you can breathe a little bit easier. And of course, as those performances happen, you get to take some of that music off your plate. So the closer we get to Christmas, the easier your practice schedule should be. So we're going to take that first performance date and I'll just call it December 1st. And we're going to make that the, the final day. That's the day we're preparing for. Now go backward a week from there. So now we're into November again. And one week before that day, that due date, that last week, we're going to call that week six. And that week is all about reviewing your music. By the beginning of week six, everything is going to be ready. Ready to the standard that we chose right at the beginning, before we started making this plan. So everything's going to be ready, and we're going to just be reviewing it and calming everything down so that our practice time that week is going to be spent just playing things a little bit slower than we know they need to go just so we can relax them and just playing through them and starting to enjoy them. What a novel thought. Yeah. Enjoying your music that week before a performance. So when you get to the performance, you're calm and relaxed. What a wonderful thing that would be. Right? Well, this is how to get there. Make that week before the performance all about calming your music down. And how do we know you'll have time to do that? Because you'll be ready. All right, that's week six. Let's go back one more week to week five. How do we get to that ready state? Well, week five is going to be the week that we spend polishing things and previewing them, doing those little. Those little kind of fake performances, if you will, or maybe even preview performances. But if it's one piece, that's really difficult. Maybe it's a piece you're playing with the choir. Maybe this is the first time you're going to be playing some of the Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britton. Well, okay, you can't really preview it because you don't have the choir to sing with you. But you could play your part for a friend. You could play it for your teacher. Even if you don't have a lesson scheduled, schedule one to say, okay, you know, this is. I want to come in and play this for you. You could do all kinds of things, play music for your friends over the phone or on FaceTime. Or you could schedule a little performance just for some friends at the house. Or you could record yourself just to give yourself a chance at playing something all the way through and having a little bit of that nervous edge. All kinds of preview performances work. Just lining up a bunch of teddy bears and having them stare at you while you play, that can. Can work, too. So that's all about polishing and previewing. But if you've noticed, that only gives us four weeks to work to get this music learned. So before we go any further in our scheduling, I want you to realize that now we've compressed your readiness time frame into just four weeks instead of six, because we've used those last two weeks to really get your music ready to play. So you only have four weeks to learn it. So now that I'm panicking you again, And I can feel that tension coming right through the wire. I know that it's there. So I want you to revisit your idea of readiness and think, okay, maybe do I need to scale my expectations back? Do I need to say, well, okay, you know, I was going to play this arrangement of Silent Night. It's hard. It's not really too hard. And I really thought I could do it. But if I really only have four weeks to practice it, maybe I should do a slightly easier one instead. Or maybe I should just eliminate that last verse that gets really fancy and just play the other ones instead. It might adjust your idea of readiness.

But this is to everyone's advantage. It's to yours, because not only will it be easier to prepare, but you'll be more confident when you're playing. And it's to the listener's advantage because you're going to be playing so beautifully that they're going to be able to enjoy it even more. Now, this leaves us with four weeks to do your practice. I know. I can hear the hyperventilation. You have plenty of time because that's all the time you have. So adjusting your readiness level is part of using your time well. Building in those two weeks at the end for polishing, for calming down, that's using your time well. And if you end up needing to do a little bit of extra practice into that polish week, that's fine. That's part of what that is. That's a little bit of wiggle room to give you some time so that you're not working right up against the date. Now, as far as those first four weeks go, I don't have to tell you how to practice. You know how to do that. But there are a couple things that I want to discuss. One of them is that if you have a lot of pieces, say that December 1st performance is playing for an hour at a Christmas luncheon, well, you need an hour's worth of music. So you've got a lot of pieces. Now, of course, there are plenty of tricks we use, right? We can repeat things, do extra verses, play it an octave higher. There are lots of things you can do to stretch out a piece, and you can always go back and repeat things. That's allowed. But if you have a lot of pieces you're trying to get ready, here are a couple of tips. One is practice in rotation. Find the ones that are the hardest and practice those every day. And find the ones that are the easiest and put them on a rotation where you play three easy ones. On Monday And a different three easy ones on Tuesday and a different three easy ones on Wednesday. And don't practice those. Just play through them. If they're really easy, then they're probably just about ready. They don't need a lot of practice. You just want to keep them in your fingers. So rotate through them over the course of a week or whatever it is, and they'll get enough playing as you're going through that process over these next six weeks, they'll get enough playing that they will be ready without you spending a lot of practice time at them, just playing them. So maybe that's 20 minutes of your practice time that's actually just playing a whole bunch of pieces. And this leaves you maybe 40 minutes of your practice to actually work on the harder ones that need work. And again, maybe it's not the whole piece that needs work. Right? It might be a hard piece, but most of it you can play. And it doesn't take a ton of practice to get that going and keep it going over the next six weeks. But there are those spots that are hard. So that's what you spend the bulk of your practice time on. Don't ignore the rest. Be sure you touch it every day, but spend your practice time on what needs it. And I think that is the key phrase right there. We only have so much practice time, so spend it on what needs it and don't practice what doesn't. You can play what doesn't, which takes a lot less time, right, because you can just play it once through. So play it so that it's still in your fingers and it's still fresh, but you don't have to practice anything that doesn't need it. If you have a lot of pieces and you know, you've got the hard ones and maybe some medium ones and then a bunch of easy ones. And I hope you haven't planned all hard ones because that's not the way to do it. Right. You need some breathing room in here. So if you've got those pieces, I would say make a list and be sure you have a written rotation schedule that is, you know, okay, I've done piece hard piece A today. I'm going to do. I'll play through that tomorrow while I work on hard piece B. And I'm also going to play the easy pieces C, D, and E on Monday. And I'm going to play easy pieces F, G, and whatever comes next. H. I was about to start over like it was a scale F, G and H on Tuesday, and then I, J and K on Wednesday, and then I'll start that rotation again. But write down that schedule so you don't have to hold it in your head and you can check those boxes and you'll feel good about what you're doing and you'll be able to see what you're accomplishing. So a written rotation schedule will get you through when you have a lot of things to practice. That doesn't mean that you couldn't winnow out that list a little bit if you're able and say, okay, well, I don't have to learn that for December, so I'm going to just put that on the back burner for a while until I get these other things really in my fingers.

So that's important thing one. Here's important thing two. As you start week one, jump start your practice. I mean, right away. See how much of these pieces you can play. And play close to tempo, right? Don't feel like you have to start slowly just because you're trying to get things ready. This goes along with my motto. Don't practice what you don't have to practice if you don't have to practice at hand separately, because it goes, okay, hands together, then don't do hands separately. Practice. Right. Only practice it the way you need to practice. Just makes common sense. But still, I think sometimes we feel this sense of obligation, okay, well, I've played it hands together, so now I've got to play at hand separately. Well, maybe, but maybe not. So don't do anything you really don't have to do. And the bigger your first step in week one, you know, okay, I'm going to push this. I'm going to get my hands separately all the way at tempo and my hands together just a little bit slower than that. The closer you can get to your readiness goal right out of the box, the easier the rest of these weeks are going to be. So don't take baby steps at the beginning. Take those big giant steps and go as far as you can right away so that you're not, you know, essentially dragging your fingers behind you. As you get into weeks three and four, we want to keep moving, so start with that big jump. Phew. I know it's busy. There's a lot of work to do. So let's recap, right? We talked about those three big decisions. Sit down with your calendar, put your practice time on the calendar, decide what it really looks like, and see if you have time to fit everything in that you were planning. Don't try to cram more in than actually fits. It'll only create more stress for you. And of course, very importantly, decide what readiness looks like. What does ready mean for any of these pieces?

How perfect do they have to be? Probably not as perfect as we might like them. And that's okay. This is a time to remember how we're serving people with our music and not making them monuments to perfection. That's not what we're looking for. Okay, those are the three big decisions. Then going backward from your, you know, your cutoff date, that date of the first performance, that week before that is all about reviewing and calming everything down. And the week before that is that polish and preview week. And yeah, if you needed to do any catch up practice, that's the right week to do it. Week five, then weeks one through four, are all about learning, putting your pieces in rotation, if that's what you need to do, and of course, taking the biggest steps you can right at the beginning so that you get off to a really good start with these pieces. Hopefully you have some of them already ready, you're already in progress. You're just, you know, cranking them out here for the last six weeks before you. Before you have to play them and getting them all polished and set. So that's how I work my six weeks to holiday playing. Oh, one final thought. Remember, this is enjoyable. We play music because we love it. So remember to have fun. Remember why you're doing this. Remember to listen to the music you're making and enjoy it. Enjoy the sound, enjoy the touch of your harp, enjoy the way your harp feels on your shoulder. Remember to take a moment and enjoy it. Okay, that's, that's enough for today. Next week we're going to be talking about how to begin a piece. I have some interesting ideas that I shared with some of our retreaters recently, and so I thought I would share them with you too. So we're going to talk about how to begin a piece. This is not the time to begin one if you're trying to get holiday pieces ready. But hopefully you already have them in progress. But you can file this one away for later. So that's next week on the podcast. Until I talk to you then. And I hope I see you on the arpeggios course between now and then too. But until 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.