Clear vision for 2020

It is now 2020 – Welcome to the new year and the new decade!

Just like every new year, we are encouraged from many sides to develop resolutions – to define those things we need to “fix” to improve ourselves.

Read the full blog on the website.

It’s going to be a busy year, and you’ll do exactly as much work as you fit in (and no more).   What will you do with all the energy you have from not developing resolutions or goals that won't work for you?

Are you happy with 2018?

The end of the year is drawing near.  With only two weeks remaining, are you happy with your harp year 2018?

In January, I suggested you keep a diary, build an I-love-me board, and/or record yourself.  Did you get a chance to start these?

If you did – it’s time to pull them out (and likely dust them off – it’s ok if you lost motivation in the middle of the year – it happens).  Look through your artifacts.  What you collected there will help you continue to grow and develop into the coming year.  You can review your diary entries or your continued additions to your I-love-me to see what worked and what didn’t. And by worked, I mean what worked for you.  The point of the diary, the I-love-me, and the recording is to give you a means to review where you were, where you are, and to determine how they line up with where you are going (or where you think you’re going or where you thought you meant to be going).

No pillorying yourself!  No harsh critique.  No judgmental condemnation.  Just a review of how you spent your time and if it served to get you where you were headed.  Take the time to thoughtfully review your documentation.  Did you practice the technique things you needed to so that you could play that dream piece?  Did you practice enough? Did you practice regularly? Can you identify patterns of good (or bad) things that you spent your time and energy on?  With this information you can continue to move forward – wherever you’d like to go!

If you didn’t (or if you started but got sidetracked by, like January 3rd) – why?  What about the methods I suggested didn’t do it for you?  There’s gold in the answers – because these are only three ways to capture your continued development.  If they didn’t work for you – can you tell me why they didn’t work and what would work better – for you?  Did you use another method?  What was it?

Remember, the idea is to know where you’re trying to get to (to master some particular technique, to play a particular piece, to be able to play a tune at a particular tempo, etc.) and to make slow, small, accurate, continuous progress.  And to avoid getting sucked down a rabbit hole (of a particular gig, something that’s giving your trouble, your regular life, whatever) and thereby getting derailed. 

How did you monitor yourself this year? Did it work?  What would work better?  Enquiring minds want to know – so share in the comments!

But if I don’t have a goal – how will I know that I got there?

If goal setting is so last year and this year we are going to do better – what are we going to do? How will we know if we got where we meant to?

First, we’re going to acknowledge that this is where that maxim about life being a journey not a destination kicks in. And to that end, I’d suggest that this year – we bimble. 

To bimble is to walk about aimlessly but not pointlessly, to get nowhere in particular, while enjoying the walk. 

In other words – there is no “there” to get to.  The time is spent enjoying the time. 

Seem like a good idea?  For so many who play for enjoyment, this is the ideal approach to the work of playing throughout the year.  No deadlines, no stress, simply playing to play…and to enjoy! No goal setting.  No getting to December and feeling like you have failed after working so hard!

But even if we play to enjoy, we would like to improve, to see some progress.  How will we do that without setting goals? We’ll bimble – enjoying our music and our lessons – without being fussed about how fast we are (or are not) progressing or that we are not ready to perform well enough.

To make improvements, we can focus on what we’re doing.  Change the focus from “where am I trying to get by some specific time” to instead be “what am I doing just now – can I do it just a little better right now?” We can focus on practicing or learning.  We can spend time reading, listening, analyzing music, thinking about the tunes. 

This enjoying the journey means that we don’t have to “work” so hard that we forget what we enjoyed about playing in the first place.  It means we can pay attention to the little things –

• how our hands feel as they close
• how the harp vibrates on our shoulder or thigh
• how the bass wires tickle our feet when we don’t wear shoes
• how we particularly enjoy the sound of those specific strings that made us buy that harp in the first place
• how buzzes sound terrible but are kind of fun to make!

Take time to enjoy the various parts of your practice time – the simple yet difficult task of performing scales, arpeggios, or other exercises.  The delight in getting through a tune you’ve been working to learn.  The fun but determined way you have to work new music into your head. This focus and enjoyment is a motivation to get back on the bench, to spend the time, to play the harp, to practice.   

We can bimble on our instruments – play and enjoy – aimlessly but not pointlessly.

And pay attention. 

Pay attention to how you have an easier time now with some particular technique.  Do your hands close fully now, without you having to think, “fingers all the way to the palm” each time? Do you move your elbows as needed to address the strings at a good and ergonomic angle? Can you sit comfortably for long enough to satisfy yourself?

Notice that you are more able, with each passing practice, to play more easily.  Do you remember more of each phrase without having to read every note? Are you able to control your dynamics?

Use tools to capture your thoughts (recording, journaling, etc.). Are you able to note that you played straight through for the first time? Did your approach to working a tricky section work?

In the end, as we enjoy the time, we get where we end up – probably right where we wanted to be.  Because really, there is no “there” there.  There is only our time and our enjoyment at the harp.  What are the things you want to notice while you’re at your harp?

Should you bother to set Goals for 2018?

It’s that time of year again. That time when experts, brainiacs, eggheads, and bloggers all exhort you to set goals for the coming year.  They delineate the process and give away worksheets.  They remind you that 5000% of people who write their goals down achieve them and that 3756% of people never even set a goal*. 

In other words, they nag you and sort of bully you into generating a set of goals. I start to feel like it is nearly immoral to not set goals.  And I know - because I have done the same thing to you in the past!  And to myself. Well – not this year! 

It is January and the beginning of a new year. It is a time many reflect on the previous year and our progress as humans to date.  And it is nearly a habit to expect to generate some goals. And those goals better meet all the criteria of good, achievable goals. 

But should you bother to go through goal setting for 2018?

There’s a reason only 3% of people even bother to write their goals down**.  It clearly is a strategy that doesn’t work for most people.  It requires a level of commitment difficult to bring to just about any activity, except perhaps a quest.  And since many of us play for our enjoyment (and even for those who play for a living) – it becomes just one more thing to do (and therefore it becomes easy to ditch!).

So, if goal setting isn't the right approach, what better ways could you use to identify what you’d like to do with your harp this year and check-in over time to see if you are getting there? If the standard goal setting hasn't worked for you, here are three other ways to approach this:

1. Keep a diary. Yes, this is a thinly disguised journal – but for some reason a diary is slightly less threatening than a journal (just look at Instagram or Pinterest – loads of journals not too many diaries).  You can keep a diary in any medium and it really is just you talking to you.  You can do this in the blocks of your planner calendar, in a separate book, on scraps of napkins – whatever fits in your day.  The best thing – who gets you better than you?  It gives you a place to pour out your frustration when you are having a hard time – and to capture your glee when something totally comes together.  
2. Make an “I Love Me” board.  I started out thinking that a Vision Board was a great idea but it comes with so much baggage. And of course, it is hard to find magazines with pictures of harps (except Folk Harp Journal, Harp Column, and AHS Journal – and who wants to cut those up?!***).  But you can capture all you want to do in the future and what you accomplish as sort of a visual scrapbook.  It can have photos and selfies, invitations, programs, contracts, etc.  Capture and display the detritus of your successes as well as any artifacts that arise from frustration (sheet music so marked up that it is unreadable? string bits?). Be sure to put the board somewhere that you can see it – and see that you are definitely moving.
3. Make a record. I like to encourage students to do this at Christmas time and spontaneously (or maybe not so spontaneously) throughout the year.  Christmas is a trove of tunes you play every year, so it is easy to effortlessly hear your progress. But you should also include any other tunes you’ve worked on.  You could make what is an audio diary and after playing the tune you could comment to yourself – how much easier it was to play the tune this year, how much you want to add tunes, how good you feel about something you’ve worked on for a while.  You could do this more regularly (as a version of 1 above) but I kind of like the idea of a different means of reminding myself what I’m doing.

Or just write your goals down.  There’s nothing wrong with writing them down, keeping a practice journal and actively looking for progress and successes.  The key is to capture evidence of your journey in a way that helps you travel!  Let me know if you're going to bother to set goals or how you might watch your own growth over the coming 12 months!

* these statistics may be randomly generated (i.e. made up)

** actual statistic snagged from this article – you’ll find various numbers in assorted sources, but they are all low

*** if you're not already reading at least one of these, you might want to consider adding it to your readying list