I’m sure that you’ve already at least thought of the goals you’d like to work on throughout the year. And that’s all well and good.  If you don’t give your goals some thought, you won’t be able to identify where to focus your efforts.  And of course, not thinking about your goals doesn’t mean you won’t have any – it just means you won’t know when you get there.

You already know that you will make small steps toward your goal each day. But watching for achievement can sometimes feel like watching your nails grow – you know it’s happening, but you can’t actually see it.  Many of your harp goals will be like that – you make progress but you can’t see it as it’s happening. If you capture that progress, you will be able to see it better – it will be in a single place and will highlight how far you’ve come.

But to really make progress you need to make those thoughts physical. There are a number of ways to capture your progress. You could:

• write it down in a journal
• build an inspiration board or mood board
• scrapbook
• develop a chart
• use an app for that
• made a progressive audio file
• or some other method that speaks to you

The point of documentation is not to add to your workload but rather to allow you to see your progress over time. Seeing your progress will help you remain motivated, make corrections, seek feedback from others, and keep moving forward. And you might even have fun doing it!  Enjoy the journey.

This year, I had a couple of good ideas for goals and it was difficult to choose between them.  But I have settled onto a single overarching goal. I finally decided to select the one with the least probability of success. Foolish possibly, but I determined that it was a better fit for me.

I set this year’s goal to be able to play two hours of fast tunes. Not that you’d ever want to do that – that would be sort of hard to listen to if you were in the audience. But, even so, it was important to me to be able to pull it off if challenged. Of course, no one is likely to make that challenge to me – except me!

I think this is a smart goal because I used the “SMART” principle to develop it.  That is, this goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed.  How’s that you say?

Specific – I want to focus on fast tunes. Not that I won’t play or learn slow airs or songs, but I want to primarily learn jigs, reels, hornpipes, slipjigs, marches, strathspeys, barndances, and polkas!

Measurable – I just have to fill two hours and I have a watch!

Achievable – I calculate that two hours will require about 80 tunes. While that’s a lot, I’m not starting from zero!  I’ll build on the tunes I’ve already learned, so that significantly reduces the number of tunes left to learn!

Realistic – OK, this is the furthest from “locked in”.  Life gets in the way, and this means that I will have a lot of music to learn – but I’ll do the best I can. And I developed a new strategy to be exposed to tunes I wouldn’t likely find if I was floundering around for tunes so that will propel me forward.

Timed – This is a leap year, so I get an extra day to work on this!

What are your goals this year? Are they SMART? Let me know what you are planning to work on this year!

Welcome to 2016!  It’s a new year so it’s time for annual goal setting!

This is a much loved (and hated) annual tradition in which we try to make plans for the year. If we are just playing along because everyone around us is making goals (or resolutions) then we have no intention of meeting those goals.  But if we actually want to make progress, then this is one of the most important parts of the year – when we set out to define what we are going to do all year with respect to our harp playing.

However, we don’t actually want to start with identifying our goals.

WHAT??

Yup, you heard me, we don’t want to start there. We have a much more important place to start – last year.

What were your goals for last year? How did you do? If you did really well and met your goals, how did you do that? What tools, techniques or strategies did you employ that worked for you?

Didn’t get where you had originally thought you’d like to? Why not? What happened? What didn’t work? Why didn’t it work for you?

There are some common reasons goals don’t get met – did any of these apply to you:

• You didn’t really define a goal (for instance, was your goal something like: “I want to play better”?)
• You bit off too much goal for the time frame (for instance, are you a first year harper with the goal, “I’d like to play Carolan’s Concerto at tempo by the end of the year”?)
• You didn’t keep the rest of your life in mind (for instance, was your goal “I will practice every day from 6 – 7” without recalling that that is dinner/homework/family reconnect time so you were never going to get to practice then?)
• You didn’t write your goals down and by March you couldn’t remember what you had thought was so important in the first place (for instance, was your goal “I will practice scales every day for 30 minutes” but by April it had become “I’ll be glad to sit at my harp for 5 minutes any day this week”?)

There’s a lot to be learned from last year, so review 2015 and glean the nuggets that will help you develop better goals for 2016 and we’ll work on whipping those goals into shape later this month!