Habits are supposed to serve us. They are behaviors we perform without thinking.

Habits can be good – like brushing your teeth, putting on your seat belt, or going to bed on time.

Or habits can be bad – like eating ice cream every day, biting your nails, checking your phone during dinner.

Habits are like callouses – forming slowly over time. They form when we’re busy paying attention to other things.  And so, insidiously, they creep into your processing, your playing, and you never notice.

And while you are not noticing, the bad habits grow stronger. Until one day – you see a photo, a reflection, or a friend laughingly points out that you look like a troll with a harp! Or worse, you develop pain in your neck, shoulder, hip, hand, arm that you d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y notice after you’ve been playing. Or sometimes you notice it when you’re away from the harp – and you wonder what you’ve done.

Bad habits can be general – you’re slouching on the bench or your head is thrust forward as you look at the strings. Or they may be quite specific – your hands are not closing on your elbow is dragging your forearm along the edge of the soundboard, your feet are not flat on the floor. But all bad habits are called “bad” for a reason – these habits are not serving you or your harp playing!

What? You’re not screaming in pain? No one has laughed at your bad posture? Maybe you don’t have any bad habits…or maybe you just haven’t noticed! Insidious, remember?

How would you know? Here are four surefire ways to find your bad habits –

1. Check it out.  Hang a full-length mirror where you can check your look while you’re practicing. This is not a decorating tip (although you can also use it to help light your space better too!). Whether you hang the mirror or get a cheval glass on a stand – put it where you can look up and see what you look like while playing. This requires no help or technology.
2. Have a photo shoot.  Enlist a friend or family member to photograph you “in the act” when you don’t expect it. This is the same idea but might be a little less discombobulating – having the photos will also tell you things you might rather know before you sit to your next practice session.
3. Star in your own show.  Videotape yourself – this is relatively easy now – just prop your phone on your music stand and prepare to learn all sorts of things (that you might rather not know – but will help you!). The second step is the most important – watch the video! See what you’re doing when you aren’t watching.
4. Play freeze tag.  Remember freeze tag? When you begin to practice, set a timer for some random number of minutes. When it dings – freeze! Then very carefully check yourself out – look at your hands, arms, legs, head and back – are you where you want to be? How’s your posture? Make corrections, reset the timer, and go back practicing. If you are sitting for a long practice session, plan to do those a number of times including toward the end of your practice when fatigue will contribute to bad habits – you might even have some that don’t come up until later when your fatigue enhances them.

Any of these ways will help. A combination of them will give you a fuller picture of what you need to fix.

How do you fix your bad habits? Go back to the fundamentals! They are called fundamentals for a reason!

When you started playing, you learned these fundamentals – go back to them. Pull out your beginning book – whether it’s Sylvia Woods, Deb Friou, Bonnie Mohr, Maria Grossi, or any of the other beginning books – and head to the beginning, working slowly and carefully on the exercises that first helped you to learn those fundamentals.

Of course, there’s a whole other set of musicality bad habits but we can deal with those another time. Work on the fundamentals of playing first.

What are your worst habits? Let me know and we can compare notes!

I’m always nattering on at you about how important practice is – for lots of reasons. And you probably laugh and think (or say out loud?) “easy for you – that’s what you do for a living!” Well, let’s pull that thread, shall we?

First, like you, I have a life – a home and house that need care and tending. And perhaps like you, I’m not big on housework or tending to anything! But these things must be done. Groceries, call my Mom, laundry, prune the dog, take out the trash – it’s all there.

Second – only in my dreams do I have all day to play the harp! Yes, I’m a professional, so yes, it is work and it is a business. And yes, that means I often get trapped in Administrivialand – doing paperwork, making phone calls, sending email.  On the package its all flowers and hearts, but on the inside, it’s still work! Booking students, gigs, networking, advertising, blogging, website maintenance, teaching students, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera*.

Third – I have a day job too – just like you. With its commutes and joys and challenges.

And somewhere in there – I still need to fit in practicing. So, how to do that?  I find a schedule is very very helpful. But you need more than that. You need to keep the schedule. And in doing that you will allow yourself to meet some other gates as well:

• You will be better able to focus – this is time you have set aside, so you don’t need to be thinking about how it’s time to wash the dog or vacuum the garden. Focus on your practicing.
• You will have built in time for self-evaluation – because you have dedicated time, you can apportion it to include self-evaluation. Are you playing as well as you’d like? If not, how should you change your practice to improve? If you are playing as well as you’d like – what should you take on as a new challenge?
• You will have time to get stuff done – because you have identified time to work, you won’t have to just “cross stuff off the list” but rather, you can bear down and work on individual elements of your playing until they are smoothed out while you also identify other things that need work.
• You will have time to be generous – to yourself (and by extension others) you will have dedicated time to play more fluidly so you can be more comfortable while performing, all the while learning to be nice to yourself as you progress and develop as a harper.
• You will have time to schedule for your best – you control your schedule so you decide when to practice. If you’re not a morning person, do not bother scheduling your practice for 6am! It’s your day, if you need to practice from midnight – do it! Just be sure you work with yourself. And be flexible – if you need to change the schedule, change the schedule!
• You will have built in time to capture everything – be sure to include journaling and recording as part of your practice time. They need to be – and if you plan them that way, they will get done.
• You will have built in time to be creative – creativity requires time and tools and time – if you add creativity time into your practice – you will have the time!

That is a lot to schedule in so it’s important to remember that there are seven days in a week. You don’t have to do the same thing every day.

Having a schedule means that you can have hard days and easy days, days that focus on a specific thing and days when you “play around”. Having a schedule means that you know which days are which, and that you are actually getting to all the things you have identified as important.

Be prepared to do work when you have scheduled it and include some “free time” to enjoy yourself! And what could be more simple than that?