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!