It’s “Make Your Dreams Come True” Day – don’t waste it!

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Today is “Make Your Dreams Come True” Day.  Wow! 

Ok, first, who knew?!?  Second, how cool is that?  A whole day dedicated to that thing everyone always says they want.  Third, I could not make this up!

Which begs the question – how will you observe this auspicious day?  Because, hey, it says right on the calendar that this is the day.  And it only comes once a year.  I didn’t set to to go on about development again, but hey – you might as well use this day as intended.

Make your dream come true dayOf course, to make your dreams come true, you have to know what your dreams are.  I have found though, that when I ask people what their dreams are, the answers are often empty unsatisfying nonexistent.  That is, either I get a (clearly) ridiculous answer (“my dream is to be the Queen of Siberia” – duh, not a country, and no monarch, and no pathway!)  or the more likely response which is…no answer at all.

That’s horrifying to me.  No dream?  Not “I’d rather not say” or “I don’t want to tell you, you’ll think it’s silly”.  Just a blank stare.  Ouch!

I hope you have a dream for your harp life.  A desire (secret or not) for yourself and your harp.  If you don’t, don’t despair – you can make one.  Today is not too late.

Having a dream will help keep you motivated and can help guide your growth…and by extension, your entire harp life.

Need to build a dream?  You can.  And more importantly, you can build dreams again and again.  What you dreamt of as a baby harper (as a friend of mine likes to call budding beginners) may not be what you dream of as a musician of mature harp years.  If you were a child when you began to play, you may view the landscape of your dreams differently later in your life.  If you began to play as an adult, you might have thought you needed to govern your dreams because you were starting later (BTW – don’t fall for that cop out!).

You have dreams that change.  You can have multiple dreams.  You can have evolving dreams.   They’re your dreams – make them what you need and want them to be!  But I hope you have some. 

How do you form a dream? First, you don’t force it.  Just collect some ideas. Spend a little bit of time (probably quietly and by yourself – but do it your way).  Gather your thoughts about what you dream of doing. You could sleep and actually dream of your dream.  Or make a dream board of images that express your dreams.  Or draw/paint/sculpt a representation of your dream.  Or write it out.  The point is simply to capture that dream so you can hold onto it.  You may discard this later if needed, but as your dream is forming, this will help you hold on to the wisps of it.

Your dream does not have to be enormous or grand – it just needs to be yours.

Ok, now that you have a dream, how do you move toward it?  Well, if you have captured it (as above) you might be getting some ideas.  But perhaps most importantly, you have to believe that you can actually move toward this dream. 

Note – I didn’t say achieve.  This is not another whack at goal setting in a different guise!  This is about identifying what you think would be a cool potential outcome and moving in that direction.  I dream of playing Smetana’s Vltava at the Musikverein in Vienna.  It might seem unlikely, but at least I could define a path to make that dream come true! (for instance, I could start by learning Vltava!)

Define what about the dream is the “dream” part and what is the “work” part.  You can definitely do the work part.  You might have to break it down into small, manageable, bite-sized chunks, but you can do it.  Of course, making a plan will help – otherwise, you’ll only dream but never make a dream come true.

Always keep dreaming.  When I was a pup (in harp years) my first dream was simply to not suck.  I think I can say that I got that dream.  My next dream – that I was confident would n-e-v-e-r happen – was to play on a stage with one of my harp heroes.  I got that one wrong.  Turns out the dream wasn’t to get to play with an amazing musician – it was to have that person as a close friend…and play on stage together! 

You can keep moving toward a dream and perhaps you’ll achieve it.  Whether you achieve it or simply hold on to working toward your dream, the important thing is to be enthused and to use that enthusiasm to keep on keeping on – usually with joy! 

So, Make Your Dreams Come True Day is specifically for doing just that.  I know you won’t want to waste it so, what will you do to further your dreams?  Willing to share your dream? Leave a comment below – I’m looking forward to being inspired by you!

 

Clear vision for 2020

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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.

How about this – in 2020, the year of clear vision – just give it a rest.  Resolve to make no resolutions. Don’t set any goals.

After all, if the goals were important, you’d have set them right when they became clear.  If you need to work on specific things, you would have started right then – if you wanted that to become a goal!

There’s nothing special about short cold days for achieving anything.  Up to 91% of people who set resolutions drop them, most before the middle of January!  So, setting resolutions is really not a useful thing to do, unless you like to set yourself up for failure and to give yourself a specific thing to beat yourself up about not accomplishing.

New Year 2020Then what should you do? How about you take on just these four things:

  1. Just Stop. New Year’s resolutions really seem to be about false notions of self-improvement and possibly about self-aggrandizing virtue signaling. And really, unless you made a significant wager with someone, no one else really cares if you make it, so stop pillorying yourself about having resolutions, goals, visions, whatever.  Use that energy to – just play!
  2. Be Nice. Be kind to yourself – if you’re not where you want to be, you probably not only know it, but you likely also know how to get across that gap.  You might just not be ready to spend that energy. And if you are not sure how to get there, work with your teacher (or me!) and keep reading (because you know that here, we’ll talk about ways to improve!).
  3. Take a smarter path. The path forward that begins by recognizing the reality of your life will be a smarter path. And possibly there’s more to your life than playing the harp – like family, friends, day jobs, other hobbies, other instruments, and myriad other things you prioritize ahead of the harp (otherwise, you’d have more time to practice).  By examining your real life – and using that as the foundation of your thinking about your playing – you will be more likely to be able to find the time to practice and to better fit your harp playing into your reality!  Your life is a system and it needs to be kept in balance so that you can accomplish the requirements of each of its parts.  That balance starts by understanding where all the pieces lie.
  4. Practice! You know it will all come down to this – but you need a wider definition – you have to practice:
    • Practice the instrument – probably that old saw of spending at least 30 – 90 minutes a day (depending, again, on where you’re trying to get, your level of performance and development, and your real life)
    • Practice fitting everything else in too (you know, like dinner, exercise, sleep, work, chores, etc.) (after all, 3 above will not happen by magic, it will take a little work to analyze what will fit, where it will fit and how you might have to adjust things to get it all into the day).
    • Practice having balance
    • Practice being kind to yourself
    • Practice stretching
    • Practice learning
    • Practice spending time away from your harp productively
    • Practice being present
    • Practice practicing – you can’t just sit on the bench and have magic pour out your fingers – you know you need to warm up, work on fundamentals, analyze music, think about your approach and strategy for new music, work on learning, learn new things, develop musicality, hammer out new burbles, etc.
      • Practice the tunes you love
      • Practice the tunes you don’t love
      • Practice the way you play and developing your technique
      • Practice becoming more accomplished
      • Practice sharing your music
      • Practice being better
      • Practice enjoying the process
      • Practice capturing your progress so you can see your improvement
      • and practice identifying where you need to improve and practice

It’s going to be a busy year, and you’ll do exactly as much work as you fit in (and no more).  Setting improbable or impossible goals will not help and could actually get in the way (by making you feel like you’re failing or not making progress when you actually are).

What will you do with all the energy you have from not developing resolutions or goals that won’t work for you?  Let me know in the comments!

Send a thank you note

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As the year begins to draw to a close, you might want to take a moment to think about the reality that none of us makes music in a vacuum.  And maybe take a moment to thank your fan club.

Don’t think you have a fan club?  You probably do.  You may not know it.  Heck, they may not know they are your fan club.  But they are. 

Who are they?  All those people who support you as you develop and grow as a musician.  They include your family and friends.  Maybe your teacher, if you’re working with one.  Your friends who come to hear you play, even when your performance repertoire only includes Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Frere Jacques, and Long, Long Ago.

And hopefully your fan club includes – you!

So, for an end of year activity, you should write a thank you note for all the members of your fan club.   It doesn’t need to be overly complex, but it does need to be heartfelt.  Make sure to include:

Open with their name – whatever you call that person. 

Be open with your thanks and express your appreciation for their support.  Be specific.  Did that person unfailingly make you tea after you practiced each day?  Did they tell you how good you sounded?  Did they pay for your lessons?  Did they teach you your lessons? State what you are grateful for.  A generic “thanks for helping me get there” is nice, but specifics will help share your deep appreciation of their efforts.

End by telling them how much their ongoing support means to you and your harp playing.  Don’t skimp!

Sign off – maybe with a flourish!  It is not possible to over-thank someone for their help in getting you where you are.  And if you can’t say it at Christmas, when can you.

Thank you for being part of my fan club.  I cannot express how much I value your comments and emails.  Or how grateful I am that you are so willing to share with me. Knowing you’re there, reading, makes it so much easier for me to write to you.  And I do picture you in my mind when I’m planning, drafting, and finalizing each post.  If it weren’t for you and your continued support, I’d have packed it in a long time ago.  I’m looking forward to the upcoming year – hope you are too!  Jen

Tired of Christmas yet?  So, what’s next?

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I get it.  We’ve been teaching, learning, practicing, and performing Christmas music since it was hot!  It’s a limited pool of tunes.  It’s a short window to share them.  And they really aren’t that different from one another.  It can get boring.  And at this point, it is too late to start changing them up…or you’re already doing that and you’re running out of ideas for changes that you can perform on the fly.  After all, by December, we’re likely to be operating on autopilot just a little.

So, while you’re on autopilot, you might be thinking about what’s next!  What do you want to do?  What tunes are you going to take on?  Do you have a longer-term plan?  Now’s your chance to make a workable plan for the post-December season.

To do what’s next, we need a plan.  How do you make a plan for your music?  Same as any other plan you might make, you just need to take a few (ok, 10) steps –

  1. Know where you are – take stock of where you are right now.  Be honest and rigorous and identify where you’re starting.  And it’s the foundation of the plan. If you’re not honest, you will have a hard time succeeding in the plan.
  2. Set realistic expectations (based on your real life).  It’s easy to build a perfect and beautiful plan.  But if the plan doesn’t reflect your real life, it will fail.  Do not promise yourself that you will get up at 5 and practice for 2 hours if you are responsible for getting your household up, fed, prepped and out the door by 6:30 every morning!  While it’s a lovely plan, it won’t fit your life. (we’re back to being honest and rigorous with yourself).
  3. Make a schedule.  No matter how good your plan is, it will help to write it down and ensure it fits into your (real) life…the messy one with chores, and work, and meals, and traffic, and showers, and all the other stuff of daily life.  Writing it down will let you see the conflicts and were you have (actual) practice time…and plan in free time – you’ll need it.
  4. Where are you trying to go?  You should begin with the end in mind.  ‘Nough said.
  5. What will it take to get there?  You have to see the space between where you are and where you want to go.  In business and engineering this is called a Gap Analysis.  Be sure to note which specific, steps, techniques, etc. are missing to close the gap.
  6. When do you expect to arrive?  While you may not know how long it will take you to master skills, techniques, or tunes on your path, you may want to develop some idea of how long you think it might take.  Be prepared to be thorough, but also be ready to be wrong.  Remember to be flexible too.
  7. How will you know when you get there?  Before you begin to execute your plan, you will have had to identify where “there” is…so you’ll know when you have arrived!
  8. Do you know why you’re going there?  It helps to define what you need to work on (where you’re trying to go), but it is also important to keep in mind why you’re trying to get there!  Are there techniques you need to learn or perfect?  Is there a particular repertoire element you wanted to build in?  The why is essential to getting there!
  9. What happens if you don’t get there?  Sometimes your plan is to achieve something before a specific event.  Or you need to tackle a particular element on your way to nailing a particulate tune you want in your rep.  But what if you don’t get there – what’s the worse that will happen.  Do you have a contingency?
  10. Did you write any of it down?  You know I’m a fan of keeping track of stuff – and this is no exception!  Take notes, write on your plan, keep a calendar, make a scrap book, use a practice journal.  I don’t care how you keep track, just be sure to keep track.

Like the meme says, no matter where you go, there you are.  Make a plan so you’re there is somewhere you’d like to be.  What are you thinking you might make a plan for?  Let me know if the comments.

Memorize or learn?

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A few years ago, I set myself a goal of having enough music in my head so that I could play a three-hour background gig without sheet music.  This was largely driven by my innate laziness –  I just didn’t want to have to pack up and carry a music stand, a binder of music, a lamp, an extension cord, laundry pins, and whatever else I might have needed to read music to fill the time.  And, to be honest, I also liked the clean look of just a set list, no music stand cluttering up the place.  But mostly I liked not having to carry all that stuff.

Some of you have asked me how you could memorize all that music.  And you’ve likely seen the questions of memorization come up repeatedly in forums.  So many people believe that they must have sheet music.  That they cannot possible hold music in their heads.  One or two of you have indicated that it is impossible for you to memorize music, that you must read, you cannot depend on recalling anything. 

Memorize or learn?You say that you can’t memorize, but clearly you can memorize some things – e.g. how to spell your name, how to spell my name!, the recipe for your favorite cookie, the names of the days of the week, the rules for bridge, etc.).  It has been my observation that often what you think is a failure to memorize is often something very different.  

Memorization is the ability to recall information from memory.  Learning, on the other hand, focuses on the content of the music, the relationships between the notes, and the structure of the tune. 

Memorization is fragile.  Learning is resilient.

Memorization, because it is fragile, will desert you when you most need to be able to rely on it!  this can lead to gaps in your ability to deliver a tune when you’re stressed (like on stage!).  Sometimes failure to memorize is actually just a crisis in confidence.  In lessons, when I turn the music over and ask you play, often you do a good job – maybe not perfect, but usually fairly accurate.  That suggests that you actually do have it memorized, mostly, you just think you don’t. 

Sometimes it’s a crisis in speed.  When I teach tunes aurally, we always want to go faster.  When I ask if you know it, I ask in two different ways.  One is that, even though your fingers aren’t keeping up, you know where you mean to go (and if you’d slow down a little, you’d be fine!).  This is a lack of confidence.  The other is that you have no idea what comes next!  So, you haven’t learned it yet – easily fixed by spending more time.  This is a lack of information.

When the tune falls apart (when the music is turned or you have no idea what comes next), it’s easy to move on and continue to work – the tune is not yet learned!  But we often skip the learning step.  In a wild-eyed zeal to memorize the tune, we brute force our way through it. We repeat and repeat and repeat.  And we bash it into our hands and our heads.  But we don’t actually know it.  And when you come back tomorrow, you’ll have learned a part of it, but you’ll just have to keep bashing away to get more of it in your head.

What if we spent more time learning the tune?  Figuring out – for ourselves – where it goes, how it gets there, why it works?  This would allow time to think about the tune as a whole (or at least large sections) rather than focusing on each individual note.  We can learn the relationships between them rather than each individual note of the right hand and each note of the left hand.

Be honest with yourself – have you learned your tunes?  Or have you just bashed them into your head?  Have you given yourself the time to be thorough and careful, to identify the relationships and to make them meaningful to you?  Have you used your time to identify how the harmonies work and what you like (and don’t like) about them?  Come at them different ways and build strength in the learning so you have a cogent foundation.

Start today.  Build a collection of tunes you have learned, not memorized.  From that you can build your go to set list that can be as long as you need for each event.  You can even go back to tunes you know you have bashed into your head and specifically work on learning them.  You’ll be surprised how much easier they will be to play!  Be comfortable that those tunes will be there when you need them – and you can lose your music stand too!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Hoping you have much for which to be thankful.  Thank you for reading and being part of my harp life.  I am so grateful for your presence, your humor, your wit, and sometimes your patience!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Starting again, again

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I’m on that high you get when you’ve had a great lesson where you’ve worked hard, learned a ton, enjoyed receiving information, knowledge and wisdom from a good teacher, had a genuinely good time, and are now exhausted!

Woohoo!!

What? you want to know why I would be taking a lesson?

That is an easy answer to give – because I needed to start again, again.

Start again, againThere is so much to know and to learn.  We all have some of the pieces, but none of us has all the pieces.  However, I keep working on the puzzle, so I gathered more pieces from another source – and I think the picture in the puzzle is starting to take shape and be visible!

I have a beautiful Wurlitzer Starke.  I am so fortunate and grateful to have it.  But, to be honest, it has been collecting dust in the corner.  Of course I play it – occasionally.  But I didn’t play it enough.  And I was making no movement toward the music I got it to work on – music I insisted I needed to play!

I have a confession to make.  I don’t just like Scottish music.  I love music.  I particularly like Baroque, Classical, and Romantic music.  I’m also a picky taster at the modern table.  But it was hearing Faure’s Impromptu on the radio that compelled me to venture into the pool of the pedal harp.

Yes, I heard that piece and I was smitten!  Just one teeny-tiny problem – I didn’t actually know how to start.  Because, while yes, a harp is a harp, I was a little bit afraid of my pedal harp.

So, I needed to start again.

In that weird way the world works, just before all of this, separately, two of you mentioned needing to start over again – in the same week!  So, I’ve had this idea of starting again, again in mind as I headed out to my lesson.

Do you need to start again, again?  It’s not a bad idea, and here’s why:

  1. Beginner’s Mind.  You might have heard this concept of keeping a “beginner’s mind” – holding curiosity forefront, being eager to learn, being grateful for each step forward no matter the size.  And perhaps most importantly, the beginner’s mind has no expectations of performance – no disappointment on not getting something right the first try or impatience that it’s “taking too long” to learn something.
  2. No matter where you go, there you are (but you’ve worn down your shoes!) – you might want to start again again just to get a “tune-up”. I’m always amazed how quickly small bad habits can build (and band together!) – a little slump leads to a little neck craning leads to dragging your arm on the sound board and a one way ticket to poorer playing and possible injury.
  3. Someone out there knows something that could push you just a little farther along on your path.  But if you don’t ask for the help and information, you might never get that little shove you need!  And you never know who will have it or what it will look like, so you need to pay attention.
  4. No one wants to become stale.  And it’s easy to do.  It’s so much easier to play the same ten tunes forever, but it’s very motivating to have new repertoire the next time you see your harp buddies.  Whether you have a lesson, go to a workshop, or find new music to learn, you’ll prevent yourself from becoming musty and have an opportunity to start again.
  5. Something worth having is worth fighting for.  It is easy (as in the above) to become complacent, but you know you want to be as good as you can become, and while it might not be a “fight” per se (although that might depend on the tune!), working for something you want has it’s benefits while not working will have significant drawbacks (like being disappointed in yourself!).

Taking the perspective of starting again, again can be freeing.  Of course, we’re not always in a place where we need to start again, again so if you’re not there that’s great!  But if you find yourself thinking that starting over might be the best way to move forward, really step into it and begin again…again!

Have you found yourself in this place? How did you know?  what did you do? Was it worth it? Let me know in the comments!