#038: Kaleidoscope Practice: Focusing On What Matters
Imagine you found yourself stranded alone on a deserted island. It’s a beautiful place or it would be if you knew a little more about it. Are there dangerous animals or poisonous plants? How will you survive? You need food, clothing and shelter, but you have no idea how to provide them for yourself. Out of necessity, you begin carefully and slowly, learning just as slowly by sometimes painful trial and error.
Sometimes harp practice can feel like that deserted island. You tune the harp and sit down ready to work. But you don’t have a clear direction. You don’t know if you’re doing the right things the right way. And there’s no one by your side to give you advice. You have plenty of notes from your last lesson, but essentially your teacher told you what to work on or accomplish, not so much actually how to do it. Are you wasting your practice time?
On the other hand, you’ve probably experienced the feeling after a lesson where your teacher helped you get to the next stage with a piece. You walk away from the lesson practically on a cloud, knowing that you’ve done meaningful and productive work. What if every practice session felt that way?
I’m pretty sure that feeling that good about every practice session isn’t realistic, but you should be able to feel certain that the practice you’re working so hard at is getting you where you want to go. That may not be the case for you right now. It certainly wasn’t the case for me in my early college years. And so today, I am going to share with you my own story about pointless practice and the discoveries that I made trying to turn that around. These are the discoveries that led to my Kaleidoscope Practice system and I’m going to share that with you too. It’s all about what to practice and why and even more importantly, how to do it right, using the five focus areas that I identified as critical to practice success and the key results and strategies for each.
PLUS if you stick around to the end of the podcast I have a special bonus just for my podcast listeners so hang in there - this one’s just for you!
Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:
Get involved in the show! Send your questions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected]
You can subscribe to Practicing Harp Happiness on your favorite platform. Click the button below to stay up to date as new episodes come out.