It’s the beginning of a new year. Time to build on last year’s successes and set goals for the coming year. Call them goals or resolutions, they represent what you think is important for you to try to accomplish in the coming days, weeks or years.

Things you think are important to accomplish.

So, if these things are so important to you, how will you get there? Are you going to set goals or are you going to wish for something? Are you going to make it so or just hope something fortuitous occurs? In 354 days will you, upon looking back at this year, be proud and feel accomplished? Or will you be sad and dejected that what you thought was important has slipped by you, undone?

To help you be in that first group, take just one little step – Write -it- down!

Write down what you think is so important – the goals you want to set for this year. Write them all down – the ridiculous, the sublime, the ones you’re embarrassed to admit to – write them all down!

Then, sort through them. Pick out the few that really REALLY matter to you. Not the “should do” ones (you know, “practice every single day” or “lose 10 pounds) but the ones you really want to see yourself complete (you know, “host a harp circle” “learn that piece you have always admired”).

Then – here’ the crucial step – write those select items in your journal. Make sure they are with your daily work so you can remind yourself why you are working so hard. For those days when you forget where you mean to be going. For those days when you wonder why you ever started playing. For those days when you don’t particularly like your harp (you know we all have those days!). You have already started your 2017 harp journal, haven’t you?

Write it down, make it real. Because while wishes are nice – goals are real!

It’s that time of year when we wrap up our celebrations and prepare for the year ahead. 2017 is already started and we have the opportunity to make it a great harp year. We know it’s the time for goals and resolutions — we might even have already made some. If you haven’t, you’re probably feeling the pressure to get a move on and make at least one resolution for the coming year!

There’s a small problem with this though. As the saying goes, how can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? Where have you been? Reflection, even if brief, will allow you to glean from your past year how to best prepare (and conduct) the coming year.  Here are seven ways to reflect on the previous year and your harp playing.

1. Interview yourself. Ask specific questions about how 2016 went for achieving your goals and how you wanted the year to go. Questions could include:
   • what did you do really well? of what are you most proud?
   • what “do over” do you wish you were going to get?
   • what’s the best thing you learned?
   • what did you play that you wish you could have skipped?
   • what did you just not get around to doing?

2. Review your notes to see how your year went?
3. Review your calendar to see if your goals happened or if were they unrealistic, unmet, and driven by life or other events?
4. Review your lesson book or journal – there might be some real nuggets in there! It’s blank? Really?!? Consider actually writing to yourself this year.
5. Review your “what went well” answer, and refine it – what went well in a sustainable way that you’ll be able to keep doing into the new year?
6. Map out what worked and what didn’t work for you.
7. Note what you’re grateful for. Gratitude is all the rage just now and it likely should be.  What lagniappe or serendipity happened in your harp playing this year? This will give you something to smile about.

This review does not need to be a long drawn out exercise. Pour a cup of tea, pull up your journal (or a post it note!), think and reflect, and jot it down. It’s a great way to prepare for what’s coming!

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!

Earlier this year I shared with you my goal to learn one new tune a month. I didn’t do as well as I had planned, for a variety of reasons. To be honest, I did better than it would seem but, because I didn’t keep good enough records, there are tunes not listed here that were in the challenge but I don’t remember what I didn’t know before! I did learn a lot though:

1. I learned that I have to write everything down! My new plan is to have a single planner/calendar/journal so I always have all the info I need at hand rather than a collection of tools which actually created more confusion.
2. I did better some months than others….and that’s ok.
3. I’m externally motivated – although I love to learn new tunes, I mostly get them into my head for specific events or activities…. I don’t just learn to learn….and that’s ok.
4. Some of the tunes I learned:

• Fair Maid of Barra
• Caol Muile
• Alan Friendly (comp. Corinna Hewat (to be fair, that was rocking along but I got sidetracked and it’s not strictly there yet, but I’ll get back to it because I love it!))
• Don Oiche m’Bethel
• The Wizard
• The March of King of Laois (which I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t learned earlier)
• Atholl Highlanders (another I never really got into my hands)
• Josephine’s Waltz ((Comp R. Tallroth) a tune all my friends play that I needed to catch up on)
• Amazing Grace (I’m slightly embarrassed that I didn’t know this cold – but that’s been fixed)
• Auld Lang Syne (another that I should have known but somehow had managed to not learn previously!)
• I reprised and worked on a few tunes including Malcolm Ferguson, Banks of the Lossie, McIntosh’s Lament, and (given the date) a number of Christmas tunes I hadn’t played a lot before

I need to set myself a challenge like this more often because it helped me focus and learn!

Of course, it’s nearly a new year so I can get back down to the business of the plan for 2016! I have a good idea when I could start.

How did you do on your goals?