Cultivate a positive mindset.
Because the biggest complaint I hear from most harpists is the fear of failure in front of friends and audiences.
When I first started performing, I thought I could just get away with working on my mindset a few times per week, or even not at all. I figured it would magically come to me when I got on stage.
But when I got on stage, I felt secretly awful. I knew I hadn’t adequately prepared. By then, it was too late to think about mindset and confidence.
What I was missing was consistent training in mindset and confidence during my lessons and practice sessions. How do you create a performance mindset in the first place?
By having consistent coaching and practicing routines that build that mindset into place, no matter where you are playing.
The key to feeling confidence in playing isn’t built in weeks or months. It’s built in hours and minutes:
✅ The minutes you put into your warm-up routine
✅ The minutes you put into learning and mastering your pieces
✅ The minutes you spend in self-talk, telling yourself how worthy you are, and how you are capable of performing in front of others while feeling great about yourself.
It’s just like life. You have to do it daily.
When I started treating my music, my coaching, my lessons, my practicing as a sacred act, an act of self-love and self-care, my music and my performing transformed from a terrifying event to just get through into a gift! That’s right, I gift that I was giving to the audience.