It’s time to come clean: yes, I get anxious before performing (and before teaching, meetings, recordings – you name it). My students and colleagues often comment on how calm I appear on stage or when I am leading a webinar. They use words like “poise”, “elegance”, “soothing voice” and ask what my secret yogic tricks are. I humbly bow in gratitude – while shaking like a leaf inside. To be fair, I am now at a point where I feel quite comfortable presenting in front of large groups of strangers (it did not used to be this way!). At times, I also find myself inexplicably calm before playing a recital. However, there are other times when my heart is pounding and I just wish I could press control-Z to undo the situation I brought onto myself.

After all of my concerts got cancelled in the first lockdown, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to experiment with alternative (online) formats – once I started getting over the “wallowing in despair” bit. Nope, I don’t feel the energy of the space or the audience, I don’t know who is listening, how they are listening or even if they are listening at all (are they in the loo? On Instagram? Eating tacos? Or something worse?). Sometimes, we are not even performing in “real time”, as in the case of pre-recorded recitals. Performance anxiety? Yep, still there.

One of my most recent online recitals offered an excellent reminder of the full range of unpleasant sensations, whirlwind thoughts and negative mind-loops that can occur when performing. Ah yes, that old familiar potent cocktail of experience. It had all the hallmarks of yucky surprises that can crop up to derail our concentration and preparation: exhausting, long travels through height-of-pandemic wasteland; waiting for hours in a freezing space with only a tiny, dark, smelly toilet for privacy while your hands turn into icicles; the pressure of a studio recording with audio engineers, full lighting rig and video crew but only one chance to “get it right”; an unexpected injury that meant changing fingerings at the last moment – lovely. I was ready to burst to tears before playing a single note (cue inner moany dialogue: “I can’t deal with this… I am just not capable of getting through…”).

However, I did play, and something happened as soon as I began – it was almost as if I just… gave up. I stopped trying to “get it right”, I decided that I didn’t give a flying doughnut what the crew / promoter / the audience thought, I actually even ENJOYED myself at times. For those brief seventy minutes, I simply kept going. It would be way too cheesy to say that I was “in the zone” and “just thought about the music” – yes, I experienced the music intensely, but I also thought “here comes that really tricky part, what if I screw it up?”. Yes, I did mess up a couple of times. Yes, I made some small mistakes here and there. But it totally didn’t matter (of all the comments I received after the performance, nobody said “bar 75 really sucked”).

Moral of the story? Say hello to your anxiety and get to know it: it will come back to visit you again and again, and possibly yet again. That doesn’t make you a bad musician or a bad person, it doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t perform for others, it doesn’t mean that you can’t ever enjoy making music. Is there anything we can do to help? Yes. Yes, I do have some “yogic tricks” up my sleeve, but it is an ongoing journey: searching for balance, swinging out too far in one direction at times, then coming back to equilibrium. Breath retraining / awareness helps enormously, so does a regular self-help routine consisting of (for me) yin yoga, cold water swimming and meditation – for you, it might be something different. Without these support tools, I might have stopped playing a long time ago.

Did you enjoy this post? Please reach out and tell me what you think. I will be offering new online classes this spring in performance anxiety management and functional breathing for musicians. Email me for a super-secret bundle discount code.