How to Conquer Stage Fright and Play with Confidence
1. Why We Fear Performing
The fear of performance is a fear that is shared by both learning and experienced musicians alike. The difference is that experienced musicians become accustomed to the feeling and have built enough evidence that this feeling isn’t going to affect their performance.
If you think about it, the act of performing is actually quite an unnatural thing to do. Throughout history being watched by an audience probably didn’t mean something good was going to happen. Our mammal brain sees others watching and judging us as a threat and therefore triggers our fight or flight response. This is why we need to somewhat rewire our brain so that it realises that performing isn’t actually a threatening situation but an opportunity!
But…what is the threat? Well, for most people the threat comes in the form of judgment, being ostracised from society and abandoned by the people around us for doing badly. - which (fortunately) doesn’t happen too frequently on the basis of a performance! The reality is…those that are watching a performance are usually more impressed that you are willing to put yourself out there and be vulnerable. This is very similar to how those with social anxiety look at the person in the room that is willing to talk to anyone! Their first thought is “I wish I could do that”.
It’s important to recognise that a fear of performing is a natural response to an unnatural circumstance, but with practice we can learn to not only control those feelings…but use them to help us perform better and come away with a feeling of euphoria rather than relief.
2. Overcoming Anxiety
Dealing with performance anxiety is not about eradicating anxiety altogether, that would likely actually be detrimental for your performance. It is much more about tempering your nerves to leave room for you to focus on playing. Most severe anxiety comes from a psychological phenomenon called “catastrophising” where you fixate on the worse case scenario. A great way of tempering your nerves is to activity do the exact opposite and picture a successful performance where the crowd goes wild and you had a great time.
Another great technique for tempering nerves is to spend some time taking slow breaths, there has been more and more research over the past few years on the effect of breathing on the fight or flight response…but I am a mere musician so I will let you deep dive into that if you wish. However, the premise is that breathing slowly and deeply activates your parasympathetic nervous system and tricks the body into believing it is safe and can therefore relax. So before performing, taking some slow, deep breaths can help you to calm down.
Other ways to temper nerves long before a performance include making sure you practice your weakest parts of the music regularly so that you have evidence that you are able to play everything you need to (even if not all together). You can also plan rehearsal performances for family members or friends to put your pieces under a little pressure to build evidence that you are capable of playing in-front of others. The more evidence you have that you are capable of performing, the easier a performance will be.
3. Using Anxiety
Having said this, as I mentioned earlier…no matter what, you will still feel some nerves if you care about your performance. But if controlled, these nerves can actually be a great benefit.
While practicing, your mind can often wander and you can end up thinking about that phone call that you had earlier where Shiela from telemarketing tried to sell you home insurance and wouldn’t let you off the phone. This momentary lack of focus can often lead to mistakes when practicing and many people worry that this will also happen in a performance. However, when performing, adrenaline allows us to hyper-focus and those kind of lapses in focus that you experience while practicing don’t happen.
This is why, for some, performing is such an enticing experience. It allows us to be present, hyper-focussed and unlock another level that we didn’t realise we had.
A thought I often like to use when preparing for a performance, is that there are many ways to play a piece of music correctly. When learning a piece of music, it can feel like you are trying to learn to play notes in a very specific order and in a very specific way. However, this is really not the case. Music is a vehicle for expressing meaning to other people. If you play a wrong note or you play “mezzoforte” (moderately loud) instead of “piano” (quiet), it really doesn’t matter. The meaning of the music remains largely the same. Our job as musicians is to convey something meaningful to an audience and if you can temper and harness your nerves, you may just be able to produce a performance that you never thought you were capable of.
Matthew Cawood
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