You walk out onto the stage. Your mouth goes dry, your heart starts beating hard and fast. Your knees shake. Your concentration fails and you become damp with sweat.
Does this sound familiar? Performance anxiety is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. Some say that nerves are essential to a good performance, but the physical effects of the nervousness can be detrimental to good playing. It turns something that should be an enjoyable shared experience for player and audience into an ordeal.
I don't have any qualifications in psychology, but I have experienced the symptoms above. And I have beaten it. I can now stand in front of several hundred people and put on a performance I'm proud of.
My 'road to Damascus' moment was realising that my solution didn't lie in building confidence, but reducing self-consciousness. The two are often confused but they are different things. self-consciousness means giving too much attention to what others are thinking of you, linked to the fear of their disapproval. This preoccupation is a distraction and causes the palpitations and other physical effects.
"Get over it and move on. It ain't all about you."
Simple affirmations like "What's the worst that can happen?" and "I really don't care what anyone thinks about me" will immediately change the way you carry yourself.
Of course you do have to care what people think. Someone who genuinely doesn't care is a psychopath, and I'm not recommending that. We wouldn't bother to perform at all if the shared experience meant nothing.
However, suffering from performance anxiety is a sign that we are over-concerned with what others think. Therefore, to reduce the anxiety, we have to let go of that preoccupation. It's liberating to pretend to yourself for a little while that you don't care.
There are many suggestions for techniques to help you develop confidence or overcome anxiety, physical and mental. Not all will work for you, but try as many as you can and see what does work.
The Alexander technique is a real life-changer. There are people who are trained in teaching it to you but much can be gained from books and the web.
Deep or regular breathing is a suggestion that appears again and again. Google '4-7-8' and 'vacuuming the lungs'.
Many of the techniques suggested in books and articles about performance anxiety work by distracting you. One of my favourites is from Howard Snell's book, 'The Trumpet, it's Practice and Performance':
Let your field of vision go peripheral. Become aware of everything in your field of vision rather than focusing on a central point.
At first, this seemed to have little effect, but the more I use it, the more effective it is.
A preparation routine will act as a distraction actvity as well as preparing you to play. Write out a full pre-warm-up preparation routine, and then write and memorise a mini version to use every time you raise your instrument to play. This will help to prevent the panic that may pop up just before you begin something important.
You already have a link in your mind between performance (or thinking about performance) with nervous feelings and those physical symptoms. These can diminish with repeated performances, but it's possible to reduce the association using visualisation and self-hypnosis techniques. For example, get yourself into a very relaxed state, and then look at a picture of yourself performing, or visualise this. If the nervous feelings immediately appear, shut out the performance image and return to the relaxed state.
Article copyright Shiela Dixon 2009