Your greatest strength? Liability? Or both?

Sometimes our greatest strengths can also be our most tender liabilities. In this video, I talk about how hiding underneath my desire for connection and relationship with people was also so much concern about what people think about me. This tender, vulnerable part of me spiraled out of control so that I couldn't function while practicing or performing, fearing that I would mess up, fearing that my colleagues would think badly of me, fearing I would need to find a new career. 

What is one of your greatest strengths? Is there a flip side to this strength? What is the root fear of the flip side? Understanding and healing the weakness will help you live in your strength in a balanced way.

In your emotional life, this means tending to the vulnerable parts of yourself, not pushing those vulnerabilities away, but hearing the concerns and pains and fears, making space. Once those fears have been heard and they have settled, then it's easier to reconnect to our intentions and dreams. 

In performing, this helps you find grounding, confidence, connection to your collaborators, and joy in the moment.

In daily life, this helps you stay focused on your goals and dreams.

Overcoming Performance Anxiety: improv classes

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to my husband.

After 2.75 hours of sweating, flip-flopping stomach, racing heart, sweating palms, shaking legs, I was ready to be done. But our instructor had just enthusiastically said, “we have time for one more exercise!!!” 

Like that was good news.

This was our first night of improv class at IO Chicago.

My husband had done a year of improv classes at Second City before we met and always said I would really dig it. After the appearance of crazy performance anxiety 6 months earlier, I knew I needed a safe space to work on my fear without worry about totally falling apart on stage and getting fired. Improv seemed like a great choice. Until we got there that night.

I finished out class that night, and returned for many more, making it through 10 months of weekly classes. That translated into 10 months of weekly terror, sweating, butterflies in my stomach, racing heart, etc.

That also translated into 10 months of weekly opportunity to practice new skills, to let fear out from under my armor, to experiment, and ultimately to learn that I could survive, that I could even thrive while in fear. That fear was not the end, it was just a feeling. 

One tidbit I learned from the Bulletproof Musician is that the physical activation of performance anxiety is actually the same as physical activation of excitement. It’s what we label it that determines if we feel positive or negative. Every single class I would tell myself over and over, “I am excited, I am excited.”

The big takeaways from improv class? I can function while in fear. And even have fun at times! Inviting fear into my body, letting it take up space, letting it do its thing and not repress it, then it stopped the internal fighting, and which resulted in taking the pressure off. That allowed other emotions to be part of the process too – excitement, joy, curiosity.

If you suffer from nerves, finding a safe, practice performance space for experimenting can do wonders in overcoming fear. Finding a friend or colleague to support you through these experiments makes it even better - you can discuss, dissect, analyze, feel, cry, share better with a comrade who gets it.

Here are some suggestions of places and situations you could use:

• Practice Performance sessions

• A small group of friends in your home, practice room, work space

• Church

• Toastmasters

• Acting class

• Music lessons

Give yourself permission to play around with the feelings, be curious about your body’s response to the situation, take the pressure off by having low expectations for yourself. You might crash and burn sometimes - I certainly did in my improv classes!

Finding the right place to practice while in fear also gives you the space to reconnect with the joy of performance, the love of your art that brought you to this career in the first place.

This is 3rd in a series about my experience in overcoming performance anxiety. If you wish to read about Part 1 (the start of my anxiety) and Part 2 (Beyond Practicing). Coming up next week, coaching with a specialist in Internal Family Systems.

Overcoming Performance Anxiety: 'Beyond Practicing' and the Centering Exercise

In my last newsletter I wrote about how it came to pass several years ago that I had a whole new bundle of performance anxiety. This week is Part 2 of my story of overcoming performance anxiety.

I am a regular reader and fan of Noa Kageyama’s blog at the Bulletproof Musician. As a specialist in performance anxiety, as someone who dealt with it himself, who went to Julliard and other top schools and then went on to become a psychologist, I thought his program might be a good place to start.

I signed up for his online class Beyond Practicing and dove into learning all about performance anxiety. He covers everything from what happens physically when we’re nervous to effective practice techniques to training our brains and bodies to perform optimally under pressure.

I don’t want to tell you all I learned in Beyond Practicing, because, first of all, that wouldn’t be fair to Dr. Kageyama. Second, that would be a really long post. So in short, what I want to offer is one gem that saved my performing career.

Centering

I don’t remember all the details of the first concert I played after practicing with Centering. What I do remember is that there were a handful of challenging songs that triggered all my cascading anxiety symptoms – elevated heart rate, drop in the pit of my stomach, mad crazy flip-flopping butterflies, über distracted brain that was more concerned about my stomach antics than the notes on the page, and worry about what everyone would think of me when I failed miserably.

The amazing thing about that first performance – I nailed all the music that I had targeted with Centering. I was elated, to say the least.

The Centering Exercise is designed to harness and redirect the excess energy generated by nerves (or build and amplify energy if you happen to be a person who gets really tired as a symptom of nerves). With steps to help me focus the energy and steps to help me engage the right brain and stay in the moment, I was back to functioning while performing.

How you can apply:
Read through Dr. Kageyama’s explanation of Centering and apply it to your practice and performance.

A few tips.

As Dr. Kageyama says, practicing Centering for 10-15 minutes each practice session makes this skill most useful and easily applied under pressure. Don’t try to cram learning it into one day, or only use it at the performance. Just as you need to train your body to learn the music, you need to train your brain to respond the way you want it to prior to performance.

Make it your own. The Centering exercise as presented by Dr Kagayama is the classic version that has worked in high pressure situations for over 40 years. But once you learn the concepts and the feeling, you can simplify and combine steps.

I found the step on releasing tension to be quite challenging, and focusing on gratitude did the job even better for me. I choose something to be intensely grateful for in the performance – collaborators, specific musical phrases, venue, audience. I let that feeling of gratitude grow and expand, and that melts my muscles much more effectively than commanding my body to relax.

I worked on learning to Center for quite a few weeks. One night, I had a vivid dream that I was playing basketball, professionally of course (for those of you who don’t know me personally – I am 5’ 2”, and can hardly dribble a ball). The clock was down to the final seconds, I had the ball, and it was my chance to win the game. I looked out to the crowd, and knew I had to decide where to put my mental energy. I could focus on the fans and the team around me and their hopes and dreams. Or I could take a risk, put my mental blinders on, shut all of that out, and completely direct all of my attention on my hands, on the ball, and on the basket.

I woke up without completing my shot. But I remembered that feeling of complete focus on my job, and shutting out all distractions. It's a feeling of dropping deep into my body and letting go of the voices in my head, the shoulds, the worries, the nerves. Now when I Center, I connect to that feeling, and I don’t need to walk myself through all the steps. I go for the feeling.

So find what works for you. And then practice in advance. As you use Centering in your music, you will find at first that other things will fall apart. The first few times through may actually be disastrous in other ways. That’s normal and to be expected.

Let me know if you give this a try. I’m happy to answer any questions or hear about your experiences!

Coming up next week, Part 3 of my story of overcoming performance anxiety, and my year of improv classes.

Overcoming Performance Anxiety: My Story

Panic.

Sweaty hands. Elevated heart rate. Shallow breaths.

Drop in the pit of my stomach, like tipping over the apex of a roller coaster.

Terror that I am incapable and everyone will soon witness it.

Head spinning about all the possible things that could and can and will go wrong.

And it will all end in public humiliation.

Several years ago I experienced several months of escalating and spiraling performance anxiety. In my previous years of training and performing as a pianist and collaborator I never really suffered from nerves, not like this. Of course, I got nervous, but the nerves never overwhelmed me. I always knew I would come out the other side. Oh, I had some bad performances and auditions, but it wasn’t like this new level of nerves.

What led to these escalating nerves was taking a class with my doctor on Mind-Body Syndrome. Basically, this syndrome is where people have real physical pain that is directly connected to emotions. I had shoulder pain for years and years, and it was only getting worse. Even though I had been in therapy on and off, and knew intuitively that my shoulder pain was somehow connected to emotions, I was unable to resolve it.

My doctor (John Stracks at Northwestern Center for Integrative Medicine) happens to be a specialist in this area and offers regular classes on the topic (let me know if you’d like his contact info, his class is marvelous, he is marvelous, and I found it life-changing). In his class, I quickly realized that I had a whole lotta emotions hiding underneath my ‘armor’ of tight and painful shoulders.

Once this became clear to me, I embarked upon a mission to heal my shoulder pain by feeling everything! Let it all out and I’ll overcome this shoulder pain and life will be great!

I was dismayed to find that the underlying anxiety was more than I could handle, and only seemed to increase exponentially as time passed.

I had two subbing performances during these months that involved some pretty technically challenging music. I became alarmed at how strong my nerves were in the first sub situation. The second nearly did me in and I became afraid that performance anxiety was my new normal. I went home after this second episode, and told my husband that I was going to quit being a musician. I started contemplating what else I could do in life, but getting paid to eat didn’t seem very realistic.

I did not enjoy performing with these new feelings.

Duh. Performance anxiety is the worst. Locked inside of you are all your good feelings for the music, the desire to be in the moment, to move people, to communicate, to be in flow. The good feelings are hidden behind an impenetrable fortress of anxiety. 

I felt stuck – I could go back to my old ways of shutting down emotion, and keep performing, and sorta feel in control, but have major shoulder pain. Or, I could keep digging and unearthing and discover where it would lead me, even though it might ruin performing for me forever.

When I would tell people about this new anxiety I received interesting responses. Some people would listen, with empathy and support, but not really have any answers or suggestions. Or maybe they had the right idea – don’t fight it, the more you resist the stronger it gets. Others would give unhelpful advice – just practice more. Or say things like, “You’ll be fine. You always play well.”

Really, no comments or advice helped the stark terror I would feel when contemplating being onstage. Because people’s comments are just words. And words are related to thinking and performance anxiety is an overwhelming feeling. Thoughts and logic simply cannot compete with the body’s instinct for safety. Or how completely out of control I felt when in performance. Because of this I drastically limited my playing for several months while trying to figure out a course of action.

The subsequent posts in this series are about the three major resources I used to heal my performance anxiety and the takeaway from each one that you can apply to your own performing lives.

1. Beyond Practicing, an online class targeting performance anxiety (from the Bulletproof Musician)
2. Improv classes at IO Chicago
3. Therapy, with Melissa Sandfort, a life coach who specializes in Internal Family Systems.

Stay tuned until next week, for the first tool, from Beyond Practicing.

Planning ahead for your nerves

A teacher in grad school used to say to us during studio classes “you need to work through your performance emotions in advance of the performance.”

I always wondered, how the heck does one do that? How do you process through and deal with nerves in advance of feeling nervous? It just didn’t make sense to me at the time.

My teachers wasn’t able to explain how to do this either, but now I see the wisdom of her words and here's how I interpret her advice.

Know your triggers
What are the thoughts, concerns, feelings that trigger your nerves? What is it that you fear will happen during the performance?

For me, letting my mind go down the path of “So-and-so-that-I-really-admire will be there, watching and judging” is dangerous. Any variation on this theme is no good – I hope to impress someone; I hope they rehire me; I hope my collaborators like me.

Anything that distracts from the job and the task at hand, including concerns about clothing, an argument that happened that morning, your grocery list. At best it leads to a distracted performance. At worst, it can create space for the nerves to take over.

During your practice sessions, train your brain to stay focused on the music, the notes, the sounds. When distracting thoughts enter, as they are bound to do, identify them, and regroup back to the music.

Practice under pressure
Find a safe place to test the waters. Find out where your weak spots are, technically and mentally. Where do you get distracted? Where in the music do nerves surge? Why?

What happens in your body when under pressure? I get cold, sweaty hands and when I'm really nervous, my legs shake. Experiencing this in advance helps me know that I am capable of performing and ignoring or flowing with the nerves. 

Visualize your day
Visualize the time leading up to the performance. What do you feel that morning? During the day? How will you keep yourself grounded, excited, confident?

How do you feel the hour before your performance? Do you have any rituals that help you prepare?
How do you feel just before walking onstage? Just before you play/sing your first note? What are your priorities, goals, and intentions?

Visualize yourself performing at your best, being grounded, centered, calm, confident. What does that feel like in your body? 

Healthy compartmentalization
Talk to your fears and nerves as if they are a person. What are their concerns? What are they trying to help you with? Spend time getting to know them and be with them in their concerns. Don't argue with the fears, just listen. Being heard and validated, just like for us real humans, goes a long way to calming fears.

Let your fears know, when it’s go time, it is not their job to help you perform. Other more functional and artistic parts of you need to step forward and take the reins.

Make a deal with your fears – during the performance they need to take a break. Then afterwards, at a specified time, you will check in with them. Set a timer for 15 minutes and journal, or think and feel, or talk out loud, to your fears.

I love this tool and use it all the time.

The key here is that you must follow through on this commitment. If you back out on your end of the deal, to be present with your fears after the performance, this tool will not continue to work.

For more reading on this last tool, check out this post from the Bulletproof Musician.

Don't try to tackle all of these ideas at once. Pick one category for your next performance and spend some time asking yourself the questions above. 

How do you plan ahead for your nerves? I'd love to hear what works for you!