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.

Come to your senses

Do you remember learning about the five senses in grade school? I do, because my experience was highly disappointing. It was first grade, and we arrived at our desks to find several sensory items – a chocolate chip, a cotton ball, and other things I can’t remember. I remember the chocolate chip very specifically because, when our teacher instructed us to eat it, I was so sad to discover that it was completely bitter. I had never had unsweetened chocolate before, and it definitely left me wanting.
 

In our busyness, our five senses often get left behind. This is not an email to reprimand you, and order you to take time to smell the flowers. What I want to remind you of is the gift these senses can give us if we are experiencing overwhelm, or stress, or rushing, or anything that takes you out of your body, out of the moment.

I was really wanting to write a blog post this week, and struggled with several half-baked ideas. I think I’ve written three blog posts, but nothing felt finished or quite right for this moment. Then, as Loki was fighting sleep tonight, I placed on hand on my belly, to remind me to soften into the moment, to relax my own body in order to help my baby. I’ve no idea if it helped Loki fall asleep or not, but it certainly helped slow my racing mind, and to enjoy the moment, even though bedtime wasn’t going as I had hoped.

I’ve been noticing in my practicing how stopping to take several breaths helps calm my mind and slow me down. Along with the delight of having a nearly-one-year-old, I also have much more limited time. So when I sit down at the piano, I often have the sense of urgency, the strong awareness of how much I hope to accomplish before Loki demands my attention again.

All of this is to say, when you are stressed or overwhelmed or rushing or busy, take a moment to connect with one of your senses and see how that might make an impact on your activity.

Connecting to your senses calms your nervous system, helping you deal with stress. And it plays a role in activating the right hemisphere of your brain. We want this, especially when performing, as the right hemisphere is more aligned with being in the moment. Being in the moment is more likely to bring about Flow, the optimal state of performing, where all of our thoughts and energies are dedicated to the task at hand. No room for past and future thoughts, self-criticism, or distraction.

Here are some suggestions for a quick sensory connection:

• Three breaths noticing the movement of your body as your inhale and exhale.
• Three breaths noticing the sound of your inhale and exhale.
• Close your eyes and notice the sounds around you, let your ears take you to the farthest sound, and then to the closest sound.
• Close your eyes and notice what scent is in the air.
• Give yourself a hug and feel the texture of your shirt. Really, there is lots of research about how hugging yourself is very soothing to the nervous system.
• Feel your feet on the ground, the chair under your bottom, the clothes on your body, the glasses on your face. Notice the feel of your instrument in your hands.
• What do you see around you? Ask yourself, “Am I safe here?”. This may feel silly, but it calms our lizard brain which is always on the lookout for any potential threat.

Pick one of these sensory suggestions, or listen to this 2.5 minute long guided exploration to come to your senses.

I'm trying something new - a video. And it scares me!

Seeking out the right work can provoke fear. You can use this feeling to help you discern if the project is a good fit for you. Is it scary-good because it's something that is near and dear to your heart? Or is it scary-bad, suggesting that it's not the right work for you? I'm taking my own advice and trying out a video newsletter. It's less than 3 minutes long - take a listen and let me know what you think! 

Curiosity and The Shoulds

I live with a lot of shoulds. Maybe you do too. I should practice more. I should have a better website. I should make more money. I should stay in touch with all the people I know, all the time. I should eat healthy food every day, all day. I should exercise more.

All of these have good intentions at the root of them. Eating healthy and exercising make me feel good in my body. Practicing more leads to more satisfying performances. Being connected to people is one of my core values.

But a lot of times the should aspect changes the goodness of the intention and burdens it, and can even change the goodness of the result.

What happens if you connect with what inspires you without the should?

What would it be like to get curious about practicing? Do you want to practice today? How would it feel to sit down for 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, to play with enjoyment and passion?

What happens if you reach out to one friend or colleague, not with the burden of obligation? What if connecting could happen in a curious way?

What if you could choose food with compassion? Even choosing pizza and ice cream with compassion!

Of course, there are many things we are obligated to do in life (did you file your taxes on time?).

However, a lot of time we have a choice in how we approach many of the activities and work tasks.

Choosing a framework of curiosity instead of ‘the shoulds’, compassion instead of berating ourselves, connecting with delight instead of pressure. These will increase the joy in your work and life.

And these mental frameworks also help us live and work in a sustainable fashion, preventing burn-out in a field where rejection, low wages, and anxiety can reign supreme.

So, I’m curious – can you shift your mental framework for any one task today? Can you add in more compassion for yourself over something that is challenging you? What are you curious about today?