The Joy Of Making Music - Performance Anxiety - Series #3

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY:

Now just those two words together are enough to make anyone nervous. But we need to take the fear out of performance anxiety as strange as that sounds.

The truth is as human beings we all experience a measure of anxiety and as performers we all experience some level of performance anxiety.  On a scale of 1-10 some of us are a 1 and some of us are a 10.  I’ve been a 1 and I’ve been a 10.  I’ve experienced the whole range of performance anxiety at one time or another during my career, and more than likely I will again!

Some of the most successful artists today have experienced some of the highest levels of performance anxiety and still do.

Just because you experience performance anxiety doesn’t mean you can’t have an enormously successful career.  You are not alone in this. We all experience it from time to time.  We can’t kill off our anxiety or wrestle it to the ground it just doesn’t work like that.  We want to learn to tune into our inner emotional world and begin to understand what’s driving our performance anxiety.  What story do we have running in that moment?  What movie are we playing in our minds eye?  When the spot light is on us and the camera rolls and we have to deliver a performance right there and then and we’re hit with the symptoms like, a shaky voice, racing heart, dizzy, a dry mouth.  Believe it or not we can  still operate in that moment.  We can learn to centre ourselves and channel that energy in a useful and positive way that works for us and not against us.  

It’s an enormously interesting topic and we’ll be talking a lot about establishing some tools to help us manage

those difficult experiences and reclaim our power!

RP