6 Music Performance Anxiety Tips (Simple & Effective)
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- Use these simple music performance anxiety tips to get more enjoyment from your playing. Here are 6 practical actions that will boost your confidence and reduce any nerves you might feel.
00:00 Intro
00:34 Breathe
01:48 Reframe nerves
03:11 Audience perspective
04:06 People aren't listening that closely
05:20 They're on your side
05:54 Replace unhelpful thoughts
06:57 Quick summary
07:26 3 bonus actions
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-- 6 music performance anxiety tips (simple & effective) --
Performance anxiety is a pretty horrible experience that affects a surprisingly large number of musicians. Quite apart from any effects it has on how well you play, it can suck the pleasure out of an activity that should be a source of intense joy.
If you want to beat anxiety completely and feel fearless with music then that's definitely possible, but it's usually not that quick a process. However, there ARE lots of really helpful things that you can do straight away.
This video gives you 6 simple tips that you can use in the moment to help you reduce any nerves you feel.
1. Breathe
2. Reframe nerves as excitement
3. Think about what the audience wants
4. People don't pay as much attention to you as you think
5. Remember the audience is on your side
6. Replace unhelpful thoughts
(Plus there are 3 bonus actions at the end of the video that you can do outside of performance)
If you like this video, please LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, & SHARE!
Great advice. It's about ignoring your EGO. An old Variety performer helped me. He said "In the wings before I go on I say to myself ..it's not about ME, it's about the AUDIENCE...may THEY have a good time..."
It works (& anyway you can only do your best). Thanks.
Love that! Great to see examples of experienced musicians/performers passing wisdom on. I've certainly benefited from that a lot.
Thanks Mark,
I found your tips really helpful. As a bit of a beginner I practised a song religously for six weeks and had it down, but absolutely bombed in trying to perform it for my wife in front of my birthday party audience.
I now have the beginning of a mental toolbox to help me do better next time.
I might like to add the perspective that the audience wants a story, and it's the performer's job to tell it. Mistakes are trivial, but the story is crucial. So, my tip is to know what story you're telling, and tell it - ie focus on the story, not yourself.
Thanks again for a great video - nice meeting you!
Matt
I'd like
Really good tips. I just had my first violin recital. I was so nervous, my bow was shaky, I messed up a section and started the measure over, but overall I was able to recover and hold it together, so I’m proud of myself. I will put these tips to good use! Hope it helps for future performances.
read Kato Havas ' Stage Fright , its causes and cures, with reference to violin ' or watch her short films on UA-cam.
This really helped me. I tend to get extremely nervous whenever I play my viola in front of people, and I can never get myself out of that fight or flight mood. I’ll try using these tips the next time I have to perform. Thank you so much!!
You're welcome, Kierra! Hope it goes well.
Perfectly explained, Mark. Applies well to music, sports, and public speaking, to name just a few. I especially appreciate the reframing of anxiety/stress into excitement. Excellent advice! Thanks.
You're welcome, Rich. So glad it was helpful! And, yes, these ideas apply across the board.
Be one with fear and you master it. I am not afraid. I am fear. Become it. Overcome it. Because only when you become, what you want to overcome, you overcome, what you want to become. "Anyway" is the most powerful word, that has guided and helped me profoundly. I become one with fear, through that word. May it help you reading this.
Sounds like you're saying to accept the fact that you feel fear when it comes. You can even know beforehand that you will experience it. Then don't fight it, accept it,--even embrace it--but with a 'so what" attitude. If you don't let it define you, you don't let it stop you. You just go out and perform anyway. Then it might even go away on its own as you change your focus to the audience and the music you want to share. Is this similar to what you are saying?
I agree. You fight the fear and you become it. Accept it, invite it in, let it share its wisdom and you are free.
Thanks Mark, for these tips on relation while performing. Very well explained.
My pleasure!
Thank you so much, your tips really helped me with our performance this evening, it was great!
Thank you Mark. These are so helpful. Brilliant points....really well explained, clear and concise. Great tips
Great tips! I watched many of your videos.. and I am now also sharing them with my students! Thank you so much for sharing those and other great practical points!!
Glad you liked this, Samuel. And thanks for sharing! - I really appreciate it!
Great content, very much needed! Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it, Yona!
Thank you for the insights into successful performances!
You're welcome, Lori. Glad you liked them.
Thanks so much for the tips. I just teared up listening to your tips. I've been suffering from performance anxiety when I film myself playing the piano in front of the camera for a very long time and it is very debilitating. I tend to hyperventilate and my heart will tend to experience bad palpitation during filming, and it affects my health. Your video has helped me to realize that it is perfectly normal to have mistakes during a filming session and I should not get too worked up about every single mistake I make while performing in front of the camera. Thanks a lot for this video. It really helps and I feel some of the burdens that I've been experiencing have been lifted up. I hope I will be able to apply all the tips that you have given. It is really a blessing to have discovered this video. ~ Leeron Tai, Pianist of Leeron Tai Music
So glad to hear this helped you, Leeron. And massive kudos to you for continuing with your music despite all the unpleasant effects that performance anxiety has had on you. I'm sure you'll do a good job of applying the tips. Just be aware that it will probably take a bit of practice - you won't magically get everything working perfectly first time. It's well worth it, though!
Thanks for these helpfull tips:
Breathing is important to decrease the cardiac high Rhythm due to the Stress. Breathing during playing at the very Right time is allowing the Right pulsation and musicality.
Spotlight from the assistance. Once for fun i did this experience to assess the public and the Jury in conservatory: at each feet i wore a sock of different colors. And at the end i asked IF somebody notice it: Nobody did!
Going to Audition with excellent préparation helps to ré inforce the Self confidence. Playing despite unsuffisant Level and preparation exposes to stress and if we fail we decrease self confidence.
I love that story about the different coloured socks! Thanks for sharing, Denis.
Another VIDEO GEM !
So glad you liked it, Rafael!
Thank you. Really helpful thoughts. 😊
You are so welcome! Glad you found them useful.
Thank you for your kind words it will be very useful to me to be able to make it a better, i do struggle with necessities when playing guiter in public 🎶🎶🎶🎶🙏🙏🎶👍
You are so welcome! And stick with it - it's definitely possible to improve.
Great advice thank you. I play in a band and after years of doing it suddenly started suffering from terrible anxiety issues to the point that I would dry wrech. I’d be ok once I got going but every gig would start the same cycle. Now after lockdown I have gig coming up and have found myself getting anxious about its arrival. I’m sure your advice will help - thanks
So glad you found this helpful, Phil. The other big thing is to remind yourself that you've been nervous in the past but that everything went ok. Not just before the gig (though that's helpful too). Just remember that briefly several times a day in the weeks leading up to the gig - the slow drip of these ideas is what gets them deep into your brain.
Gracias Morley, soy profesora en la escuela de música de Rosario , Argentina, me re sirvió este video para trabajar con mis alumnos/as, agradezco los subtítulos, Saludos!!
You're welcome, Virginia. So glad it was helpful for your students. (I think the subtitles are done automatically by UA-cam. They're not something I've added myself...)
U ROCK!
Thanks, Hector! So glad it was helpful.
Great !
Glad you enjoyed it, Martin.
Hi Mark - really loving the way you're helping to get musicians exploring their own mindset. It's such a valuable journey to go on and I acknowledge and salute you for popularising this topic on youtube. It warms my heart whenever I see musicians studying this.
You mentioned there being a lot of research out there about the spotlight effect - but are you aware of any research specifically relating it to music performance? I'm sure there's some truth in what you're suggesting there, but I'm not aware of music-specific research that backs it up. My sense would be that in the case of the public attending a performance they have paid for, they are likely to notice and scrutinise the performer more than in average social settings that the spotlight research often focuses on.
Either way - I think what you're essentially pointing to here - that you create anxiety because you put too much attention on yourself - is bang on. Perhaps surprisingly, the old chestnut suggesting replacing or reframing thoughts is actually a little trickier to back up in the research on music performance anxiety (or anxiety more generally) though. As far as I can tell (both from the research and anecdotally with clients), what seems to be optimal is when they completely let go of trying to think anything at all. This no-thinking is the very essence of 'the zone', or Maslow's 'peak experience' etc.
When it comes to thinking in performance less is definitely more!
Thanks for the kind words, Nick!
I'd have to look back at the different studies I've found on the spotlight effect. But, off the top of my head, I don't think any of them involved musicians. Certainly some general ones, and I think at least one looking at public speaking as well. I think that the takeaway from that was that people certainly will scrutinise the performer more than average when you're in a formal performance setting - but that this is still at a much lower level than people expect.
My experience from my work with students is that both letting go of thinking anything and replacing thoughts are helpful. It might well be that no-thinking is the ideal way to do things, but a lot of people find this very difficult to do in practice. In that case, having an alternative strategy of thought replacement can be much more effective than trying to let go of thoughts and failing. It can also be used as a stepping stone to the no-thinking zone. I quite like Michael Gervais' way of putting it. He talks about 3 mindsets: "negative mind", "positive mind", and "no mind". His take is that, although we're aiming for "no mind", it's impossible to get there directly from "negative mind". So if we find ourselves in a negative state we might have to deliberately use some tools to get us to a positive state first, and THEN we have a chance to access "no mind".
@@PlayInTheZone now THAT really helps clients. No mind. Taking them BEYOND their psychology altogether. That's definitely where our field is heading and Gervais is pretty plugged in. Abraham Maslow knew the same thing back in the 1960s.
But it's been known of course by humanity for thousands of years prior to him - you find it in the Tao Te Ching, The Gita, Advaita Vendanta, Zen and so many of the spiritual texts etc.
However, to your point about thought replacement, when you go into the cognitive therapy research in depth you find plenty of evidence that suggests that it's not actually changing or reframing our thoughts that is the causative factor in transformation. It's what Maslow referred to as 'self transcendence' - the topic of his hierarchy (at least in the final iteration, published posthumously).
To read more about this I'd start here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17157970/
Wonderful help! I find that prayer helps me before I sing, but for some reason, playing my guitar in front of others paralyzes me.
Glad it was useful. These feelings can definitely appear in very different ways in what seem like only slightly different situations...
This was really helpfull . I signed up ..and did not 1 minute regret . Mark Morley Fletcher is really highly interested to in advance , described in all the details and & necessary actions !
Thanks, Matthias. I really appreciate your comment and feedback.
Thank you for your kind reply Mark i have found it is better to play a little slower and try to relax and Breathe, and not worry to much,, I do play Bach prelude in D minor at around 68 Bpm is that OK, for example take care and thank you for your music kind wishes from bernie 🎶🎶🎶🎶🙏🎶🎶🎶🙏🌹🎶🎶🎶
I definitely find that it's important to take things at a pace where you can relax as you play. Not just get through it with lots of tension.
Thank you Mark for this excellent video with very helpful hints how to deal with any tension appearing before or during a performance.
So glad it was helpful!
I can't play in front of people. My hands sweat, shake and become very tense.
I have low self esteem and am often able to play a piece through flawlessly but when it comes to performing to am audience I go from 10 to 2. And my hands start shaking. Not good for a guitar player. And the quality just drops. Anything specific I could do for dealing with this?
I'd suggest finding ways to practice with more of that "pressure" feeling. You'll discover that shaking hands doesn't have to affect your playing as much as it seems it should. And that in turn will tend to help you relax more and get les shaky.
How do u charge and how much and how long do u coach ? Thank you!
Hi Hector. I mostly help people through my courses rather than via coaching. You can see all the courses I offer here: playinthezone.com/courses/ (prices for each course are on the course's dedicated webpage)
If you're looking to beat performance anxiety, though, the most relevant course would be Unlock Your Performance: playinthezone.com/unlock-your-performance/ If you join that then I give feedback and support through the private course forum (so not exactly the same as a 1-1 coaching call, but still personalised advice)
I do currently offer the option of 1-1 coaching sessions (you'll find this at the bottom of the "courses" page above). However, this is mostly for people who have taken a course and want to go deeper into that. It's very rare that it's someone's first point of contact with me.
@@PlayInTheZone Ah ok. I read u give private coaching for 150 but didnt say how long ect.... Well Thank U for ur contact. I appreciate it.
i had to wach this im bord
Funny because he has never played an instrument in his life.
So this isn't me playing then? ua-cam.com/video/dGwJKK9SpAI/v-deo.html
Funny - I could have sworn it was... You'd think I'd remember something like that 😉