The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 155 Why You're Nervous & What You Can Do About It

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 155. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, optimal performance, and building a purposeful life and fulfilling career. I'm your host, violinist and certified performance and life coach for musicians, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope this episode finds you doing splendidly well. Today, I'm wrapping up this three-episode series on the self-coaching model with some strategies on how you can use it to help you with performance anxiety. A quick reminder that in episode 153, I presented you

Starting point is 00:00:51 this extraordinary framework, which was developed by my coach and teacher at the Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo. The self-coaching model is a tool that we use to examine and understand how our mind operates. In episode 154, I showed you how the self-coaching model, or the model as we simply call it, can be used to create different results in our life once we've gotten clarity on what is first. And today, as I said, let's look at what it can do for us in the context of performance, how we can use it to understand why we feel nervous and how to turn things around. Of course, at the root of what we call performance anxiety, there are many things and I want to cover these things as well. I'll talk about what we need to prepare fully for a performance. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:01:44 cover what can create performance anxiety for you. And I'll offer some strategies to neutralize this anxiety. Lots of good stuff ahead, I think. So let's get started right away. Let's begin with what you need to prepare for a performance. And if you've watched my free workshop, The Confident Musician, you know what I'm about to say. If you have not watched it, go to mindoverfinger.com slash resources right away and download it. It's free and it's full of great information for you. So in a nutshell, what you need are three things, and these are the three core pillars of the Mind Over Finger Peak Performance System. You need thorough preparation, proper conditioning, and mind management.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Let's talk about preparation. Preparation is everything you do when you practice to learn a piece, from reading it to the first time to being able to technically and artistically play it. Learning the notes, picking your fingerings, building it to tempo, using all sorts of different drills, studying the score, listening to a bunch of recordings, making artistic decisions, all of this. That's the bedrock foundation. You cannot bypass this pillar. If you don't learn the piece well, it's going to show in the performance for sure. So to make it clear, preparation is an essential pillar. The issue is that most people stop there. They practice and they practice. And as the

Starting point is 00:03:25 performance approaches and they get more nervous, they practice some more and they just keep on practicing, always in problem-solving mode, very rarely in performance state. But if you never leave the practice mode, it's not going to be easy for you to enter the performance state on purpose for the performance. You need the other two pillars to perform at your best. The second pillar is conditioning. What that means in my world is anything you do to replicate the performance situations in the practice room and condition yourself for those situations. What I'm talking about here is to seek opportunities to channel your performance state over and over before the actual performance. This is where you train your body and your mind to perform. We do this with

Starting point is 00:04:20 visualization, mock performances, lessons, coachings, adversity training, anything where you make yourself experience the conditions you're going to face on stage on purpose, so that you get familiar and comfortable with those conditions. The thing about the second pillar is that some people do venture in that area. But I'm telling you, most people don't do it nearly enough. It's sort of this wishful thinking that you hope you're going to feel on stage the same way you feel in the practice room. But it's the opposite. You need to make yourself feel the same way you're going to feel on stage, in the practice room, on purpose, over and over again. The analogy I like for this is if you're going to race in high altitude, you need to spend some amount of time training in high

Starting point is 00:05:15 altitude. Same with swimming in open water. If you signed up to cross the English Channel, you cannot train in a pool alone. You got to get into open water. That's what the second pillar is for. So if you have a thorough preparation and proper conditioning, you're already in so much better shape for a confident performance. And a lot of people do make it to the second pillar, actually more and more all the time, thanks to the work of many wonderful thought leaders in our community. But not many make it to the third pillar. And if you add this third pillar of mind management, of mindsets, you're golden. So mind management is where, the term explains it, you manage your mind. For me, that involves any activity where I spend some time nurturing my

Starting point is 00:06:09 thoughts, my emotions, and my mental health. I work with coaches, I meditate, I do yoga, and I monitor my mind through self-coaching using the model I've been introducing you to in these three episodes. Now, one thing I want you to notice is how powerful this third pillar is going to be in influencing the other two. Think about how different both your practice and the things you do to condition will be when you manage your mind, when you understand it, when you guide it with patience, curiosity, love, and self-compassion. It's easy to see the difference. Think about the kind of practice you have when you're anxious, angry, and overwhelmed. If this is how you feel when you practice and condition, this is what you're practicing to feel like in

Starting point is 00:07:06 the performance. When I take time to manage my mind, my thoughts, and my emotions, everything else is positively impacted. What you nurture in the practice room is what you bring with you on stage. So can you see how ongoing mind management in the practice room and in any conditioning activity is critical. If you practice with fear and tension, fear and tension will be with you on stage. Preventing this is exactly what I want to help you with today with this episode. So let's talk about why we feel nervous and what we can do about it. Based on what I just shared with you, being shaky in any of these three pillars will definitely contribute to build anxiousness and nervousness for you. So if your preparation is lacking, you might definitely be

Starting point is 00:08:04 creating circumstances that will allow for stress to rise. If you don't condition yourself for the things you want in performance, you're conditioning yourself for the things you don't want. You're anchoring in tension and fear. And if you neglect to manage your mind throughout the process, you're missing out on opportunities for your work to be so much more efficient and for your conditioning to work powerfully. Another reason why we have an excess of anxiety related to performing is that we forget an important thing. We are human. And being human means that we might feel activated when it's time to perform for other people. And that is a totally normal thing. Your thoughts on stress itself are a big contributor in that excess of anxiety you

Starting point is 00:09:04 might feel. The way you feel on performance day is actually quite normal. Elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, cold hands, spiraling thoughts. This is actually an absolutely normal way human beings react to a powerful stimulus. This is a state that I call activation. And this is a desirable state to be in prior to a performance. Hard to believe I know, but it's true. You're about to go play for people. There are many things you will be unable to control, namely what they think about it. There's uncertainty. You don't know yet how it's going to go. How exciting, How thrilling. Your body goes into high alert. As I just said, that's a great thing. It's a great place to be in for a performance. Your senses are going to be sharp. Your nervous system is ready

Starting point is 00:10:00 to receive all the information around you. Your pupils dilate so you can see better. Your heart is pumping all this blood because your brain wants more oxygen so it makes you breathe faster. There's a lot of adrenaline and cortisol pumping through your veins. So when you go on stage, that state of activation will give you energy. This is what happens. This is how a human responds to a stimulus of that nature. You're activated. But because we don't feel like this all the time, we think something went wrong.

Starting point is 00:10:38 By the way, this is why we condition and do adversity training in our second pillar to get familiar and comfortable with those physical sensations. When you interpret this as anxiety and you attach to it a negative meaning, your response to the state of activation becomes disproportionate. If you've listened to episode 153 and 54, you now know that your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings fuel your actions, and your actions create your results. So if your thoughts about this absolutely normal way your body reacts to the stimulus of having to play in public are something's gone wrong, I shouldn't feel this way, you're now adding worry into the mix. and it's easy to see the things you do when you worry. You overthink, you ruminate on even more negative thoughts, you tense up your body, you cite yourself out, and you build more and more

Starting point is 00:11:42 anxiety as a result. So the one thing that you want to do is to reframe the way you feel prior to a performance from translating those normal physical symptoms of arousal from anxiousness to activation. Those physiological signs, your racing heart, your sweaty palms, those butterflies in your stomach, reframe those as activation or excitement or anticipation, whatever works for you. In this way, you stay in that hyper arousal zone, but you're not trying to fight your automatic physiological processes. Instead, you do this mental reframe from negative to positive. You free up mental space for you to pick the thought you want to spend time thinking instead of worrying about anxiety itself. So great preparation, conditioning, mind management,

Starting point is 00:12:44 and by reframing what you perceive as anxiety, as activation or excitement instead, you can create a context that will help you perform at your best. And as I mentioned above, mind management throughout is extremely powerful. So I want to go through some examples of how you can use the self-coaching model throughout the entire preparation process. And you know, I created a handout for you. So go to mindoverfinger.com slash resources to download it. Also, make sure to catch up episode 153 and 154 to understand better how the model works.

Starting point is 00:13:28 A great way to do this is to monitor how you feel regularly. While you practice, have a keen awareness of how you're feeling. Catch those emotions, frustration, despair, overwhelm, investigate them, put them in the model, find the thoughts that are making you feel this way and examine them. Notice what you do when you feel this way and the results that's creating for you. Those negative thoughts, they feel true to us. They feel like facts. but when we look we can always find a thought that could be equally true but would be so much

Starting point is 00:14:11 more helpful and supportive. I'll give you an example from my life that happened just this week actually. I was in the middle of a practice session working on something very difficult and I felt so angry. I was just having the worst of times and I caught myself in that moment. I realized the state I was in and that it was not helpful and that I had the ability to change that. I have the tools to change it. So I did a quick model in my head this time, but you know, I encourage you to do it on paper. I realized that I was angry because I was thinking that I was never going to get it. It's too fast. You're never going to get it. In my head, it sounded as though I was stating a fact, because I thought and believed this. You're never going to get it. So I was angry.

Starting point is 00:15:04 From feeling angry, I was very tense. I wasn't using the fundamentals of good playing. I had really bad posture. I was really inefficient in my problem solving. Because I was so blinded by my anger, the result that I was creating for myself is that there wasn't any tangible progress happening any fast, which was proving my thought, you're never going to get it. Our brain is smart, my friends. It never wants to be wrong. If we tell it, you're never going to get it. It's going to create it to prove you right. Your wish is my command, says the brain. And sure, it's great to be right, but I'd rather be happy. And I'd rather experience success and growth than being right. Or rather, I prefer to find the thoughts that are going to help me be

Starting point is 00:15:58 happier and experience success and growth and focus on those. So in this case, that statement would never hold in court. If I told the judge, I'm never going to get it. They would ask for proof for tangible evidence. And of course, I would never be able to provide it because it is not a fact. now remember I told you that when you decide to choose a new thought it also needs to resonate as true otherwise it's not going to work for you in this case I can't go from thinking I'm never going to get it to I'm going to get it today but it could be totally possible for me to eventually get it at some point so a valid thought would be I will get it at some point but it's kind of annoying not to know when I'm going to get it. So the thought that I actually went with was,

Starting point is 00:16:56 it gets better every minute. And that really did it for me. Because I believed that it was possible that it could get better every minute, I felt calm. And from that place, from feeling calm, I had enough clarity to notice my posture, all of the things that I was doing that were holding me back in my progress. I was better able to problem solve. It gave me more patience. And you see where this is going. The result it absolutely created for me was that it did get better each minute. Now, which practice session would you rather experience? The one where you stay stuck in anger, or the one where you're able to get some leverage over those unintentional thoughts and feelings, and can gear yourself back to a place where you're operating at your best?

Starting point is 00:17:50 I'm telling you, this is accessible to you today. Also, use self-coaching throughout the conditioning process. Playing mock performances, recording yourself doing adversity training, those things don't feel good most of the time. That's why most people don't do it nearly enough. Coach yourself throughout the conditioning process. what thoughts would make you more likely to do it and make your motivation and your stamina sustainable throughout here's a few good ones for you this is good for me this makes me strong

Starting point is 00:18:27 it's normal for it to feel this way the more i allow myself to experience this the more comfortable i will be with it i can learn to play my best with a beating heart or cold hands or sweaty palms whatever physiological response you get. And at different stages of the preparation process your thoughts are going to start to look different but it's the same process. You remember my example from episode 154 where I was able to self-coach myself right before a performance. So you see how that works. Monitor your thoughts as the performance approaches. Which thoughts are you nurturing. Which ones are you letting roam free in your brain? Catch those. Observe them. If you're thinking things like, I'll never be ready. It's not good enough. I suck. What feelings

Starting point is 00:19:22 do you think will come from this? What actions will you take from these feelings? And what results are you going to get? Take some time to reflect on the thoughts that resonate as true for you, but would actually support you. Generate feelings that motivate and fuel you to take the actions that will create the results you want. Brainstorm on what those thoughts could be. And here are a few examples to get you started. Every day it's getting better. My consistency will help me get there. I'm able to problem solve. I can get help. I can do this. use the self-coaching model to understand your mind throughout the entire process and you will start to see the results you seek some of you might know this quote by aaron hansen it's so

Starting point is 00:20:18 beautiful there is freedom waiting for you on the breezes of the sky and you ask what if i fall oh but my darling what if you fly it's a little bit like this for performing as well because let's face it, no matter how prepared we are, how much we've conditioned, and with all the mind management in the world, there are still unknown factors. We are human. Anything could happen, good or bad. When you focus on the bad, you in fact increase your chances of those things happening. When you let go of these and focus on the positive things. When you intentionally choose, practice, and nurture thoughts that will support you. And again, I'm not talking about positive thinking or wishful thinking. I'm talking about thoughts that feel true to you. So when you focus

Starting point is 00:21:16 on those, you calm down your nervous system. You reduce mental and physical tension. This is when you move to the right brain. You release the unnecessary fear, and you can let your training and your preparation do the work for you. This is when you access flow. And before I finish, I want to share some quick thoughts on preparation. If you're like me, and like most people I meet, it's never going to be enough. You're never going to feel fully prepared. It's that ever-receding finish line. We all feel it. You, me, everyone else. Everybody wants another month, another week, another day to prepare. That's also normal. There just comes a point where you decide what is good enough for now and you go with that. At the beginning of the process, you draft a plan,

Starting point is 00:22:14 you stick to it the best you can, you try to get as good as you can, and then you decide that this is where you are now, and it's enough. This is a long journey. Each performance is only one wrong on the ladder. So what you must do is prepare the best you can and meet yourself where you are backstage. Allow yourself to be where you are. Embrace yourself. Feel love for yourself. Feel pride in all the work you did, all the sacrifices you've made, the determination you've showed. Acknowledge all of this. Build that sense of accomplishment in yourself. Experience it.

Starting point is 00:23:03 Let it fill you. Let it fuel you. When you do that, you can play as your best current self. This is going to give you wings to fly on stage. Don't forget this. It's really important. Okay, this is what I have for you today. So try this this week.

Starting point is 00:23:28 Think about the next performance you have. Take some time to establish what your preparation is going to look like and make a plan. Brainstorm on what you could do to condition yourself for this performance. Set up mock performances. do adversity training? Think of all the things you could do to bring this stage inside your practice room time and time again throughout the preparation process. Put time aside to manage your mind. Pay attention to how you're feeling and investigate those thoughts that are not serving you. And finally, think of the many ways you can reframe what you've previously interpreted as

Starting point is 00:24:09 stress or nervousness? What could it be for you? Anticipation? Excitement? Activation? For me, it's actually all of those things. And here's some questions that can help you intentionally choosing the thoughts you want to think and the feelings you want to experience during practice and performance. You've heard some of them in the previous episodes, but a reminder never hurts. How am I feeling right now? What am I thinking that makes me feel this way? What do I do when I feel this way? What results does that create for me?

Starting point is 00:24:46 What results do I want to create in my life? What do I need to do to create this result for myself? How do I need and want to feel to take action? What thought could I believe and nurture to help me feel this way? And I have you covered with all of this. For you, I have a detailed preparation plan, powerful conditioning strategies, and a supportive mindset approach. Go to mindoverfinger.com today and join Practicing for Peak Performance, my online course where I have all of those things for you. You can expect to feel certain about your process, to learn your music better and faster, and to develop the ability to feel confident in performance.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Maybe you want to win an audition. Maybe you're working towards a big recital. Maybe you're a teacher wanting to help your students perform with confidence. Your time is precious, and you deserve to see massive results. In Practicing for Peak Performance, I'm going to help you develop the kind of practice approach that will make that happen for you. I show you how to condition for the kind of performance and the results you want to experience. 2023 is going to be your year. Go to mindoverfinger.com right now and join Practicing for Peak Performance today.

Starting point is 00:26:20 And use the code 10OFF at checkout to get 10% off until December 19th. Let's do this together. All right. Much love going your way, my friend. And à bientôt. À bientôt. thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this episode of the mind over finger podcast if this content was helpful for you please share with everyone you think could benefit from it take a screenshot share on social media and tag me i'm mind over finger everywhere so reach

Starting point is 00:27:02 out send me a dm and let me know how this content helped you let's keep the conversation going as always i have all the information related to this episode in the show notes you can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com where you can also find more free resources on efficient practice and performance preparation links to sign up to my free workshops and information on how to work with me. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to receive your free guide to a productive mindful practice, transcripts from the Mind Over Finger podcast episodes

Starting point is 00:27:42 delivered to your inbox every week, and more. Also, join the Mind Over Finger Facebook community, my private group, for access to my live videos and to exchange with a community of like-minded musicians. So, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast And if you have specific questions for me or my guests that you would like answered in an episode, share them with me using the link in the show notes or send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. That's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 155 Why You're Nervous & What You Can Do About It

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