The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 193 Conditioning for YOUR Ideal Performance

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

In this episode of the Mind Over Finger Podcast, we explore the art of conditioning for optimal musical performance. Join us as we uncover practical strategies to bridge the gap between practice and stage, empowering musicians to excel in high-pressure situations. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your musical journey, these insights will help you unleash your full potential on stage. Tune in now to elevate your performance game! Sign up now for the brand-new FREE workshop – Mastering the Stage Download the transcript from this episode HERE   Mind Over Finger Click www.mindoverfinger.com/coaching to book your free consultation with me. Visit MindOverFinger.com for my online courses as well as free resources on peak performance. Connect: https://www.youtube.com/@MindOverFinger https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfinger https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme:  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson.

You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 193. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, where we dive into the world of mindful music making, peak performance, and crafting a purpose-driven life and career. I'm your host, violinist, certified performance and life coach for musicians, and your guide to unlocking your full potential, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Welcome everyone. We're once again inside the Mind Over Finger Facebook community for a live Q&A session. And today is the third and last installment of this series on preparing for your ideal performance. I have a lot of great stuff for you ahead.

Today, we're going to talk about how to condition for your ideal performance, and we're going to really cover everything that you need to transition from the practice room to the stage because it doesn't just happen, right? The first time we talked about planning, in the second live, we talked about practicing, and today we're bridging that gap between the practice room and the stage so if you're here live with me inside the community we're going to stick around at the end for a Q&A session and if you are watching on YouTube or you're listening to the podcast make sure to join us inside of the community because there's going to be a lot of fun lives coming up over the next few

weeks, the next few months, there's going to be a lot of opportunities for you to get answers that are specific to your issues. So if you're watching live, you can start putting these questions in there right away and I will answer them at the end and I'll be able to give you some personalized answers to your unique problems or struggles. So here's how it's going to work today. We're going to talk about some of the misconceptions about conditioning. We're going to talk about what conditioning is, right? So many people have different definitions of this word. So I will tell you what I mean by conditioning. And then I'm going to give you, of course, some suggestions of ways that you can start conditioning today. So let's begin because there is a lot of stuff ahead

today. What is conditioning, right? Conditioning is everything that you can do to prepare for performance. And by that, I don't mean practicing. Practicing is half the battle. If all you do is practicing, you're missing half of the preparation. Actually, probably more, because there's the whole mindset thing. But if all you do is practice, you're missing a lot of key ingredients and what conditioning is is how we prepare ourselves for performance by performing and not only performing for other people but by developing the ability to get ourselves into a performance state on command anytime that you want so when we're practicing we're analyzing we are assessing we work we problem solve we're learning but in a performance state things are

different this is when we reap the results of all of that hard work this is when we can let go this is when we are in the present moment this is when we want to access that flow state correct and to feel comfortable with that state you need to practice that state and condition yourself to enter that state and many ways of conditioning include there's more than that but the ways that i'm going to discuss today are understanding your desired performance state so the arisal level that works best for you, how to practice performing, recording yourself in a performance state, pre-performance routines, adversity training, mental training, doing mock performances, and nurturing the asset. And that is you. We're going to cover all of these today.

What are some of the misconceptions about conditioning? The first one that I'm encountering in people is this idea that things need to be perfect before you present it to the world, right? But here's the thing is you don't learn how to perform in a practice mode. You learn how to perform in the performance mode. It's kind of the same as actors. Actors don't just learn the words and then hop on stage. They really take a lot of time to learn how to channel their character. They experiment with many ways of interpreting that character. They practice performing being this character. Another example that I really like for this is athletes that have to perform in high altitude. If you're running a marathon at an altitude that is several thousand meters

different than where you train, you don't fly in the day before. You fly in a few weeks, perhaps, to get used, to get acclimated to this new altitude. So performing is very similar. You need to bathe in this performance altitude. Oh, I like that. That's a good analogy. I'm going to use that again. So same with swimmers. If you're going to be swimming in the open ocean, I was just watching the movie Naya the other day. If you're swimming in open waters, you don't just practice in the pool. You get in the open waters. It's the same concept for us. If you like tennis and you know you're going to be competing on clay, you don't just rehearse on grass or the opposite or practice rather. So this is what conditioning is. And that's the misconception is that we need

to hide in the practice room and we hide there for the big reveal. That doesn't work. I think the only person surprised at that reveal moment might be you. So what we need to do is learn how to perform by performing and practicing that transition from practice room to the stage. and that's a skill. And like everything else, it is learned. You hear it from the best performers in the world. They practice performing a lot. That brings me to that second misconception, which is how much to condition. So some people don't do it at all. And then some people do it a little bit. People underestimate how much conditioning you need to do to prepare for performance. I would say, if you're one of my clients, you've heard me say this many times,

test yourself early, often indifferently. How early in the learning process can you start performing? So people don't do enough conditioning. Then the third misconception is, I mean, there's more misconceptions than this, but let's zone in on three today. So the third one is the expectations that you have of how you should feel when you're ready. That's another one. A lot of people think that if they are prepared, they will feel ready and that if they feel nervous or they don't feel ready, that's not normal. They think that if they feel nervous or they feel activated, that means that they're not ready. But we have to learn how to perform while activated. I talk a lot about that in my online course, the Performance Anxiety Solution. If you're curious, you could go to

mindoverfinger.com and watch this today. When we perform, we will be in a state of activation that is normal. Conditioning is the part where we learn how to perform while activated. And activation is actually something that we desire. It allows us to really dig into a part of ourselves that we don't always access. And it adds that little extra sauce, little extra magic to the performance. So activation is a great thing unless you have spent time getting comfortable with it. Activation is like altitude. It's like the open waters. You got to spend time in it. So one reminder that I'm going to give you now that I have given in the other two lives on this topic is that it's simple, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. So don't overthink, but be dedicated to experimenting

with the concepts I will present today. It's not complicated, but it's not always easy. All right, let's get started with some strategies to condition. The first one that I would offer for you is to understand your desired performance state, your arisal level. And that is the emotion that you want to experience while you're performing. One way to know what works well for you is to think back of moments when you were feeling great while performing or maybe while practicing. How were you feeling? What were you thinking? And that works really well if there is a past performance that went well. If you're able to tap into that memory and remember how you felt? Were you excited? Were you joyful? What was that emotion? How much energy did you have?

And once you know this about yourself, experiment with that in the practice room. If you are feeling hyper, if you're feeling joyful, energetic, practice in that state so that you can start to gauge how much the level of arisal that is really helpful for you in the practice room. Once you know that, then you can move on to the rest of conditioning. And this is practicing performing, right? It's easy, just perform. Not always as easy as that, right? But all you need to perform is to have the intention to perform.

So that's going to be the biggest thing for you to start experimenting today with the intention to perform. And you can do that anytime. A performance state is a moment when we have a level of focus that is different than when we're practicing. It's a different level of arousal. We're not necessarily analyzing. We can still be thinking, but we're not overthinking. This is when we express. This is when we let go. This is when we enter more of the right brain part of ourselves. So you want to develop the attitude, not the attitude, you want to develop the aptitude to channel that at any time. That is the magic right there. So you want to bring this stage inside your practice room

over and over and over again. Like I said, my clients hear this all the time, test early, test often test differently. I'll get to the differently portion in a minute. So perform in the practice room. Maybe you set a timer that's going to go off every 10, 15, 20 minutes, half hour. And then when it goes off, perform something. Perform a measure. Perform a section, a page, or maybe an entire movement. But you set this intention. You take a deep breath and you set this intention to perform. You can perform at the beginning of a session. You warm up, let's say, then you do a quick performance and that allows you to assess, hmm, but this passage might need some work. So putting yourself in the state of performance at the beginning of a session will really inform

the work that you could do ahead. Another thing you can do is perform at the end of the session and assess how fruitful your work was or record it, listen to the next day to guide your work the next day. But create a lot of performance opportunities in the practice room. I will talk about mock performances in a little bit or other performances in a little bit, but for this section here, I'm just talking about practicing performing by yourself in the practice room and really developing the aptitude to turn on that performance switch whenever you want. Another way to condition yourself is recording yourself in a performance state. I have a really good episode for you. It's episode 162. And I talk about the method that I called record, reflect,

refine, which is to use recording as a way to practice. That's a great working tool. but we use recording devices to practice performing as well it's easy set a recording device set the intention to perform and then record a passage a measure an entire piece it's the intention that matters the intention and the commitment to perform and as you're performing you really put on your performance persona you're not analyzing you are expressing perhaps you're even seeing yourself on stage you can include some elements of visualization in there seeing yourself performing in the space with the audience in the clothing that you'll be wearing that day so set that intention turn the recording on and go for it and sometimes having that recording device

on will add just that extra layer that will make us a little bit more activated for a real performance and of course you can always listen back but here's something that you can add to this it's really great to get an idea of what we experience versus what it sounds like to an audience member so as you're recording performances take a note of how you feel how it felt for you you could maybe even give yourself a grade from one to ten of your comfort level that's something i like to do so on a scale of one to ten how did it feel and then when you listen back, maybe give yourself a grade of from one to ten, how effective do you think that was? And when you compare the two, you might be surprised. Sometimes things don't feel amazing

and they sound okay. Sometimes the opposite is also true. But what is great about doing this is we start to learn that the way we feel doesn't always match the way it sounds, the way it is perceived and that is really important information to have very important data because when we're performing sometimes and things feel a certain way it's easy for us to start making that mean a lot of things it's not going well it's not sounding good and that becomes very distracting when we can start to understand how things feel and how they sound and how these two elements come together then that really gives us a chance to experience a different type of performance. So as you record yourself, pay attention to how you feel and then try to see how that matches the effectiveness of

that performance. Another way to condition yourself is by creating a pre-performance routine. This is really, really helpful. And there's a very specific way that I teach this to my clients, my private clients or my clients inside of the Music Mastery Experience. But here's an easy way for you to get started. Think in detail of what you want to do before you play and then make a clear plan to execute that. So how do you want to hold the instrument before you're going to start? How are you going to be breathing before you start? What are you going to pay attention to? What are you going to be listening for? How are you going to count yourself in? Hear it in your head also. How are you going to cue yourself in or cue someone else in? What will that look like?

What will that feel like? And what are you going to be thinking about before you start? So think about all of these elements and come up with a recipe for how you want to start any movement, any piece or a section of a piece or orchestra excerpt and practice that. So you want to decide and then experiment and then tweak it as necessary. And I want to tell you something about these starting routines is that there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's only the way that works for you. So spend some time coming up with something that works for you. This is why this series is called Your Ideal Performance and not An Ideal Performance. It's Your Ideal performance, every part of the preparation process should match who you are, who you

aspire to be, and how emotionally connected you feel to this performance. So as you decide on these performance routines, don't let yourself get confused by doing it the right or the wrong way. Just experiment and find something that works for you. You can't mess it up. I say this all the time to my clients. You really can't mess it up. All right. Adversity training. I'm sure you've heard about this, but here's the thing. Don't

just try stuff randomly, right? Mind over finger. Pause for a second. Think about past performances. What are some of the things that bother you when you're on stage? Not everyone has sweaty palms. Not everyone has cold fingers. Not everyone shakes. Everybody has different little stumbling blocks. So think about what those are for you and then come up with solutions to get comfortable with those. So that with cold hands, with sweaty palms, with a heart racing, with butterfly in your stomach, with a shaky knee. It's happened to me before. It's so distracting. you can still perform at your best um so figure out what bothers you train yourself to get comfortable with it and get creative to create unfamiliar and uncomfortable circumstances for you

and this will help you develop resilience physical resilience emotional resilience and intellectual resilience under any circumstances. Here are some examples of things that you can try. Absolutely try playing in varied acoustics. A really boomy room, a dry space, small, big, all of that. You don't want to be distracted by an acoustic that you've never tried before. Let's talk temperature.

So there's a temperature of the room. You're going to show up. The room might be cold. the room might be warm. Try practicing in different environments in this regard. Then there's going to be the temperature of some specific body parts. Namely, for me as a violinist, fingers and hands. Can you play with cold hands? Or if it's really hot, sometimes we get the sticky fingers. So experiment with various temperatures in that way. I always give the following caveat however, is you can really hurt yourself playing on cold, unwarmed up hands or arms. So be very

mindful when you do this kind of work. I think it is good work to do, but you have to be careful because you can really injure yourself. So be mindful. How about uncomfortable clothing? Sometimes I'll play and I have this one sweater in particular that I always forget not to wear when I'm playing because it's super slippery. So sometimes I make myself practice with it on purpose. Because if you show up at rehearsal and you're wearing it, there just isn't a lot of choice. You gotta go ahead. So how can you wear perhaps clothing that is not comfortable for you? That is just an added difficulty, a little stumbling block in the way. And it's really good for your grit, for your resilience. Beating heart. How can you replicate this condition? Do some jumping jacks.

Go up and down the stairs, not holding your instruments, please. Run a little bit or do some squats. Anything that will elevate your heart rate and then practice, perform rather. So elevate your heart rate and then perform. Create some distractions for yourself or enlist people to create distractions around you. This is a really great way to get used to that. So can people be in the same room, make noise, drop things, be in your face, start talking to you, start music, any way that they can distract you. You can also try to practice not warmed up. But again, be very careful with this one. I think it is a good thing to try carefully, paying attention and making sure that you're not injuring yourself. And I don't recommend not warming up as a strategy

to do every day before you practice. We want to be very targeted with this approach. Other than that, I always recommend to warm up. Okay, you could play a piece in a different order. And this is a really great way to practice your memory as well. Maybe get some index cards and you pull a different section of a piece and you play them out of order. Can you practice or perform rather tired? I would do both, practicing and performing. We will show up at times a little bit tired. We might have a big performance and not sleep the night before, or we might be flying in somewhere and we are just not comfortable in the hotel, can you still pick up your instrument and play tired? So can you recreate situations where you practice tired? I was talking with someone the other day and they

were saying that their moms used to wake them up at three in the morning and pick up their instrument and play through the recital program at three in the morning. Or I was also talking with someone who was mentioning coming back from rehearsals and performances because they had a full-time job and were preparing for an audition and would come home and play through the list at midnight. So can you perform while tired? Can you perform while hungry? Can you practice in a situation where you can't see the music so well? Try that one. Try practicing with the stand in a very uncomfortable position. So challenge yourself. Create circumstances that are less than ideal so that when you show up on performance day, whatever comes your way, you know you can handle

it because you've done it time and time and time again in the practice room. What are some other circumstances? Practicing with earplugs. That can be really telling, right? Try different tempi, right? You show up at a chamber music rehearsal or maybe you work with a collaborative pianist or an orchestra and the tempi are not at all what you were imagining. So put on recordings that have tempi that are really different than the ones you like and see how you can keep up and adjust in real time. Try with different articulations. You could enlist some colleagues to come and hear you play and then ask you to do things completely different on the spot. So all of these ways to create adversity for yourself will help build up your grit and your resilience for when you

show up on stage on performance day. All right, let's talk about mental training. And that is a big deal, my friend. Mental training is really, really important. There is a huge emphasis on that inside my group coaching program, Music Mastery Experience, because this is something that we underestimate a lot and we have to do. I teach very specific ways to approach mental training. And if you're curious, I really recommend that you sign up for the April training. First of all, I'm going to talk about this in a little bit and also try to see if music mastery experience would be the right thing for you. You can go to mindoverfinger.com, look into the music mastery experience and see if this is something that you feel ready for is to elevate the performance and

you feel like you've tried so many things and there's still something missing it could be the mental training portion and maybe the music master experience would be something that that would be great for you at that stage where you are so let me give you though a really good starting point today. And the thing with mental training is what I mean by that is not mental rehearsal. What I see as mental training is not the same as mental practice. They're two different things. Mental practice is part of the practicing portion. It's really helpful. It's really important. Do it. Yes. But mental training is a little bit different. So visualization would be one of the best ways to mentally train yourself for performance. And what I recommend is for you to decide ahead of

time how you want the performance to go and decide ahead of time how you want to feel during the performance and bring that in the practice room with you and visualize it, experience it a lot. this is a real game changer you see athletes using it a lot you see speakers actors the visualization is something that can really enhance everything about your performance preparation but the intention behind it is the key ingredient how intentional you are with this visualization. Do you know what you want to happen? And do you know how you want to feel while it happens? And then you practice that in the practice room. Let's talk mock performances and performances. I have a podcast episode about mock performances. So I will be brief on this

topic today, but I highly recommend you listen to episode 163. It's titled Mock Performances are real. I like that title. But here's what I would say about mock performances. Do a lot of them. Do a lot more than you think. Whatever number you think you want to do, just double it, triple it. Perform so much. And as you stand there and you're playing for someone, really commit to performing. Channel the performance state. This is what you're there for. and if possible recreate the real circumstances of the performance how late in the day is the concert or the audition where is it what type of hall is it what are you going to be wearing if possible try to recreate these circumstances so that you are used to driving that long commuting

there, wearing these clothes, playing at that time of the day. And then afterwards, assess objectively. So of course, you're going to be recording that, right? But then assess objectively. Pay attention to the things you want to work on, but also make sure to notice what is going well. That's going to be really important in informing all of this mental work that you're going to do. So make sure to listen to episode 163 about mock performances for more information on the mock performances. But the main thing I would say is do many of them. And when you're performing for your audience, truly perform. Then let's talk about performances. Why not create performance opportunities for yourself? Learning how to perform only happens by performing.

is just how it is. So can you create opportunities? Can you offer to perform anywhere? Churches, hospitals, retirement home, anywhere. Can you sign up for a master class? Nowadays, we have an online option. Can you create online performances for yourself? How about starting a concert series? Now that's a little bit more work logistically, but why not? Right? How about busking. So however you can create performance opportunity for yourself, I highly encourage that you get creative and see what you can make happen. And it's by performing that you will learn how to perform. Finally, let's talk about nurturing the asset. Don't forget that you are a human performing. The human who's going to be performing needs to be rested, well fed,

feeling fulfilled, feeling happy. So the more you nurture your asset, and I'm borrowing this term from Greg McKeon from his book Essentialism, highly recommended. The more you nurture your asset, the better you're going to perform. So easy, easier said than done. Rest and recovery. Make sure that you rest enough, that you find ways to get good sleep, and that you have periods of rest and recovery between sessions and performances? Can you take some rest days or lighter days? Can you plan for the recovery techniques? I call them massages, acupuncture, stretching, yoga, any of these things. Then nutrition and hydration. Try to eat a balanced and nutritious diet and also hydrate. That's very crucial for optimal physical performance,

but also the mental function. Now, hydration, that's my challenge. I have a very hard time drinking water, but it is very important so we can all encourage ourselves to eat better and drink more. Also, strength. Do not neglect your physical strength. What can you do to get this amazing, beautiful, wonderful body of yours working better. Whatever will work for you, try to see if you can implement a way to get stronger. Now, of course, speak with your doctor before you start any kind of workout regimen. And I'm not going to make recommendations here of what you should do, but I will encourage you to think of ways to get stronger physically, whatever that is. Then let's talk about the mental health portion. Again, it's a human with human emotions,

human thoughts that's going to be performing. This is an important part to nurture. What fuels you mentally? What fuels you emotionally? Take the time to schedule pockets of fun, of joy, of nurture. Get art in your life. Get nature in your life. Literature. Spend time with loved ones and incorporate some ways to enhance your mindfulness. Whether that's a mindfulness practice, maybe it's prayer, maybe it's journaling, whatever that is for you, take some time to practice being, practice presence, practice slowing down and simplifying. So that is nurturing the asset.

We're going to nurture the body and the soul and the mind, all of these things. So we're going to revise in a second, but I really think that for you to spend more time conditioning is the key ingredient in enhancing how you perform. And I said at the beginning, it's simple. It's not necessarily easy. And I gave you so much information in this session and in the past two sessions on how to practice, how to plan all of these things. And sometimes we have all of this information and we still don't take action.

Well, there's a reason behind this, and it's called being a human. This is the entire mind management portion of things. So we talked about planning, practicing, conditioning. The next step is to make all of that gel together with mind management. And all of that I will be discussing in the April free workshop called Mastering the Stage. how to manage your mind to make all of these things come together in a way that works for you. So it's good to know what to do, but we don't always do it. And that's because of the ways that we're thinking, the ways that we're feeling. We are humans with feelings and it's so easy for the

emotional aspect of us to take over. So how do we manage that? I'm going to be talking about that in April. So I'm going to recommend that you go right now to mindoverfinger.com and find the tab that says mastering the stage and sign up. I'm also going to drop that link here in the comments in a little bit. So that's April 4th through 6th, 10 a.m. to 11 central. We're going to be inside of Zoom together. And I'm going to talk to you about what works and what doesn't when it comes to the performance preparation, the mental, the mindful aspect of that, what sabotages your progress in the practice room, the mindset that will boost your practice. And I will also talk about the ways that you can prepare so that you can walk on stage feeling free and feeling ready.

So we want to understand what gets us to stay stuck, what prevents us from taking action, what generates so much unnecessary suffering through a performance preparation right i mean sometimes it does feel dreadful right why we're going to talk about that and then we're going to talk about how to turn that around and develop a productive mindset productive mind management so all of that comes together so make sure to sign up it's mastering the stage april 4th through 6th It's absolutely free and we're going to have a lot of fun inside of Zoom together. Right, let's revise for a second. So conditioning is your real training for performance.

This is what you do once you've learned the repertoire to transition from practice room to stage. What I recommend you try is understanding your desired performance state, that you start practicing performing in the practice room all the time. that you record yourself in a performance state, that you develop this aptitude to set the intention to perform and just have the performance switch on. You have that performance persona turned on. Develop some pre-performance routines. Engage in adversity training. So identify what your stumbling blocks on stage are and get extremely creative of finding techniques to help you get

comfortable with those. Don't forget mental training. Do a lot of mock performances and make sure to nurture your asset. So the podcasts that I mentioned that could be helpful for you were 162, where I talked about your no excuse recording techniques. I talked about episode 163, mock performances for real. And I think you might also find episode 161, how to master a scary passage for performance interesting. So these are three podcasts that I recommend listening to, to take in a little bit more information about this topic. So I hope this helps you understand what conditioning is the way that I view it. I hope that it provides you with some really good technique to get started today. And I hope that you get some really great results from this.

I'd love to hear your findings the insight that you get from experimenting with those things and please don't hesitate to join in here in the group and reach out and let me know what that felt like so if you're listening to this on the podcast or you're watching on YouTube this is when we say goodbye as I said I recommend that you join us inside of the Mind Over Finger Facebook community where I'm going to do more of these lives where you can post questions where you can interact with me and get some personalized answers for your own unique issues. And if you're here inside the Mind Over Finger Facebook community and you have some questions, put them in the comments right now and we'll see how I can support you today. So until next time, YouTube, podcast,

I send you much love and I say à bientôt. Thank you for watching!