The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 238 Calm Under Pressure – The 3-Pillar Strategy to Beat Performance Anxiety and Play Your Best

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Learn a clear, actionable framework to help you manage performance anxiety and play with confidence. ·         The 3 pillars: preparation, conditioning, and mind management ·         Why traditional advice doesn't work ·         How to train your nervous system to support you ·         What to include in your practice for real performance readiness     If you're ready to hit the ground running come September, Practicing for Peak Performance is your blueprint. This step-by-step course gives you the exact system to practice smarter, perform with confidence, and build unstoppable momentum. Enroll this summer and get bonus access to The Performance Anxiety Solution — free. Start now at http://www.mindoverfinger.com/ppp.     Join Practicing for Peak Performance HERE Grab your free Joyful Practice Guide HERE 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. Grab my free workshops and PDF downloads by going to www.mindoverfinger.com/resources. 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. This is episode 238, the 10th and final episode of your Reset and Rise summer series. We did it. We are wrapping things up by talking about something we all face, performance anxiety. This one ties directly into the Performance Anxiety Solution course and offers you tools to stay calm, focused, and in control when it really counts. 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. Hello there, and welcome back to your Reset and Rise summer series. I'm so glad you're here. This episode is part of a special 10-episode journey I created just for you this summer to help you reignite your spark, rethink your practice, and show up with more clarity, confidence, and joy. Each episode builds on the last, so if you're just joining us, feel free to hop back to episode 229 and catch up. The series follows a clear arc. We start with reigniting your joy and connection to music.

Then we move into mindset tools like alignment, patience, and self-compassion to bring more ease and clarity to your work. After that, we clear away hidden obstacles. And finally, we wrap up with powerful tools to help you manage your mind and build real momentum. And if you're ready to go even deeper, check out my course, Practicing for Peak Performance. It's your full blueprint for performance success. And when you join this summer, you're going to get my Performance Anxiety Solution course for free. All the details are at mindoverfinger.com and the link is in the show notes.

All right, ready to reset and rise? Let's dive in. 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, I presented you 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 happier and experience success and growth and focus on those. So in this case, that statement would never hold in court. If I told a 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 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? 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 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 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 henson it's so 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 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, 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. 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. 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 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? 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. 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 go to mindoverfinger.com right now and join practicing for peak performance today let's do this together all right much love going away my friend and à bientôt. And there you have it. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you'd share with your friends and colleagues. Take a screenshot, post it on social media and tag me. I'm mind over finger everywhere. I always love hearing your favorite takeaways. And if you're ready to take your playing career to the

next level, I'd love to invite you to join the Music Mastery Experience. This is my signature group coaching program where we're going to dive deep into building your confidence and mastery and set you up for success and fulfillment in your life and career. You can find all the details at mindoverfinger.com. While you're there, check out the free downloads and online courses available to support your journey even further. And don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss an update or a tool to help you thrive. Again, thank you for being here. Until next time, much love and à bientôt! Thank you.