Steps to conquer stage fright: general wellbeing matters

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Then we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. Last week, we looked at the importance of knowing what you’re doing. This week, we’ll examine how our general state of wellbeing (use of ourselves) affects our performance.

I am a big fan of snooker, and one of the highlights of my year is the Snooker World Championships – 17 days of non-stop snooker action. I think many snooker fans will agree that one of the great excitements of the past few years has been the anticipation of seeing how player Ronnie O’Sullivan is going to fare in the tournament.

Ronnie is generally acknowledged to be the most naturally gifted player to ever pick up a snooker cue. But he is also widely acknowledged to have not achieved as many tournament wins as his prodigious talent would have suggested he might. Critics suggest that O’Sullivan’s temperamental streak leads to a lack of confidence.*

When Ronnie O’Sullivan won his first World Championship in 2001, part of his strategy for maintaining his focus through the long matches was by working on his general fitness. He took up running, and watched his diet and his sleep patterns carefully. He found that taking care of himself more generally led to a change in attitude at the snooker table.**

Why your general use/wellbeing matters.

FM Alexander wouldn’t have been surprised that Ronnie’s snooker abilities improved when he took care of his general wellbeing. FM wrote:

“the success of any particular process … must depend, primarily, on the general condition of psycho-physical development and control present…”

And he goes on:

“By chance or good luck a man may make a good stroke without having attained to a good standard in the general use of himself, but he can never be reasonably certain of repeating it, and the experiences associated with this state of uncertainty do not make for the growth of confidence.”***

In other words, if we want to be good at playing flute, or singing, or speaking in public, we need to pay attention to what we do with our minds and bodies more generally. If we are generally predisposed, as Ronnie O’Sullivan seems to be, to being hypercritical of ourselves, then that tendency will be exacerbated in our specific activity. If we are generally inclined to keep our shoulder muscles tense, then I can confidently predict that we’ll have them extra-tight just before we make that big speech.

This means that we can’t just think of conquering our stage fright when we’re performing. It is a whole-life process of change.

Here are a couple of questions that might get you started on the journey to improving your general psycho-physical condition.

  • What attitude do you have to life generally? Ae you a relaxed individual, or are you a little on the anxious side?
  • Think about the areas of your body that are most tense before you perform. Take a mental check on them now. How relaxed (or not) are they ordinarily?

Today, how can you move beyond your usual state of being?

* See the Wikipedia entry on Ronnie for references.
** He talks about this at length in his autobiography, Ronnie: The Autobiography of Ronnie O’Sullivan (co-authored with Simon Hattenstone, Orion, 2004).
*** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.341. 

Steps to conquer stage fright: Know yourself!

audience

A week or two ago, I did something I haven’t done in a fair while (and no, I won’t tell you just how many years!). I performed an instrumental solo in public.

It was only a local festival competition, and the audience wasn’t large. But it was a big occasion for me. For me, it was proof that I had finally found the key to the anxieties that I used to suffer before every performance. I was a stage fright sufferer.

And now I’m not.

Stage fright is a big problem, whether you’re a musician, a famous actor, or faced with giving the best man’s speech at your friend’s wedding. In fact, in the UK I believe that speaking in public ranks even above death as the thing that most frightens the general public!

In the next few weeks, I want to share with you the things that I have learned through studying the Alexander Technique that have helped me to conquer my stage fright. And for the first week, I’m going to start with the principle from FM Alexander’s work that makes it all possible.

 

Know thyself.

There’s a wonderful sentence in the introduction of FM Alexander’s final book. It’s towards the end of the chapter, and the unwary would find it slide past their eyes very easily. But it is pure gold. Here it is.

“I think I may confidently predict that those who are sufficiently interested in the findings I have recorded … will find their outlook and understanding … so completely changed that they will see that knowledge of the self is fundamental to all other knowledge”

Alexander makes three major claims here.

1. His work changes students’ outlook and understanding

2. His work is all about knowledge of the self

3. Knowledge of the self is prior to all other knowledge

This is important to stage fright sufferers because we tend to look for external fixes to our problems. We try imagining that the audience are in their underwear. We try deep breathing exercises. We walk; we pace. Some of us resort to alcohol to calm us down. Above all, we try to deal with the awful thought that our anxiety is all our own fault because we aren’t courageous enough.

This isn’t true. We don’t suffer from a lack of courage. We suffer from a lack of knowledge of ourselves: how we tick as humans. We need to know about adrenalin and the fight/flight response. We need to know about discipline. We need to know about attitude of mind.

And those are some of the topics that I’ll be dealing with in future weeks, because these are all areas where the Alexander Technique has helped me.

And does it help performers? Just listen to Dame Nellie Melba, pre-eminent soprano of the early years of the twentieth century:

“When we come to know that certain actions produce certain results,  and when we can, at will, perform those actions, uncertainty is removed, and uncertainty is at the root of most of our fears. In singing, as in all else, the precept “Know thyself” is of the utmost importance.”

So. Do you know yourself? Do you know how you get your results?

Image by scottchan from FreeDigitalphotos.net

Make Mistakes! What FM Alexander teaches about experimenting and creativity.

moma-make-art-make-mistakes

This is the beginning of a short series on what FM Alexander can teach us about creativity. I hope you like it!

For my son’s birthday recently, I gave him a book called Make Art, Make Mistakes. It led me to think about the relationship between creativity and experimentalism.

Often, especially when I work with musicians, I encounter people who have come to believe that mistakes are not a good thing. Indeed, for some musicians, one of the most prevailing lessons that they learned through their training is that Mistakes are Bad.

Of course, the mistakes that the teachers were warning against was the sort of slip-up that we are led to believe mars a good (read: flawless) performance. But what tends to happen is that in our desire for the good (flawless) performance, we begin to fear the mistake. And as we fear, we make what FM Alexander might have termed a mental reservation, a decision to close ourselves off from performance choices that we consider riskier and more likely to result in mistakes.

We play it safe.

But safe is, ultimately, boring.

And safe doesn’t get us to new places and new ideas. FM Alexander didn’t play it safe when he stood in front of the mirror, trying to work out what was causing his voice problems. He experimented. He tried things. At one point, midway through his experiments, he even wrote “all my efforts up till now to improve the use of myself in reciting had been misdirected.”*

Alexander was prepared to risk failure in his efforts to resolve his vocal problems. And we need to be prepared to risk failure if we want to push the boundaries of our creativity.

Be like FM Alexander and experiment.

Make art. Make mistakes. Have fun.

What one thing can you do today to help you take more risks? What one project or task will you pledge to stop playing safe?

Next week: how decision-making can help you, and how FM Alexander used it to great effect!

 

*FM Alexander, The Use of the Self, in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.419.

Picture by Jennifer Mackerras

Children and (Learned) Stage Fright: a Rant

This is an undisguised rant about stage fright, why our children grow up to be nervous in front of audiences, and why the Alexander Technique is so important.

audience

Recently my son played cello in his first ever school concert. He got excited about a new piece, and though he didn’t know it very well, he decided he wanted to play  it  instead of the two he’d been practising. Predictibly, he got stuck mid-piece, and I had to murmur hints to help him to the end.

When he sat down, another parent leaned over to him and said in a consoling tone, “It was very brave of you to keep playing. Well done.”

Both he and I fielded many such comments over the next few days. One even said (to me, luckily), “I don’t know how he did it. I would have burst into tears.”

These sound like nice, nurturing, supportive comments, don’t they? So why was my son nonplussed, and why do I feel the urge to rant?

Because they are not supportive comments. And here is why.

These comments come from a very particular world view. If I asked the parents involved, they would probably admit that, in their eyes, having to perform in front of an audience is tantamount to torture. And making a mistake in front of an audience is just about the most awful thing that can happen to you.

But this is just a point of view. It might be common, but that doesn’t make it the only right or normal way to think about performing. How about this for an alternative: there’s an audience of really nice people waiting to hear me play, and I am going to share my favourite music with them. (That was what my son was thinking. I know, because I asked him.)

So which would you rather be thinking as you walked onto the stage: ‘this is torture and I hope I don’t mess up’ or ‘I get to share my fun with all these people’?

The sad thing about the concert was watching all the other children. Many of them were clearly afraid and couldn’t get off the stage fast enough. One girl even burst into tears beforehand and refused to play.

That sort of fear is a learned behaviour. We are not born with a natural fear of performing. We learn it from the people we love and respect.

So… You may be content to live with a fear of speaking or performing in front of strangers. You may be content as you are. Fair enough. But I want to ask you the same thing FM Alexander asked in 1911:

“What of the children?” Are you content to rob them of their inheritance…? Are you willing to send them out into the world ill-equipped, dependent on precepts and incipient habits…? *

Those of us who have any contact at all with children have a tremendous responsibility. The paradigms we live in, the views we hold have the potential to mould their thoughts and actions, for better or worse. In today’s world, a fear of performing or presenting is a serious handicap – one that we would be crazy to want to pass on. For the children’s sake, if not for our own, we seriously need to  reconsider our ideas and attitudes about doing stuff in front of an audience. And for me, the work of FM Alexander is a great way to start that process.

 

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.68.

Image by scottchan from FreeDigitalphotos.net

Interlude: change your rules, change your world. A true story.

I’m postponing the last of the 5 steps to everyday happiness for one week, because I have a really important true story to tell. It’s an important story because it shows so clearly how the rules we make for ourselves can completely change the way we act.

Cello

My son is going to play his cello in a concert at school this week. Because he learns outside of the school environment, one of the school music teachers wanted to hear him play so that they could place him at an appropriate point in the programme. So last Friday my son took his cello in to school.

The cello was placed in a safe spot in an office, but I placed his music bag on his coat peg. Clearly he didn’t notice me do it, because later, when the music teacher came to collect him, he didn’t pick up his music. He just went to the office, got his cello, and went off to play.

After setting up, he realised that he didn’t have his music with him.

So what did he do?

What would you do if you realised you didn’t have your music, and you were auditioning for a concert? Would you panic? Would it affect your performance?

 

What my son didn’t do.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t worry.

 

What my son did.

Telling me the story later, my son said that he thought, “Oh well, I’ll just have to play my pieces from memory.”

So he did. Really well, according to the teacher.

My son doesn’t know that playing for strangers is meant to be scary. He doesn’t know that playing pieces from memory is meant to be hard. So he did both things unquestioningly and without a jot of worry. In fact, when I suggested to him later that some grown-ups might find that situation hard, he laughed at me.

It’s a question of rules. My son hasn’t learned or internalized any rules that say that playing for other people, or playing from memory, is anything to be afraid of. This means that he hasn’t put up any barriers from playing as well as he can.

So why should we?

 

Change your rules, change your world

FM Alexander said that “a changed point of view is the royal road to reformation.”* If you change the rules and assumptions that you operate under, then you effectively change the way you view and interact with the world.

Piano teacher and blogger Elissa Milne gave a great example of this in her most recent post. By encouraging her student to stop reading the note names he had placed over every note in his music, and instead to think about the music in terms of shapes, she was able to change his playing from fumbling to near effortless in minutes.

If a piano student can experience that sort of improvement from a change of rule, what sort of improvement do you think you could achieve?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.44.
Image by J Frasse, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

5 Alexander Technique steps to everyday happiness: 4. Live in the present moment

Next week my recorder quartet will be playing a concert, and my thoughts about the rehearsal process are what have led me to today’s tip for everyday happiness: being in and reacting to the present moment.

PinkNoise

The piece that my quartet will play to begin our concert is called The Jogger, by Dick Koomans (the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet play it extremely well here). It is one of those pieces of music where one person starts, then the next person comes in, copying what the first person does. Then the third person joins, copying the first two players.

The trouble we had initially with this piece as a quartet is that the third player didn’t exactly following the style of playing (intonation) set up by the first two players. And if all the players don’t agree, then the result can sound a little odd.

What happens is that each player goes away and practises the piece on their own. They spend time working on their own style of playing it. But when we get together to practise as a group, we have to find a way to play the music together, sounding as one unit. This means that we really need to spend time listening to each other, and responding in the moment to what we hear going on around us. And if we don’t listen to each other and just press on and play the way we practised, then the result just doesn’t sound the same.

 

Lifting past chairs

But it isn’t only musicians who need to spend time in the present moment. Even on the simplest of tasks we can fall into the trap of not sticking with the present moment, but either dallying in the past or straying into the future. FM Alexander used as his example a person asking a friend to lift a chair:

“You will see at once that your friend will approach the task with a definite preconception as to the amount of physical tension necessary. His mind is exclusively occupied with the question of his own muscular effort, instead of with the purpose in front of him and the best means to undertake it.” *

Our friend lifting the chair approaches the task with “a definite preconception” – they will probably have decided upon the likely weight of the chair and tensed muscles in readiness long before their fingers touch the object. To all intents and purposes, they aren’t really picking up the chair in front of them. They are picking up all the chairs they have picked up in the past!

Most of the time it won’t be the end of the world – misjudging the weight of the chair isn’t likely to have serious consequences! But if we keep relying on our preconceptions, to the point where we forget that we are even doing so, then we are locking ourselves out of the present moment. And that will make it so much harder to react quickly when it really counts.

 

So my task for you this week is this: 

  • Think about the times and places where you do genuinely experience the present moment. For blogger Jamey Burrell, it is when he is running. What about you?
  • And for the next week, keep an eye on yourself. See how often you operate on preconceptions, and whether it sometimes trips you up.

Oh, and if you’re in Bristol next Wednesday lunchtime and have nothing to do, come along to my concert!

 

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.63.
Image by Gregor O’Gorman

Stage fright? Untwist your thinking!

Yarn-Kitty-500

Perhaps because the topic is in my mind, it seems as though every time I turn on the TV or listen to the radio I hear another instance of a performer whose career was blighted by panic and performance nerves.The most recent reference was on Radio 3 (the thinking person’s Radio 4!), during a programme about the Swiss-Romanian pianist Clara Haskil.

The prevalence of the condition is truly mind-boggling. And the most interesting thing about it is that it isn’t just us amateurs who struggle and suffer. Some truly great professionals have fought their panic every performance night. Laurence Olivier survived by asking his fellow actors not to look him in the eye while onstage. Ian Holm, according to the website IMDb, developed severe stage fright in 1976 while performing in The Iceman Cometh, and has barely returned to the stage since.

The most intriguing reference to stage fright in the past couple of weeks was, again, on Radio 3, this time on the excellent programme Composer of the Week. Last week’s composer was Enrique Granados who, in addition to being a fine composer, also a renowned pianist in his day. Indeed, it was his performing career that paid the bills, and this was a source of difficulty for him. For Granados, like Clara Haskil, like Laurence Olivier, like Ian Holm, was a sufferer of near crippling stage fright.

The reason why I found Granados’ plight so intriguing, however, was because of a short quote that was included in the radio programme. Apparently Granados said:

If, in an audience of 1000 spectators, I know that 999 like me but one does not, I will play poorly, because for me that one person will be the only one out there, and I know that nothing I do will please him.

Take a minute to read that quote and think about it. Granados has just admitted that if the audience contains just one person who is not guaranteed to love his performance unconditionally, he will play poorly. Hmm. The problem with this is that no audience is 100% guaranteed to love you, unless it is entirely composed of your family and friends, in which case you are unlikely to hear anything constructive afterwards that will help you to improve.

Not only that, but it sounds uncomfortably like Granados makes a decision to play poorly, based on his fear-filled assessment of the audience. He doesn’t say “I am likely to play poorly.” He uses the far stronger statement “I will play poorly.” That one person doesn’t like me, so I won’t bother to play well because I know that nothing I can do will change their mind. Those of you with any knowledge of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will recognise this as a fully-fledged cognitive distortion – a type of twisted thinking. Granados is basing his whole performance on his opinion of an audience whose thoughts and feelings he cannot possibly know in any detail! From the sound of this, Granados’ life as a performer may well have been plagued by the tension created by his desire to play well fighting with his decision to play poorly.

Would you want to live in that particular universe? Does the logic of it sound reasonable to you? I suspect not! Yet, when it comes down to it, my hunch is that most performers, when questioned closely, would ‘fess up to a similar sort of twisted thinking around their performance practice. One of the most common, for example, is an actor looking out at the audience before the show, and expressing a strange combination of fear and hatred towards them as the actor wonders if the audience will be ‘good’ tonight.

Clearly this sort of twisted thinking is of no help to us whatsoever. But how do we get round it?

What we don’t do is to try to block out those twisted thoughts, or to just struggle on past them. This is just adding a whole new layer of tension on top of the stress created by the original twisty thinking.

Instead of this, FM Alexander suggests that we approach the problem indirectly by inhibiting our habitual manner of use in reacting to the old stimulus. We then give ourselves the opportunity of making a new decision.* In other words, when we’re approaching the performance date, or when we’re waiting in the wings ready to come onstage, we feel a strong stimulus to think about the audience. Our instinctive reaction is to be drawn away from ourselves and into a nightmarish fantasy where we leap to conclusions about what the audience will like or want. Alexander is asking us to notice the stimulus, but not to be drawn in. Instead of thinking about the things we can’t control (the audience and their reaction to us), we could think about things that WILL be useful to us. We need to make a decision to think about ourselves, about our role or our music, about the care with which we have prepared ourselves to perform.

And we need to stick to that decision. Alexander said:

We are by nature creatures of impulse … and will remain so, more or less, so long as we are content to struggle on … in the last analysis, success will depend upon the individual’s capacity to carry out a decision.**

So make a decision not to be ruled by the twisted thinking that leads us out of ourselves. Think instead of those things that are useful to you: your preparation, a sense of perspective about performance and audience, sticking with the process of just saying the words or playing the notes, and knowing what you want to achieve with your performance.

And enjoy it!

 

*Paraphrase of Universal Constant in Living, Iredeat Combined Edition, p.601.
** ibid., p.602.

Four words to conquer stage fright

As I write this, I have less than a day before I take to the stage area of a local church and perform a lunchtime recital with my recorder quartet. If I were counting (which I’m not), I’d tell you that I’m to be walking out and playing my first notes in 22 hours’ time. And once upon a time, just the act of typing that sentence would have caused within me a paroxysm of cold fear.

I’ve always loved playing music, but I never enjoyed performing. I hated – no, loathed – the act of walking out onto the stage. As the years went by, it became harder and harder to function as a musical performer. This fear, combined with the debilitating pain I suffered in my arms, put a stop to any desire I had to share music with others.

But not any more. I am a recovering stage-fright sufferer.And the Alexander Technique has been the most powerful tool I have possessed in advancing that recovery.

For me, part of the process of studying and teaching the Alexander Technique has been a methodical re-examination of the rules I have made for myself around issues such as performance. So often I see articles in the press and online that stress the physical aspect of this work, as if it was limited only to physical movements such as sitting or standing. But the scope of the Alexander Technique is so much broader than this. My colleagues and I often say to students that it is a physiologic fact that we can’t have a movement without some sort of thinking preceding it. If this is true – and it appears to be so – then we must draw the conclusion that what we think is of vital importance.

This means that the ideas and beliefs that we have about certain activities may be the very things that are holding us back from performing those activities as well as we would like. This is certainly true in my own case, and from the experiences I have teaching, seems to be true for my students too.

Based on my own experience of stage fright and that of my students, these are the major issues that I believe cause the problem:

Lack of preparation.

This is possibly the biggest issue amongst my acting students. This is how it works: I know that I have not practised enough and do not have the music/speech/whatever completely under my belt. So I worry about messing it up. Then I worry about messing it up – in public. ‘What will they think of me?’ My head is now spinning so much that I have little or no chance of remembering my music/speech/whatever.

Perfectionism.

I place pressure on myself by expecting myself to be perfect and to give a flawless performance. I also know that this is pretty much impossible. So I also berate myself first for expecting perfectionism, and second for the mistakes I am certain to make. Now we are back to ‘What will they think of me?’

Etiquette.

People expect performers, especially amateur performers, to display nervousness prior to going on stage. It becomes good manners to oblige. By extension, it is bad manners to appear calm and confident!

Misunderstanding the physical.

Most people experience certain physical sensations pre-performance:  ‘butterflies’, shaky knees, etc. We are conditioned to think that these are bad and will disrupt our performance. What if these are simply side-effects of pre-performance adrenalin – the same adrenalin that sharpens our instincts, our senses, and speeds up our thinking processes…

So, how do we get around these issues? With four simple words! And to help you remember them, they mostly begin with P!

Here are the three Ps and one G:

Preparation.

There is only one way to know something really well, and that is to do the preparation. We all hope and dream that there is some kind of shortcut, and that talented people don’t need to do the long hours of study. Actually, they do. That’s why they are so talented.

Perspective.

Does it really matter if we make a mistake? Realistically, who is going to notice? And even if they do, will one or two little mistakes really outweigh all the good things about your performance? Of course not!

Process

As soon as we start thinking about the audience and wondering what they are thinking/feeling, we have lost our train of thought. We are no longer doing the process of performing, but wondering about the after-effects of it. In traditional Alexander Technique language, we are end-gaining rather than sticking with the means we have chosen in order to achieve our goals. In my experience, when I am staying within the process of singing or playing a piece of music, note by note, phrase by phrase, I don’t have the time to worry about the audience. And my performance, I am told, improves radically as a result!

Goal.

It’s often overlooked, but… What are you trying to achieve with your performance? Do you have a goal? Having a goal in mind for your performance can make a big difference to the way you approach things. For example, my recorder quartet recently performed at a local music festival. Our aim was to test one of our pieces in a hall acoustic, to check whether all the notes could be heard clearly on the instruments we had chosen to play. Because we had a specific goal in mind, nerves weren’t an issue.

So there you have it – three Ps and 1 G towards conquering stage fright, based on my experience. I hope they’re of help. And if you catch up with me on Facebook, I’ll let you know how the concert goes!