SIX TIPS: Develop a healthy mindset for performance
HELP PIANO STUDENTS BE READY FOR AN UPCOMING PERFORMANCE
The next of my Six Tips to Ensure Your Student is Ready for a Performance is to help your students develop a healthy mindset for performance.
Many students who start music lessons at a young age often have a naturally carefree attitude towards performance. However, students who begin lessons at an older age, or those who have grown older and more self-conscious over time, often find themselves worried about making mistakes and concerned with the opinion of others when performing.
WHAT IS a healthy performance mindset?
Performing is sharing music.
This is the mindset that I hope to instill in my students. I already alluded to this in my previous post, where I discussed helping students emotionally or imaginatively connect to their pieces, so if you missed that, click here to read more.
Most pre-college or recreational students will only ever find themselves in performance environments where their audiences want them to succeed. Even judges at a competition want each of the contestants to do well! Therefore, framing performance as an opportunity to share the gift of music with parents, teachers, friends, and even adjudicators, allows students to focus outside themselves.
I was thrilled to see Noa Kageyama over at the Bulletproof Musician address this topic in his recent article and podcast titled How the ‘Gift’ Reframe Could Enhance Performance. The whole article is interesting, but his main takeaway is this:
“So the gift is not us, nor our performance per se, but the work we have done to identify, cultivate, and highlight that which we find beautiful and meaningful in the music….The end-goal [is] less about impressing those in attendance with our technical prowess, but to make them feel hope, awe, joy, or an emotion of some kind.”
He gives one caveat to the “gift reframe” here which is worth noting:
“The value of the gift reframe lies in its ability to focus our attention and energy on the doing and sharing and excitement behind our work, not the response to that gift by the intended recipients.”
Of course, for those performing at an elite level, or within spheres that have political realities under the surface, it is true that there are times when not every audience member is rooting for the performer. Fortunately, this does not apply to the vast majority of students in the every-day piano studio.
WHAT is an unhealthy performance mindset?
In my opinion, when students are too focused on avoiding mistakes or too fearful of the judgement of others, they easily enter into an unhealthy performance mindset.
Because we spend a lot of lesson time teaching students “the right way” to do things and correcting mistakes, it’s natural for students to enter into a mindset that what matters most is playing from start to finish without making a mistake.
The difficulty here, of course, is that we are all human, and the likelihood of playing any one piece of music under pressure, exactly as we hope it will sound, is very low. We will probably play at least one wrong note, miss one dynamic change, fumble one trill, lack clarity in the damper pedal at least once, or fail to bring out one inner voice that we’d hoped our audience would hear.
Therefore, it’s vitally important that students know the difference between the work done in practice to learn a piece - all of the rehearsal and corrections that need to be made - versus the mindset that must be adopted when practicing performing and playing at the final performance. (Stay tuned my next post for where I talk about exactly that - the process of practicing performing!)
An unhealthy performance mindset can lead a student to generally feel negative about performing, which can ultimately lead to a loss of motivation and lack of interest in continuing lessons.
Of course, an unhealthy mindset can also be the result or one cause of performance anxiety.
how does performance anxiety get in the way?
There are two types of performance anxiety:
Feeling anxious because you are not prepared, and
The natural physical and mental responses to the effects of our stress response when we are under pressure.
The first category requires teachers to work with their students and guide them in awareness of what it really takes to be ready for a performance. This directly relates to Tip #1 - Choose Appropriate Repertoire - and Tip #2 - Allow Enough Time in my Six Tips sequence here.
The second requires more understanding. I have a video here titled What is Performance Anxiety? that I would encourage you to watch if you’re not familiar with what actually happens in our bodies when we experience the natural stress response because we are performing under pressure.
Part of developing a healthy mindset around performance involves self-acceptance of what happens to us physically and mentally when we encounter that stress response.
Do you want to help your students develop a healthy mindset?
Establishing positive studio culture and developing healthy mindset are foundational topics in my course, Preparing Confident Performers.
In this post, I’ve given you a vision for what I consider a healthy mindset, but you might be wondering how to instill that in our students. That is one essential part my course. In fact, one whole module (with no less than 5 video lessons) is devoted to Preventing and Minimizing “Performance Anxiety.”
Click the photo below for access to this course full of
unique content,
geared towards independent piano teachers,
guaranteed to help you support your students in this essential part of piano study:
