ReducePerformanceAnxiety

Reduce Performance Anxiety

   While listening to Good Morning America, I heard an interview with Charlie Gibbons and the then President of the International Toastmasters. (Toastmasters is an organization that helps develop good public speaking.) He listed five important points that assist people in becoming better speakers. After giving this some thought, I realized how easily these five points could be assimilated in to a singing performance.

RELAX I find that deep, slow and quiet breathing and stretching exercises just before a performance release excess tension that might interfere with a performance. When a vocalist gets nervous, often "technique" is the first element of a performance to suffer. We all need the adrenalin, but not so much that we lose our focus. Focus on your role, or think about a passage of music so that your thoughts are of the performance at hand.

VISUALIZE Days before a recital or show, visualize often a song or a particular scene. In that visualization you have performed it well! Hear the applause and enjoyed it! You deserve the success. See yourself taking bows and receiving a standing ovation. Concentrate on a difficult passage or memorization challenge. Visualize doing it correctly. See and hear yourself performing perfectly!

KNOW THAT PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SUCCEED Get rid of the little critical voices in your head. This is destructive    thinking.. Audiences really want you to be successful. They paid good money to see you and want to walk away being happy that they purchased the ticket. Strange as it seems, psychologists say that our purchases are extensions of ourselves. Therefore we want to be pleased with ourselves.

PRACTICE-KNOW YOUR MATERIAL.    I feel that this could be number one. I have known that the times I was the most nervous was when I hadn't quite mastered a particular phrase or tried to perform a song when I knew in my heart that I really wasn't ready. Technique as I said before is the first to go when your are concentrating more on trying to remember the words or pitches etc. A song should not be performed unless you have worked on it for at least two months. I had a vocal coach tell me that a song really isn't yours (ingrained in the body) until you've performed it at least five times. By the way practice doesn't make a perfect performance. Perfect practice makes a perfect performance!

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. When selecting music to perform, make sure that the audience is going to be receptive. You wouldn't want to sing rap music for senior citizens or only Christmas Carols at a Jewish retirement home. You would probably bore teenagers to death by singing an hour of classical art songs, and opera arias (and all in foreign languages). Any listener has to have something he or she can relate to so that the performance is meaningful. The audience would like to be familiar with some of the music that you'll be singing. They want to be a part of what is happening. As an audience goer, I like to walk away with at least one song that had meaning for me. One that I would catch myself humming over and over again.

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Updated October, 2003

RELAX	I find that deep, slow and quiet breathing and stretching exercises just before a performance release excess tension that might interfere with a performance. When a vocalist gets nervous, often "technique" is the first element of a performance to suffer. We all need the adrenalin, but not so much that we lose our focus. Focus on your role, or think about a passage of music so that your thoughts are of the performance at hand.
VISUALIZE	Days before a recital or show, visualize often a song or a particular scene. In that visualization you have performed it well! Hear the applause and enjoyed it! You deserve the success. See yourself taking bows and receiving a standing ovation. Concentrate on a difficult passage or memorization challenge. Visualize doing it correctly. See and hear yourself performing perfectly!
KNOW THAT PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SUCCEED	Get rid of the little critical voices in your head. This is destructive thinking.. Audiences really want you to be successful. They paid good money to see you and want to walk away being happy that they purchased the ticket. Strange as it seems, psychologists say that our purchases are extensions of ourselves. Therefore we want to be pleased with ourselves.
PRACTICE-KNOW YOUR MATERIAL.	I feel that this could be number one. I have known that the times I was the most nervous was when I hadn't quite mastered a particular phrase or tried to perform a song when I knew in my heart that I really wasn't ready. Technique as I said before is the first to go when your are concentrating more on trying to remember the words or pitches etc. A song should not be performed unless you have worked on it for at least two months. I had a vocal coach tell me that a song really isn't yours (ingrained in the body) until you've performed it at least five times. By the way practice doesn't make a perfect performance. Perfect practice makes a perfect performance!
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.	When selecting music to perform, make sure that the audience is going to be receptive. You wouldn't want to sing rap music for senior citizens or only Christmas Carols at a Jewish retirement home. You would probably bore teenagers to death by singing an hour of classical art songs, and opera arias (and all in foreign languages). Any listener has to have something he or she can relate to so that the performance is meaningful. The audience would like to be familiar with some of the music that you'll be singing. They want to be a part of what is happening. As an audience goer, I like to walk away with at least one song that had meaning for me. One that I would catch myself humming over and over again.