While you wait for your next lesson to arrive…
Why “Just Perform” Doesn’t Work for Musicians
Imagine trying to learn to swim by being thrown into a cold, stormy ocean. The waves crash around you, the wind howls, and your only thought is survival. In that chaos, you’ll thrash about frantically, doing whatever it takes to stay afloat.
At best, you’d develop a desperate, inefficient doggy paddle. At worst, you’d simply slide beneath the waves.
This is exactly what happens to most musicians when it comes to performance skills. Their mental game is never engaged in the practice room. Instead, it’s not until they’re in the storm — on stage, in front of an audience, feeling the weight of expectations — that their mental skills get called upon.
It’s like being thrown into that stormy ocean and told to survive. Sink or swim.
Of course, it’s impossible to build a solid foundation under those high-pressure circumstances. Instead, they cling to whatever survival strategies they can muster. Reinforcing bad habits and tense, inefficient techniques.
The key to enjoyable and effective performances is to train these skills deliberately outside of performance, in a safe and controlled environment. Like learning to swim in a calm pool, you need a space where the stakes are lower and you can focus on developing proper technique one step at a time.
This means breaking performance skills into individual components and working on them in isolation. For example, rather than attempting to “practise performing” all at once, you might spend one session focusing on staying mentally present, another on managing adrenaline, and another on handling mistakes gracefully. When the pressure is off, you can give your full attention to one skill while letting everything else slide for the moment.
When you train this way, you not only build stronger skills that set you up for success when you’re finally in front of an audience. You also avoid ingraining the frantic “doggy paddle” habits that come from attempting to survive in the storm.
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