It’s “the elephant in the room”, says Charlotte Tomlinson, performance coach and former pianist. “The pressure you’re under having to be better than the last concert, that can be huge,” she says.
The all-consuming pressure of giving a perfect performance has stopped many a musician’s career in its tracks. While conquering pre-concert nerves is a topic receiving increasing attention, what happens after you take your final bow and the show is over?
For Francesca Leo, professional flautist and performing arts health advocate, anxiety following a performance has always been a struggle, but in recent years she has found ways to keep these feelings in check.
“I would be really fixated on any mistakes that I made during the performances, I would just beat myself up for hours,” she says. “I even went as far as to go into the practice room after concerts and just practise for hours and punish myself in a way for making mistakes.”
Leo says these feelings occurred after any performance, regardless of how objectively successful it was. “The feeling that it didn’t go perfectly was something that I carried for days after,” she says.
Whether you are dealing with pervasive perfectionism or struggling to find a sense of calm after a performance, here are some simple tips you can follow to cope with the intensity of emotions performing can provoke.
Wind down
One of the biggest challenges for musicians following a performance can be winding down from a heightened and often endorphin-filled state. Performance coach Charlotte Tomlinson says the best approach to this “depends on whether you want to be with people or you need to be on your own.”
“The more pressure that lay on the performance, the longer it took for me to be able to wind down after and calm my mind,” says Leo. Be mindful of the time your mind needs to readjust and re-centre.
She says that following a performance she needs to be with people. “If I spent time alone, that would cause the negative thoughts to continue, and I would ruminate on things that I wasn’t completely happy with.”
You have to let go as soon as you’ve given a performance and then you can rethink the next day
Charlotte Tomlinson, performance coach
Tomlinson advises that musicians coming off the stage after a performance should refrain from immediately discussing how it went in detail. “To a greater or lesser degree, I would say that musicians are in a heightened state of sensitivity,” she says. “You zone in on all the things that you think you’ve done wrong.”
“You have to let go as soon as you’ve given a performance and then you can rethink the next day,” she adds. “It might be two days before you’re ready to actually think about what you’ve done.”
Leo agrees, saying she has learned to never discuss a performance straight away, “because it gave me permission to reflect on all the things that didn’t go well”. She says that if she waits even a day, she can feel differently about how a performance went.
Let go of perfectionism
Combatting perfectionism is a skill which Leo has developed over time. “Something that’s been helping me is playing through a piece, recording myself and then not listening to it until a full 24 hours after,” she says. She will then try and find positive things about it and “realise that what I perceived in my mind as completely terrible was actually not that big of a deal.”
People are coming to see concerts because they enjoy music; it’s people that want to support you and see you succeed
Francesca Leo, flutist and performing arts health advocate
She advises visualising the audience and their basic goodness and their intentions for being there to “strip away the fear of judgement as much as possible”. “People are coming to see concerts because they enjoy music and want to support you and see you succeed,” she says.
It can be hard as a musician to admit you are human and that imperfection is inevitable in any performance. But for Leo, realising this was key to reducing her anxiety post-performance. “For me, it was realising that nothing is ever going to be perfect. So continuing to strive for perfection is basically setting myself up for failure,” she says.
Although these techniques can help with combatting perfectionism, it may be a different story after a “disaster performance”, which can completely destabilise a musician’s confidence. When this happens, “baby steps” are key to re-building self-belief, says Tomlinson. Begin with playing a much simpler piece to a trusted audience and build from there to help with regaining confidence, she says.
Acknowledge your feelings
It is impossible to begin to tackle the way in which you cope post-performance if your feelings aren’t acknowledged and recognised. So if you’re struggling you should reach out to someone you trust, whether that is your teacher, performance coach or your GP.
For Tomlinson, this is an industry-wide issue. “I would love classical musicians to have a much greater awareness of the psychology of performance,” she says. Anxiety surrounding a performance is “still perceived as weakness” and “there’s a lot of people in total denial of what they’re dealing with”.
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Talking about post-performance anxiety is the first step to reducing the stigma surrounding it, says Leo. “There are very few people who don’t experience it, but I think people are afraid to talk about it because it shows vulnerability or makes them feel weaker, especially when they’re in a competitive environment.”
“I was already so nervous about people having a negative perception of my playing that I didn’t want to add any other reason for people to talk about my performances or if I had made any mistakes,” she says. “But then I realised that it was just so much easier for us to talk about it and realise that we’re not alone.”
Speaking up about the anxiety surrounding the performance can help to change the culture in an ensemble or conservatoire, which can in turn lead to a more supportive atmosphere where people are more willing to say if they are struggling, says Leo. “Everyone has the power to make a small change by just opening up about it.”