Recession Proof Valentine’s

Here I am in my new Valentine's Dress with Kent Allyn.

Yesterday, I performed a Valentine’s Day concert of love songs called “Recession Proof Valentines: I Can’t Give you Anything But Love” with Kent Allyn, my long-time accompanist and musical pal. We give an annual concert every February in honor of love. The hall was full of old friends who come every year and some new faces, too. Kent and I had a great time playing these songs.

Afterwards, we got talking about how nervous we each get before this concert. This is the one concert that makes me the most nervous. I always thought Kent was cool and unflappable, but turns out the older he gets the more nervous he gets. We started comparing notes about how to manage this performance anxiety.

Performance anxiety or stage fright is a consuming experience, affecting my body, mind, and spirit. It impairs my energy, my ability to focus, memorize, breathe, and stay calm. In fact, the fear of how the anxiety will affect me is often worse than what actually happens.

About two days before this concert, I decided to focus all of my preparation on channeling my anxiety into a positive state of readiness. I have developed many strategies for handling my performance anxiety over the years. It was reassuring to experience again that these strategies work for me. Here are my top 3 strategies.

1- I reframe every negative, anxious, worried thought into something positive and present tense. I write out as many as I can think of and read them first thing in the morning, before bed, before or during practice, and whenever my worried brain gets overwhelmed, for example- “I’ll never remember all these words” becomes ” I trust my memory. I know how to prepare.”

2- I make a list of what I am most worried about and focus my practice on those things. The older I get, the more focused practice time I need. In this annual Valentine’s concert, memorizing words is one of my biggest worries. I write the words for each song on a 4×6 index card. I carry them with me all day, taking them out to review at red lights, in lines, waiting for an appointment, on my daily walks. The time over-preparing reassures me.

3- Meditation – I have found that being still and centering myself reminds me that there is a place in which worries are irrelevant. The more anxious I am, the more I meditate. In that quiet place, I sing the songs in my mind as if I am singing them for sheer joy, no goals, no outcomes. It is blissful and makes me happy. I can breathe. The more practice I have singing in that place, the better able I am to sing in performance with total presence and joy.

Very happily, that is how the concert went yesterday. It was a joyful sharing of songs with friends, songs that we both loved preparing and performing. It was a performance, but I felt present to each song, each note, each beautiful turn of Kent’s piano phrasing. The songs then become a place in which everyone in the room can connect, sharing an experience of the pleasure, ache and tingle of love.

I am interested in how you manage performance anxiety. Feel free to share your strategies on this blog.