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 The Joyful Musician Blog

A singer I worked with, who had years of experience with CBT in therapy, kept getting the same feedback: She looked blank up there. Distracted. Like she'd rather be anywhere else. Which was strange, because she loved singing, and because nobody could see how hard she was working on the inside. CBT is the best-researched approach to performance anxiety, and it does help. Here's the specific place it gets stuck once you're actually on stage, and what to do with it.

A musician I worked with arrived having already done everything. A sports psychologist, a mental coach from elite sport, mock auditions, dozens of books. And it had worked. She'd got to a good enough place, and a good enough place wasn't enough to perform the way she wanted to. What was missing turned out to be freedom.

A harpist I worked with, decades into her career, once told me the thing she was most ashamed of. I expected something big. It was a quarter of a small white pill. The shame around beta blockers is real, common, and almost never said out loud — and it weighs far more than the nerves it's attached to. Here's where it comes from, why the whole profession keeps it secret, and how the shame lifts even when the pill stays.

There's a small white pill that lives in a great many musicians' bags, and on any audition morning somewhere between a quarter and nine in ten of the waiting room is quietly carrying the same one. Nobody says so. This is the unhushed version of beta blockers for musicians: What they do, what they can't touch, the safety risk almost no one talks about, and how to stop dreading the day they're not in your bag.

Most musicians chose music for one reason underneath all the others: They loved it. And then, somewhere down the line, the thing they got into for love started costing them the love. This post is about what happens when the path you took for love stops feeling like love — why it happens, why it's almost certainly not your fault, and what you can do about it that isn't just quit and isn't just push through.

Years ago I came across an idea in a book about writing fiction: Your characters need solid traits, but not everything they do should be in character. And if you're having a character act out of character, you'd better have a good reason for it. I think about this when I work with musicians. Because the same character that makes you good at being a person can actually make you worse at performing... and most of us don't realize it until it's too late.

One of my clients has a small ritual he does before every gig. He sits in his car in the venue parking lot, takes a full breath, and says out loud, with feeling: F*** it. (Note that post content is uncensored!) The way you might say it when you've been overthinking something for a week and you've finally decided to just do the thing. He's not the only one. A surprising number of the musicians I work with have some version of this. The research is actually on their side.

It didn't used to feel like this, did it? For a lot of musicians, music starts as a refuge — somewhere you could go where things made sense for a bit, where you weren't being measured all the time. And then, at some point, something shifts. You start looking around. Mapping where you sit. Who's ahead. Who's been doing this longer. Who seems more secure. And the strange thing is, the comparison usually starts before anyone else has actually compared you to anything. You do it

Your hands start shaking... sometimes before you've played a note, sometimes halfway through. And your attention goes straight to it: This is going to ruin everything. This question shows up in coaching almost weekly. Sometimes it arrives after a specific audition that didn't go the way someone hoped. Sometimes it's pre-emptive — I have one coming up and I know this is going to happen, what do I do. The underlying request is almost always the same: Make it stop.

There's a particular kind of musician I see a lot of in my practice, and they say variations of the same thing: I just have really high standards. It's why I'm good at what I do. I care more than most people. These sound reasonable. Healthy, even. But what those same musicians describe in the same session is something else entirely. Here's what the latest research shows about perfectionism in musicians, and what I see in the practice room.