Welcome to
 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.

It's one of the most common questions I get from musicians, and the logic underneath it almost always runs the same way: I've done the hours, I know the piece, if you asked me in a lesson I could play it. So why does my body keep behaving as though I haven't? Two musicians said something almost identical to me in the same week recently — a 17-year-old and a music teacher in his fifties. Different careers, decades apart, almost the same sentence.

A trumpet player I worked with recently came to me with exactly that question. He's been a professional for fifteen years. In rehearsals, concerts, lessons, even when teaching, he doesn't have to fight for anything. He just plays, and everything works. And then there are auditions, where he'd feel like a totally different person. One with about ten years less experience. He'd slept fine. Felt prepared as usual. But the moment he stepped out to play, he could feel the shift.

Should I stop drinking coffee before an audition? The question shows up more often than you'd expect — usually a few days before, sometimes the morning of, occasionally in the car on the way there. The phrasing varies, but it's almost always wrapped in the same logic: caffeine raises my heart rate, I already feel activated, so removing the coffee should make things better. Most of the time, the answer is no. Here's why — and how to tell which kind of musician you actually are

You're thinking about quitting music. Maybe you've been thinking about it for months, maybe years. The guilt feels unbearable — you've invested so much. I'm not here to convince you to stay or leave. This post is about giving you a framework to decide clearly, without guilt, shame, or others' expectations clouding your judgment.

Why does performance anxiety get worse as my career goes better? That's a real question I've been asked in coaching. Variations of it come up almost every week. The musicians asking aren't beginners — they're principals, titled players, professionals with successful careers behind them. They expected experience to make this easier. It hasn't. Some of the most anxious musicians I work with are the most accomplished. The thing that was supposed to make performing easier often d

Peak performance dominates performance coaching language. Books, programs, podcasts, all promising to help you reach your absolute best. It sounds appealing. But there's a problem with applying this framework to musicians specifically. Most performance coaching language was developed for athletes with sporadic peak events: Olympics, championships, the big race. Musicians don't live like this. You perform 40 weeks a year. Here's why peak performance is the wrong goal, and what

Most musicians come to me believing they have a confidence problem. They've tried positive thinking, affirmations, visualisation... and Some of it kind of works. Most of it doesn't. The longer they chase confidence as the solution, the further they get from what would actually help. The problem isn't that you lack confidence — it's that "confidence", the way it's usually defined, isn't actually what helps people perform well. Here's what does, grounded in research and coachin

You can play a concert for 2,000 people and feel mostly okay. Then walk into an audition for five panel members and feel like your body has been replaced with someone else's. If you've experienced this, you're not inconsistent or secretly bad at performing. You're noticing something real. Auditions and concerts are different kinds of performance, triggering different stress responses. They require different preparation. Here's what makes them different and what that means for

I worked with a jazz drummer in his thirties who's been gigging professionally for over a decade. Earlier this year he told me he thought he was probably just lazy, and a bit of a fraud. And he meant it. He could lock into a groove for four hours without noticing he hadn't eaten — and he also couldn't, no matter how many times he tried, sit down and do the rudiments he'd known since he was twelve. It was an ADHD brain doing what an ADHD brain does, in a profession structured

You feel the sound of the room before you've consciously registered it. You can hear the click in the third trombonist's key mechanism that nobody else seems to notice, and once you've heard it you can't unhear it for the rest of the season. You arrive twenty minutes early because being late is a physical impossibility, but you sit in the car for fifteen of those minutes because walking in first feels worse than being late ever would. You've been told you're intense, take thi