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 The Joyful Musician Blog

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

About an hour into our session, mid-conversation, she paused and said something I haven't forgotten: "It's really weird. I've had cold hands this whole time." We were sitting in a video call. Nobody was evaluating her. There was no audience, no jury, no piece to play. And her hands were cold. Her body had been doing what it always does — faithfully, from the moment the topic of performing entered the room.

He's on stage. He's prepared. He's running through the process he built years ago to keep himself functional under pressure: hear the pitch, rehearse the rhythm, set the embouchure, take the breath. The notes come out. They sound fine. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. From the inside, he's somewhere just slightly behind the music. Watching it happen. Tracking it. Making sure the system runs.

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