The Cost of Being Professional: Relearning Play After 200 Concerts a Year
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 12, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* This story is shared with care. To respect the client’s privacy, some details have been changed. The essence of their experience and the outcomes remain true.
She was already successful by most standards when she first came to me. A French horn player in her mid-thirties with a major orchestra, performing over 200 concerts a year. From the outside, her career looked exactly the way the dream says it's supposed to look: Full, active, stable...
What was less visible was that something essential had gone silent. She no longer enjoyed making music.
Interestingly, it wasn't the dramatic loss we see in movies. There was no breakdown, no missed entry, no public unravelling. Just a slow, private erosion of the thing that had drawn her to the horn in the first place. Music had become something to deliver. Not something to inhabit... and certainly not something to savour.
At the same time, she was preparing for two significant auditions — one for a high-profile commercial television orchestra, and another for a major city ensemble. She was committed. She'd already worked with mental performance coaches. She maintained a disciplined mindfulness practice. It's not like she didn't have tools.
But she was coming to me because she sensed there should have been more: More ease, more presence, more space to actually enjoy the playing rather than just survive it.
The Belief That Cost Her Something
From the first session, it was clear how thoughtful and precise she was. She wasn't just looking for surface-level adjustments, she came with a clear intention to evolve. And not only as a performer, but in how she related to her work. She paid very close attention in sessions. And between sessions, she tested ideas carefully and consistently.
I could tell from the first few minutes that what she wanted wasn't improvement in skill. She was already an exceptional musician. What she wanted was a different internal experience.
Underneath the perfectionism, we found a belief she'd absorbed early in her training and never quite questioned: To be a serious musician means letting go of play.
Precision and control were the only things that mattered. Enjoying yourself was, at best, a bonus... and at worst, a sign you weren't taking the work seriously enough.
That belief had served her in some ways, like getting through a highly competitive school with big names as her teachers. (Most beliefs we hold this tightly served us, once. That's why they're hard to put down.) But it had also narrowed her experience considerably. She'd built a career on it, and somewhere along the way, the belief had started costing her the very thing the music was supposed to give her.
How We Worked
We refined her existing mindfulness practice, but added self-compassion, which she'd been skipping over the way many high-performers do. (You can't critique your way to ease. The criticism is always going to be the strain.) We built pre-performance routines that reduced internal monitoring rather than adding more layers to it.
In the practice room, we tweaked her usual approach. Instead of running repertoire on autopilot, we introduced questions that reconnected her with intention and imagination:
What would she listen for if she were on the jury?
What qualities would she value in a future colleague?
That reframe changed how she listened to herself. Less self-surveillance, more musical curiosity.
We also made space for music that wasn't tied to outcomes. She picked a piece purely for herself... something with no audition attached, no career stakes, no judgement waiting at the end of it. Almost immediately, she wrote to me:
“I picked up an old favorite and realized I was already enjoying it."
That sentence reads casual. It isn't, not to me. For someone who'd spent years performing as a job, the simple act of enjoying a piece while playing it showed us what was possible.
The Tools
A few specific things became part of her practice, and I want to name them quickly.
An alter ego. A performance persona, a way of accessing courage and a bit of mischief on stage without over-identifying with every note. (More on alter egos in another post, but the short version is that it gave her just enough distance to stop taking each phrase personally.)
A ring as a physical anchor. Something simple, on her hand, that she'd touch as a reminder of the quality of presence she was practising. That's not a magic object, more like a concrete cue. Cues work because the body responds to them faster than thought does.
Physical simulations of performance pressure. We integrated these into her audition preparation, so the fight-flight-freeze response was no longer something to avoid but something to get used to. By the time she walked into the actual rooms, her body had already met that level of activation in rehearsal and survived it many times.
After one of the auditions, she described feeling something unfamiliar:
“I wasn’t stressed by the situation. I actually felt excited, a bit like the first day of school. I could play with sound, color, and dynamics, and I allowed myself to take a few risks. It went even better than I expected.”
What Happened (and What Didn't)
Here's the part I want to be honest about, because it matters.
She didn't win either of the full-time roles that year. (Spoiler alert: Emphasis on 'that year'.)
One audition went to the final round, and she was later invited as the jury's preferred substitute — a solid professional outcome, but not the headline result. The other didn't land in the way she'd hoped either.
And yet, when I think back on that period of work with her, I don't think of the auditions as the centre of the story. She doesn't either. What mattered more, and what surprised her the most, was how she experienced the process itself.
After a concert shortly afterwards, she wrote:
“I made eye contact with some of my colleagues while playing, and it was obvious we were enjoying it. Even the conductor started smiling. I made two small slips, but I wasn’t bothered. I refocused instead of panicking. That felt like a real achievement for me.”
The difference wasn't that everything always went perfectly from that point on... it was that she didn't unravel when it didn't.
In the meantime, music had started to feel lighter: More relational and less like a test she was being constantly graded on. She had moved, to use her own framing, from someone taught to take music seriously at the cost of her spirit, to someone who could once again laugh, take risks, play, and actually connect on stage.
“The work has changed how I approach both practice and performance. I feel more focused and effective, and I handle pressure more easily. My performances feel more consistent, and I’m enjoying performing again in a way I hadn’t for a long time.
A Year Later...
A year after we'd finished working together, she wrote again.
“I auditioned again this year for the same role and was invited to trial weeks. I prepared in the same way we worked on last year and used the tools from our sessions. I felt very grounded throughout the process, and I wanted to thank you again.”
She'd used the same tools we'd developed together a year earlier. Nothing needed to be reinvented. The structure was already there — with the alter ego, the ring, the rehearsed pressure, the questions she asked herself in the practice room... they'd become part of how she works rather than something she had to remember to do.
And even facing trial weeks alongside another candidate, she felt that the harder part was already done, because she knew she could trust herself through the process. Whatever the outcome of the trial, that confidence wasn't going anywhere.
This, for me, is what the work is actually for.
Not winning the audition on the first attempt, or eliminating fear, or getting to a place where the pressure stops mattering... but becoming the kind of musician who can show up grounded and engaged again and again, regardless of outcome — and who has somewhere reliable to stand when the next audition comes around.
Sometimes that looks like a headline win. Sometimes it doesn't. In my book, both versions count.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
