What It Takes to Perform Freely and Confidently
- Gökçe Kutsal
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
Years ago, when I was reading more fiction than I am now and occasionally trying my hand at writing some, I came across an idea in a book about writing.
I can't remember which book, or the author... only that I was deep enough into reading about writing craft that I'd absorbed quite a lot of it.
The idea was this:
Your characters need very solid traits. But not everything they do should be in character. And if you're having a character do something out of character, you'd better have a very good reason for it.
The author's point was that flat characters are predictable. A character who is always kind and never cruel is a stick figure.
Real people (and the believable fictional people we build out of them) act out of character all the time. The reliably kind woman snaps at her sister on a bad day. The famously generous man becomes oddly stingy when his ex is in the room. The patient teacher loses her patience in one specific class.
But when a character acts out of character, the writer should always be asking what it took for them to do that.
Is it the emotional state they're in? Is it something that just happened to them? Is it the role they're playing in this particular moment? Is it a belief from a long time ago that's quietly running the show?
The out-of-character behavior is never random. And it tells you something about the architecture underneath the character that you wouldn't have learned from the in-character behavior alone.
I think about this when I work with musicians, because the same thing comes up constantly.
We Are All Acting Out of Character
Now this isn't just a writing-craft observation, it's how people work. We act out of character all the time, and what it takes for us to do that is information about who we actually are.
You know this from your own life, right? When you're tired, you're snappier than usual. When you're in a particularly good mood, you're more generous and forgiving and supportive of your friend's complicated situation than you might be on a worse day. When you've just received bad news, you can be cold to someone you love without meaning to. The you that shows up in any moment is a function of your traits plus what's happening in you and around you.
And it's not just emotional state. It also depends on the role you have.
A doctor giving you medical advice in the consulting room is operating differently than the same doctor giving you that advice as a friend at dinner. The medical-professional version is more direct, more clinical, less concerned with your feelings about the information, which the friend version is gentler, more emotional, more focused on what the news will mean for you. Same person with the same medical knowledge can act completely different in a different role.
The doctor-as-friend version, delivering the same news as the doctor-as-professional, would be a strange experience. You'd probably wish they'd put the white coat back on. Because the role isn't just about clothes or context... it's about which version of the person is operating, and which set of social filters is active, and what the person is allowed to do for the duration of that role.
We slip in and out of these versions of ourselves all day, mostly without noticing. We're not lying when we behave differently in different roles. We're using different facets of ourselves for different functions. The version of you that's in a formal meeting and the version that's reading bedtime stories to your kid are both you... but they're different facets, with different filters, doing different jobs.
Now apply this to musicians.
Why This Is Hard for Musicians Specifically
For most musicians, the love of music wasn't a hobby that arrived in adulthood. It was there early. You discovered as a child or a teenager that you loved playing or singing, and at some point music wasn't just something you did — it was part of who you were.
Your identity fused with the music itself: I am a musician became as foundational as I am kind or I am curious or I am the dependable one in my family.
This is part of what makes musicians good at music. The depth of investment, the willingness to do the unreasonable hours of practice, the tolerance for the difficulty of the path... all of it comes from music being load-bearing for your sense of self. It's hard to imagine doing this profession well without that depth of identification.
But this is also what complicates things.
Because your musician-self is so fused with the rest of your character, all of your character traits come with you when you walk on stage. Including the ones that aren't useful for performing.
You walk into an audition or a major performance and you bring:
Your kindness and compassion
Your tendency to read other people's emotional states
Your habit of accommodating other people's comfort
Your discomfort with taking up too much space
Your reluctance to seem arrogant, or too-full-of-yourself
Your worry about whether the people watching are tired, bored, hungry, having a hard day
Your sense that you should be a nice person at all times
The cultural conditioning that says you shouldn't shine too brightly (which I wrote about in the post on fear of success)
None of these things make you a worse person. In fact, many of them make you a better one in the rest of your life. The kindness, the attentiveness, the accommodation — these are the things your friends and family love about you. These are the things that make you good at being a colleague, a partner, a parent, a teacher.
But none of them (yes, none of them) are useful for what an audition or a high-stakes performance requires.
What the music needs from you in that moment is something else entirely. It needs your full sound, taking up the full room. It needs your prepared technique, played without apology. It needs your commitment to the interpretation, regardless of whether the panel agrees with it. It needs you operating as the performer-self, with the social filters that the rest of your life requires temporarily set aside for the next ten or twenty or sixty minutes.
And what most musicians I work with don't quite realize is that this is a role. Like the white coat. The performer-self is not a less authentic version of you. It's a different facet of you, doing a different job. And accessing it isn't a betrayal of who you are. It's letting a part of you that doesn't usually get the floor have the floor for an hour.
The problem is that most musicians have never been taught that this role exists...
So they walk into the audition wearing all their everyday filters, and they're confused when the result doesn't match what they can do in practice.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me give you three examples from my coaching practice, because the patterns are easier to see in specific cases than in the abstract.
The auditioner who didn't want to win.
I worked with a singer once who'd auditioned for a position she'd been preparing for over a year. She knew the music. She'd done everything you'd want a serious candidate to do. She was, by any reasonable measure, ready.
A friend of hers was also auditioning for the same position. Not a casual acquaintance but a real old friend, someone she cared about. Someone who, in her assessment, needed the job more than she did.
She didn't make a conscious decision to underperform (that's not how this works). She just walked in and was somehow less than she'd been in her preparation. Less committed in her sound, less precise in her articulation and less willing to take the risks the music asked for. By the end of the audition she'd been technically fine but conspicuously less than her best.
She didn't get the job. Her friend didn't get it either.
When we talked about it afterward, the picture became clear.
Her kindness, as in her actual, real, lifelong kindness, the trait she'd been praised for since childhood) had walked into the audition room with her and quietly decided that winning over her friend would be cruel.
Her musician-self knew what to do. Her kind-person-self didn't want to do it. The kind-person-self was the one who showed up in the room, because that's the facet that runs most of her life. And the kind-person-self gave a kind-person performance. Which, in an audition, is not what was needed.
The musician who read the panel
Another client, a different instrument, walked into an audition for a major orchestra and noticed, in the first thirty seconds, that the panel looked tired. They'd been hearing candidates all day, he was candidate number 57. One of them was checking their phone. Another was leaning back with their arms crossed. The body language suggested we are exhausted and we would like to go home.
His kindness, plus his finely tuned ability to read other people's emotional states (which is one of his strongest qualities in the rest of his life) kicked in immediately.
They've had a long day. I shouldn't push too hard. I should be considerate. I should not make them work harder than they need to. Then we can all go home.
He played a polite, mid-energy version of repertoire that wanted full commitment. The panel got what they were getting from him: A competent but considerate, somewhat damped-down version of his playing.
He didn't progress to the next round.
What he'd done, without realizing it, was respond to the panel's state as if they were friends he was at dinner with... as if his job was to take care of their emotional needs. The panel didn't need him to take care of them. They needed him to give them something worth hiring. His kind-person-self had read the room correctly and applied the wrong rule.
The new teacher who couldn't stop being a student
A third pattern: A musician spends years away from her home conservatoire... maybe studying abroad, building her career, developing technically and artistically into a much more accomplished player than the one who left. She comes back, eventually, to teach at the same school where she trained. The faculty includes some of the teachers she studied with as a student.
When she's in lessons with her own students, she's authoritative, generous, technically sharp.
But when she's in faculty meetings, with her former teachers in the room, she becomes a student again.
Quieter, more deferential... unable to bring up the technical refinements she's spent the last decade developing because raising them in front of the people who taught her the older version feels somehow rude. She finds herself agreeing with positions she actually disagrees with, because disagreeing would be forward.
This is the same mechanism. The student-self showed up to the role that needed the colleague-self. The kindness, the deference, the not-wanting-to-be-too-much (which all good qualities in the right context) were making decisions for the wrong role.
What These Stories Have in Common
Notice how, in each of these cases, the musician's character traits weren't the problem.
The kindness was real. The attentiveness was real. The respect for one's teachers was real. None of those things needed to be removed from the person.
Plus, removing them would have made them worse people, and I'm not taking the responsibility for creating the next Marvel villain :)
The problem was that the wrong facet of the person was operating in the room. The everyday-self showed up to do a job that the performer-self was supposed to do. And the everyday-self didn't know it was in the wrong role.
Those traits and beliefs aren't wrong. They built the person you are. But they're not the facet that needs to be running the audition.
This is where the question I mentioned at the start becomes useful, applied to yourself rather than a fictional character:
"What does it take for this person to do this?"
What does it take, specifically, for the kind and competent musician you are in the rest of your life to walk into a room and play as well as you can?
Is it an emotional state... the willingness to be seen succeeding, even when a friend is watching? A situational anchor, like knowing that the stage is your place to shine, even if you feel like playing it safe? A belief about whether taking up space is allowed... even when you feel like disappearing?
The Performer Self Is Not a Mask
This is where I want to be careful, because some of the conventional advice about performance gets this part wrong.
There's a whole body of writing about performance personas and alter egos — Beyoncé as Sasha Fierce, that kind of thing — where the suggestion is essentially:
Invent a different, more confident version of yourself, put on a mask, and let the mask do the performing.
I don't think that's quite right, and I think it doesn't serve most musicians well.
Here's why:
Putting on a mask implies that the performer-self is not really you. That it's a fiction, a costume, something you take off when you go back to being your real self.
The problem with that framing is that it asks you to fake confidence, to pretend to be someone you aren't, and most working musicians can tell when they're faking. The mask makes them feel inauthentic, which is its own kind of self-sabotage.
The framing I find more useful is this: The performer-self isn't a mask. It's a facet of who you actually are.
You contain many versions of yourself. The one that shows up at dinner with your friends is not the same as the one that shows up at a job interview is not the same as the one that shows up when you're alone in a practice room working on a difficult passage. They're all you. They have different filters active, different priorities, different rules of engagement.
So each of them is a facet... like a diamond has multiple facets, all part of the same stone, each catching the light differently depending on which one is turned toward it.
The performer-self is one of those facets: The version of you that's focused, undivided, willing to take up the full room, willing to be the version of you who's there to play rather than to make friends. It's less accommodating than your everyday-self, but it's not less authentic. It's a part of you that the rest of your life doesn't usually need. The audition needs it. The performance needs it. The audience needs it.
Accessing this facet isn't a betrayal of your kindness or your attentiveness or your respect for others. Those traits are still you. They'll be there waiting when you walk out of the room. The performer-self just gets to be in charge for the duration of the performance. Then the everyday-self comes back on duty, and you go back to being the kind, attentive, respectful person you are in the rest of your life.
Funnily enough, the best version of this I've ever heard came from Dolly Parton:
"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
The performer self isn't someone else. It's you... found out, and done on purpose.
What It Takes to Access the Performer Self
It's hard to just read a post and decide I'll just be the performer-self next time, and have it work on the next audition. It takes some structured practice.
But the broad shape of how I approach this in coaching looks like this:
Recognize that the performer-self exists. This sounds obvious, but most musicians have never actually thought of themselves as having different facets that run different parts of their lives. They think of themselves as one person, and the variations in how they show up are just inconsistencies. Once you can see the facets as distinct, you can start working with them deliberately rather than wondering why you keep being inconsistent.
Notice which facet is operating, and when. In the days before an audition, in the morning of, in the walk to the venue, in the warm-up, in the moment you walk on stage... which version of you is in charge? Are you in everyday-kind-person mode, or are you in performer-mode? The first step is just to be able to tell the difference.
Practice accessing the performer-self in low-stakes settings. This is the part that takes practice. You can't simply switch into the performer-self at the most important audition of your year. You need to practice being that version of yourself in your living room, in lessons, in informal run-throughs, in studio recordings. Build a relationship with that facet of yourself before you need her under pressure. (Hint: Try asking yourself 'what does it take for me to perform as well as I can right now, even if it feels out of character?')
Notice what tries to pull you back into everyday-self mode in the room. A tired panel. A friend in the lineup. A former teacher watching. A sense that you're being too much. Whatever it is — name it, recognize it as your everyday-self trying to take back the controls, and consciously stay in the performer-self instead. Sometimes what you need is to just decide that the kindness can wait twenty minutes. The performance is what's happening now. The everyday-self can come back when this is done.
Trust that you'll go back to being yourself when you walk off stage. This is the part most musicians worry about: Accessing a more focused, less accommodating facet of themselves will make them into a worse person, that they'll lose the kindness somehow, or become someone they don't recognize. They won't. Every facet that's run a different part of your life so far has handed control back to the everyday-self when the role was done. The performer-self will too.
What This Connects To
A lot of what I've written here overlaps with the territory I covered in the post on fear of success — the cultural pressure not to shine, not to take up too much space, not to be seen succeeding too visibly. That post was about the societal pressure.
This one is about the mechanism through which the pressure operates inside an audition room: The everyday-self showing up to do the performer-self's job, and using the wrong rules of engagement.
If you've read both posts and you're recognizing yourself in them, it's a sign that you're someone whose character is generous and well-formed in the rest of your life. And the same character traits that make you good at being a person are quietly working against you in the performance moments where they don't belong.
If it's time to let a different side of yourself have the room for an hour at a time, private coaching is where we can get started together.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a music 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.
