What Performance Confidence Actually Is (And Why Most Advice Gets It Wrong)

Gökçe Kutsal
Oct 14, 2025
10 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

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Most musicians come to me believing they have a confidence problem. They've been told that if they could just feel more confident, they'd play better. So they've tried everything: Positive thinking, affirmations, visualisation, mindset work, mantras...

Some of it kind of works. Most of it doesn't. And the longer they chase confidence as the solution, the further they get from what would actually help.

After 2,100+ hours teaching and coaching, I've come to realise that the problem isn't that you lack confidence. The problem is that "confidence", the way it's usually defined, isn't actually what helps people perform well.

So this post isn't about lowering the bar or pretending confidence doesn't matter. It's about understanding what we actually mean when we say "confident performer" — and what builds it.

I'll cover:

What most musicians are taught about confidence (and why it doesn't hold up)
What the research actually says about affirmations (it's not what you've been told)
What performance confidence actually is — and the two components that make it up
What builds it in practice

Let's start with what most musicians have been taught.

What Musicians Are Taught About Confidence (And Why It Doesn't Hold Up)

The standard advice for performance confidence falls into a few familiar categories.

You've probably been told some version of these:

Think positive thoughts about yourself and the audience
Use affirmations ("I am a confident performer")
Imagine the audience or panel as supportive humans who want you to do well
Visualise success
Fake it until you make it

All of these share the core assumption that confidence is a mental state you can manufacture before performing. Find the right thought, the right belief, the right self-image, and confidence will arrive on cue.

In practice though, your subconscious mind isn't easily fooled. When you stand up to perform and tell yourself "I'm confident" whilst your hands are shaking and your stomach is in knots, your system registers the mismatch. The forced positivity collides with the actual experience of activation and uncertainty, and the gap itself becomes destabilising. You're now performing AND managing the cognitive dissonance of pretending to feel something you don't.

A wind player I worked with had tried most of these strategies before we started working together. She'd been refining her approach to auditions for years, and she was honest about what hadn't worked. She wrote in her intake form:

"Thinking positive thoughts about the panel — how they want candidates to play well, how they're humans I'm sharing my music with — this doesn't seem to help. Sometimes I know members of the panel, and I know that some of them are sexist or have their own biases. So the positive thoughts are just a distraction."

Notice what she's identifying. The positive thinking didn't fail because she didn't try hard enough. It failed because it asked her to override her own accurate read of the situation (knowing some panel members were biased), and to pretend to be someone she wasn't in order to qualify as "confident enough" to perform.

This is the structural problem with manufactured confidence: It requires you to lie to yourself about what's actually happening. And your mind and body always know.

What the Research Actually Says About Affirmations

You might assume affirmations work even if they feel a bit awkward, because surely there's research backing them up. They wouldn't be everywhere if they didn't help, right?

The research on affirmations is more complicated than the wellness industry suggests.

In a landmark 2009 study, psychologist Joanne Wood and colleagues at the University of Waterloo tested whether positive self-statements actually improve mood and self-esteem. They asked participants to repeat the statement "I am a lovable person" and measured the effects.

The findings were striking and counterintuitive:

Participants with high self-esteem felt slightly better after repeating the affirmation
Participants with low self-esteem felt worse — their mood scores dropped, and their self-esteem actually decreased after repeating it

The researchers concluded that "repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who 'need' them the most".

(You can find the full study here, if you want to read it directly.)

When you repeat a statement that contradicts your actual felt experience, your mind doesn't just accept it. It generates counterevidence. "I am a confident performer" gets immediately met with "no I'm not, look at my hands shaking, look at all the times I've fallen apart in auditions." The affirmation highlights the gap between what you're saying and what you actually believe, and the gap itself becomes the problem.

Here's why this matters for musicians specifically: Most musicians chasing confidence-building affirmations aren't doing so from a position of feeling great about their performing. They're doing it because they're already doubting themselves.

Which means affirmations are landing in exactly the conditions where the research suggests they backfire.

I worked with a musician who relied heavily on affirmations like "everything always works out for me" and "I'm the luckiest girl in the world". She told me they worked — in the moment. She'd repeat them before going on stage and feel a temporary lift.

But as soon as she got distracted by anything (a glitch in setup, a small mistake, a difficult passage approaching), the effect would evaporate immediately. The confidence had been borrowed, not built. Without continuous topping-up, it disappeared.

Affirmations that contradict felt experience function like a sugar rush (nothing wrong with the occasional Haribo, but I'm sure you'd agree it's not the greatest source of sustainable energy!). Quick lift, fast crash, no lasting structure underneath. They don't build anything durable because they don't actually engage with what's happening in your mind and body.

So if confidence isn't a mental state you can reliably manufacture, what actually is it?

What Performance Confidence Actually Is

Here's the reframe that changes everything for the musicians I work with:

What we usually call "confidence" is actually two things working together: Competence + psychological flexibility.

It's not a feeling. It's not a mindset. It's not something you summon before performing.

It's the byproduct of having genuinely built skill and being able to access that skill regardless of how you feel.

The First Component: Competence

Let me give you an everyday example to make this concrete:

Think about driving a car. You don't have to feel confident to do it. You don't need to repeat affirmations beforehand. You don't need to visualise yourself successfully parking. You just drive. Your body knows the movements. The skill is built into your system at this point.

But there was a time when driving was new. You'd stall the car. You'd misjudge distances. You needed an instructor sitting beside you. You probably weren't anywhere near "confident".

And even now, with years of experience, your driving changes when you're being watched closely. Take your test again, or drive with an examiner in the passenger seat, or have someone film you parallel parking — and suddenly you're more aware of every movement. You might fumble something you'd normally do without thinking. Not because you forgot how to drive. Because the pressure of being watched changes how your system accesses what it knows.

This is confidence based on competence. The skill is genuinely yours. It's been built through repetition, practice, and integration. You can access it under normal conditions without thinking. Under unusual pressure, accessing it becomes harder, yes, but the skill itself is still there.

This is what's actually going on when we call someone a "confident performer". Not that they feel confident. That they've built genuine competence over years and can access most of it even when conditions aren't ideal.

The Second Component: Psychological Flexibility

Competence alone isn't enough though. Plenty of technically excellent musicians struggle in performance contexts despite years of skill-building. Because access to skill under pressure requires something else — and this is where most performance coaching falls short.

That something is psychological flexibility.

Psychological flexibility is an ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Training) concept. It's the ability to:

Notice what's happening in your mind and body without being controlled by it
Stay present with difficult sensations (racing heart, doubt, tight stomach) without trying to make them go away
Take actions aligned with your values regardless of what you're feeling

In performance, this looks like walking on stage with shaking hands and a tight stomach, noticing these sensations, not trying to override them with positive thoughts, not pretending to be calm, acknowledging the activation, taking a breath, and playing anyway — accessing your competence whilst experiencing the arousal.

This is fundamentally different from the standard confidence model, which says you need to feel a certain way before you can perform well. Psychological flexibility says you can perform well regardless of how you feel — as long as you've built genuine competence and you can stay present with whatever shows up.

Putting It Together

When you combine these two things (real competence built over time + the ability to access it regardless of internal state) you get what looks from the outside like "confidence". But it's not actually a feeling state. It's a skill set.

This reframe changes the whole approach to performance preparation. You stop trying to manufacture feelings before performances. You start building genuine skill and the psychological flexibility to access it under pressure.

Which means the actual work of building "performance confidence" looks quite different from what most musicians have been taught.

What Actually Builds Performance Confidence

If confidence is competence plus psychological flexibility, the work of building it is twofold: build real skill, and build access to that skill under pressure.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

1. Build Genuine Competence Through Deliberate Practice

There's no shortcut here, and I won't pretend otherwise. Real confidence comes from real skill, and real skill comes from deliberate practice over time. Not just repetition, but focused, intentional work on what's actually difficult for you.

The musicians who appear "confident" on stage are usually the ones who've genuinely built the skills they're displaying. They're not faking it. They're not pretending. They've earned the access through hours of intentional work, and their system trusts the skill because the skill is actually there.

2. Practice in Conditions That Approximate Performance

Building skill in the practice room isn't enough if you can't access it under pressure. State-dependent learning is real — the conditions you build a skill in affect how easily you can access it elsewhere.

This is why simulated performance practice matters. Recording yourself. Playing for friends. Performance trials. Mock auditions. Anything that creates some of the activation you'll experience in real performance, so you can practise accessing your skill whilst activated. (I've written about this in more depth in Why Can't I Perform Like I Practice?)

3. Develop Psychological Flexibility (Instead of Positive Thinking)

This is the ACT piece, and it's the part most performance coaching skips.

Instead of trying to think different thoughts, you learn to relate differently to whatever thoughts arise. Noticing the thought "I'm going to mess this up" without arguing with it. Without trying to replace it. Without believing it's a fact. Just noticing it, naming it, and continuing to play.

I know this sounds counterintuitive. Most people assume you need to not have negative thoughts in order to perform well. Both the research and clinical experience suggest the opposite: musicians who can have difficult thoughts without being controlled by them perform better than musicians who try to suppress or override those thoughts.

The negative thoughts don't have to go away. They just can't be running the show.

4. Build Values Clarity

Confidence-as-feeling tends to disappear under pressure. Values clarity doesn't.

When you know why you're performing — what matters to you about the music, the audience, the moment — you have an anchor that's stable regardless of how nervous you feel. The performance becomes something you're doing in service of something you care about, rather than a test of your worthiness as a musician or a person.

Values clarity is a different kind of stability than confidence. It doesn't require feeling good. It just requires knowing what matters.

5. Work With Activation, Not Fight It

Performance generates activation. Heart rate goes up, breath shallows, attention narrows. This is your system doing its job — not malfunctioning, not failing, doing exactly what it's designed to do under high stakes.

Trying to make these sensations go away (which is the implicit goal of most confidence-building) creates more problems than it solves. Working with activation — using it, riding it, performing alongside it — is a learnable skill that beats trying to suppress it every time.

(I've covered this in more depth in Performance Anxiety in Musicians: Causes & Real Solutions if you want to go deeper on the activation side.)

What This Looks Like in Practice

Back to the wind player.

When we started working together, we stopped trying to manufacture confidence. And as you might guess, we didn't add more affirmations.

Instead, we worked on what was actually there. We built mock audition conditions so she could practise her excerpts whilst activated. We worked on psychological flexibility — noticing the thoughts about the panel without being hijacked by them. We clarified what she actually valued about performing (which, as it turned out, had nothing to do with proving herself to a biased panel).

Her playing in auditions improved. Note that this wasn't because she magically "felt confident" — in fact, she didn't particularly feel confident at all. But she was able to access her competence regardless of how she felt. The shaking hands, the awareness of bias, the doubt all stayed present. But they just stopped running the show.

That's what performance confidence actually looks like when it's built rather than manufactured: Not a feeling of self-assured ease, but a reliable access to your own skill under real conditions.

Performance Confidence Is Built Over Time

If you've been chasing confidence by trying to feel a certain way before performing, the chase itself might be part of what's keeping you stuck.

What we call "performance confidence" is actually two things: Genuine competence built over time, and the psychological flexibility to access that competence regardless of how you feel.

Affirmations and positive thinking try to skip past the building work and jump straight to the feeling. The research suggests this approach backfires for most people — particularly those who don't already feel confident, which is to say, the people most likely to be reaching for affirmations in the first place.

The work of actually building performance confidence is slower and more durable (and frankly more interesting). Build real skill. Practise in conditions that resemble performance. Develop the ability to be present with difficult thoughts and sensations without being controlled by them. Clarify what matters about the work you're doing. Work with activation, not against it.

This isn't a faster path. If anything, it takes getting used to. But it's the one that produces the kind of "confidence" that doesn't evaporate the moment you get distracted.

If you're ready to stop chasing confidence and start building the actual capacity to perform well regardless of how you feel, Performing Under Pressure walks you through the process step by step. It's designed for professional musicians who've already tried the affirmations, the mindset work, the positive thinking, and want a different approach grounded in what actually works.

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.

More about me | Ways to work together