Moving Beyond Fear
There’s a reason that I chose to use this photo on the “About Me” page of my website…
It shows me doing something that I love. Something that makes me feel joyful, exhilarated and free. A bit like musical performance at its best.
But the photo only shows part of the story. Five minutes earlier I had been crawling on my hands and knees, gripped by fear.
This ridge walk was well within my capabilities, but sometimes our minds play tricks on us. Perhaps it was the fact that it was slightly icy underfoot, or just that it felt so exposed. For whatever reason, self-doubt came rushing in. I’m using this to draw a comparison with performance anxiety, because both the physical and mental processes felt similar to me. The fear hit me, my mind started to whirr, my legs started to wobble and my muscles tensed up. And of course, in that state it genuinely was difficult to walk the ridge. Here’s how I came out of it:
Accepting my anxiety response and acknowledging that it would pass.
Taking some slow, deep breaths (see my “Five Minutes of Calm” blog post for a great exercise that you can use at moments like this).
Consciously releasing the tension in my muscles.
Carrying out a reality check: how real was the danger?
Using positive self-talk: reminding myself that I was completely capable of doing this (something that I already believed deep down).
Focusing on the task at hand, without letting my thoughts run away with me.
I stood up and took some careful steps and then some braver ones, and in no time at all I was moving freely, my body relaxed, a big smile on my face. That’s what you see in the photo.
When I work with musicians around performance anxiety, I find it can be helpful to approach things from two directions. The first is to acknowledge the feelings and to ask what is going on at a thoughts and beliefs level: What is the fear? Is it real? What’s the belief that sits behind it? How might we look at the situation in a different way? And the other is a somatic approach: supporting my clients to develop strategies to calm the nervous system and manage those “fight-flight” responses that can interfere with what we are otherwise perfectly able to do.