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Performers
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Whether you are a dancer, musician, or actor, your career entails being able to handle high threat performance situations. Often due to the complexities involved, this is no small feat. For those who do experience debilitating anxiety, some deal with it in a rather blasé fashion, telling themselves things like, "It's just another recital, no big deal." Others might repress the situation, saying, "I don't ever get anxious." That is not to say the some people don't get anxious, but there are many who claim to not have a problem, when in fact, their physiological readings (i.e. hand temperature) tells a different story. Catastrophizing or "making mountains out of molehills," is common. Some may feel, "Oh my God!, My performance was terrible because I missed that rest!" Other poor ways of thinking can also interfere, making things worse.
At SPPA, we recognize that performing can be just as high threat to people as having to undergo a surgery. While the stakes are not "life and death," your body cannot tell the difference and the arousal state is much the same (i.e. muscular bracing, rapid heartbeat, cold hands, tremor, etc.). |
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Simple Ways to Reduce Performance Stress |
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Performers
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It's not hard to get on the right road and keep yourself there. Here are some simple things you can do right away:
- Stop saying "Yes" to performance situations you are not ready for, or do not feel you are up to doing for any reason. Not allowing others coerce you into doing performance that are potentially damaging to your self-esteem are one of the first steps in loving yourself.
- Go to your instrument and play what you want to play! Stop playing what others want and start playing what you want. You are not obligated to anyone unless you have created a false expectation in others that you will play what they want. Make today the day that saying "no" to them is saying "yes" to yourself.
- Its not about competition. The great artist professor Donald Walker always said, "In art, there is no score." A true winner does not set out to beat another person; a winner wins at being him or herself. Just because the world is set up to get all "A's," isn't it more important to have the knowledge than the grades?
- Believe it is possible. You are good and you have something to offer the world that no one else has to offer. If you know and admit your weaknesses, your strengths will shine.
- Stop trying to prove yourself and set others straight. Remember that one of the quickest things to take you off of the path of your life will be to please someone else with beating someone else following a close "second."
- It is impossible to learn without error; you learn from the mistake. The bad news is that you cannot learn anything without making mistakes, and you will have days when everything appears to go to "hell in a handbasket," as the old saying goes. Expecting to learn pieces or moves with little or nor error is unreasonable and pretentious. It will only take you down the wrong road.
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Books for Performing Arts Professionals |
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Performers
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Below is a list of books that we currently recommend for performing arts professionals:
Sapolsky, Robert M. (1998). Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping. W.H. Freeman & Co., New York, ISBN: 0 7167 - 3210-6. Written by a professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford, this book is some of the best layman's interpretation of technical material in print. Readers will understand how the same physiological responses to threat in the wilderness can turn into disasters when chronically provoked in psychosocial situations for humans. Sapolsky is one of the country's leading researchers on stress and stress-related illnesses.
Stanovich, Keith E. (2006) How to Think Straight About Psychology. (8th ed.). Allyn & Bacon, ISBN: 0-205-36093-9. This book resents psychological topics such as falsifiability (having to show the possibility that one's work may be wrong) operationalism (how to state an elusive concept in numbers so it can be measured), experimental control, converging evidence, correlational vs. experimental studies, and statistics as tools for critical evaluation, providing the readers with a set of practical consumer skills to independently evaluate psychological claims. It d discusses psychology in the media and provides some consumer rules for dealing with it. One particular strength of the book is its presentation of how to tell true psychological research from pseudoscience,, which is an opportunity to gain critical thinking skills within the rich context of modern psychology. |
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Performers